The Guardian propone sulle sue pagine la recensione, a cura di John Banville, del libro intitolato “Natural light” scritto da Julian Bell e dedicato ad Adam Elsheimer, artista tedesco quasi dimenticato. Julian Bell, l’autore, è figlio di Quentin Bell, storico dell’arte, nipote e biografo di Virginia Woolf.
Elsheimer era figlio di un sarto e nacque a Francoforte nel 1578, ma lavorò tutta la vita a Roma, dove morì in povertà nel 1610 all’età di 32 anni. Amava dipingere quadri molto piccoli. Adam Elsheimer non è un nome molto noto, eppure ha influenzato alcuni dei più grandi artisti del suo tempo, come Rembrandt e Rubens.

At the start of this marvellous, engrossing and illuminating study, Julian Bell poses a simple question, one that will recur throughout the book: “What is nature?” Easy to ask, yes, but not so easy to answer. The word “nature” itself comes, of course, from the Latin natura, which Bell translates as “having-been-born-ness”, and which he allies with “physics” from the Greek physis, “‘whatever grows’ or ‘whatever has a body’”. This version of nature he sets against the godly supernatural, and against the mind and consciousness.

“Natural Light” racconta le incertezze dell’epoca di Elsheimer, attraverso le minuscole opere di questo artista tedesco che introduceva nella pittura una nuova relazione tra figure e paesaggio. Secondo Bell Elsheimer ha tentato di indagare cosa significa essere umani e nella natura, o anche contro o alla mercé della natura.

Before, most artists and their patrons would have agreed with Michelangelo, that a picture without figures in it lacked “substance and vigour”, and could be not much more than amiably decorative. Elsheimer and his circle in Rome, however, pushed the human agent more and more to the periphery, and often out of the frame altogether. This was not meant to diminish the peopled aspect of pictorial art, but to attempt to investigate intimately what it means to be human and in nature, or even against or at the mercy of nature, in the sense of Edmund Burke’s “sublime”. In this endeavour, Elsheimer was encouraged and supported by contemporary advances in “natural science”, in particular the astronomical discoveries being made by such savants as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and, especially, Galileo Galilei. The development of the telescope was showing that the Aristotelian conception of a fixed and unchanging universe was no longer tenable. New stars could appear, Jupiter had moons, the Earth is not the centre of everything. All is movement, all is change – as the pre-Socratics told us long ago.

Nel suo libro Bell analizza la poetica di questo pittore e la complessità del suo pensiero:

This is the painter of whom Bell writes: “I want to bring out not only the lyricism and humanity of his pictures, but the complexity of his thinking and the ways in which it bears on the debates about nature that were circulating in his era.”

La scheda di Adam Elsheimer sul sito della National Gallery.
Michele Frazzi su About Art On Line pubblica un lungo articolo diviso in due parti e ricco di immagini sul pittore tedesco dal titolo: “Adam Elsheimer e la straordinaria maniera dei suoi dipinti su rame”:
Parte Prima – Parte seconda