Baroque Art. Victoria Charles

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      Of far-reaching importance are also the French landscape paintings of the seventeenth century, first under Italian influence which found its developing strength mostly from within and was completely adapted to an ideal form.

      Nicolas Poussin initiated this path. He occupied himself mostly with painting faces which he handled, withdrawing from Baroque influence, wholly in the sense of the antique and its modification by Raphael. His many pictures with religious and mythological content have not survived his times and the colouristic impression of his pictures has suffered greatly due to his excessive use of shades of blue. But as a landscape painter he was one who could enhance the rhythm of Italian landscape forms through his overflowing emotion. A landscape such as the Landscape with Saint Matthew and the Angel (1642) from the Tiber valley belongs to the jewels of art history.

      His brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, born in Rome and also called Poussin, only painted landscapes in idealised form and combined them into a whole picture through the combination of beautiful individual tableaux. Although these pictures corresponded to the character of the Roman campagna and the mid-Italian mountain landscape, they were not to be found anywhere in these pictorial impressions.

      This direction of landscape painting found a renewal only in the nineteenth century. After this, the aesthetic definition of value, the “heroic,” “historical” or “stylized” landscape was formulated, where, besides the stylizing, the main emphasis was on the figures in the landscape. The painters of the seventeenth century had no intention of distorting nature. In their enthusiasm, they saw nature as even more beautiful than it was. The most inspired of these heralds of beauty was the painter and etcher Claude Lorrain, born as Claude Gellée, who earned his nickname from his Lothringen home but lived in Rome from 1627. Everything he painted mirrored the beauty of nature and the sunshine of southern Italy. The ruins of ancient Roman buildings often dominate his landscapes; he brought to the memorials of the past the small but peaceful people of his time in a pictorially rewarding contrast.

      However, most important to him was the effect of the southern light on the change of the day and times of the year as well as the light and air perspectives through which he also imparted a new element to the landscape painting that accompanied the pictorial mood. All his landscapes – among which, besides the pictures of ruins, the harbour views such as Morning in the Harbour (second third of the seventeenth century) played a large role – are based on close studies of nature, as are his approximately five hundred known drawings. Later, towards the end of his life, he compiled approximately two hundred other drawings after completed paintings in a book called Liber Veritas in order to give posterity the possibility of distinguishing his paintings from those of his successors.