Description: "In Claude's work, Nature stands eternally revealed". Thus Goethe expressed his admiration for the most celebrated landscape painter in the history of art. Claude Lorrain (1600-82), born in Lorraine, went to Rome as a thirteen-year-old and, except for minor journeys, was to remain there until his death. The history-laden Roman Campagna, and Latium's soft, warm light, became his sources of inspiration in a genre of painting which, through him, first achieved autonomy, and of which he was the unrivaled master. Claude's landscapes bear witness not only to his intense observation of and familiarity with Nature. They are not only miracles of poetry and mood, perfectly composed and executed. They also embody a world-view, translated into light and color, that owes its philosophical foundation to the poetry of Ancient Rome and Greece, and its timeless relevance to the Renaissance and newly-emerging Enlightenment sciences. In an increasingly disjointed world -- the age of Descartes, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years' War -- which, since Copernicus and Galileo, could no longer be seen as the center of the universe, Claude countered with the boundless finitude of his light-filled universal landscapes.

This book brings together Claude Lorrain's finest paintings and drawings, carefully selected and lavishly reproduced.

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