Adam Elsheimer Frankfurt am Main 1578 - 1610 Rome

This highly important, small gouache, unique within Elsheimer’s work, was discovered in 1973 (see Provenance), and was first brought to wider public attention in 1989, when it was the subject of an extremely thorough article by Jürgen Rapp (see Literature).  More recently, its inclusion in the Frankfurt and Edinburgh showings of the definitive Elsheimer exhibition permitted it to be studied over several months alongside other, related works by the artist.  This unprecedented opportunity to make side-by-side comparisons with the majority of the artist’s surviving paintings and several of his drawings further illuminated the relationships that Rapp had identified in his article, and confirmed that this remarkable gouache can rightly be accorded a place as a highly significant addition to the very small body of surviving works by Elsheimer. 

The artist's cruelly short life – he lived only to the age of 32 – has left us with some 30 paintings, and the number of surviving drawings is even smaller.  In the earlier literature the drawings associated with Elsheimer were more numerous, but many of these have subsequently been reattributed to other hands such as Hendrick Goudt;  when Keith Andrews wrote his fundamental Elsheimer monograph in 1977, he accepted only just over 20 drawings as autograph, a corpus which has hardly been extended since.  Those core drawings, all executed in pen and ink, some also with wash, include a variety of different types of studies, from rapid, almost feverishly drawn sketches to more carefully constructed and delicately drawn composition studies, but none are worked up with colours, as here.  In addition to the pen drawings, there are several small, monochrome gouache modelli, which are in some respects closer to the present work in their conception (see Adam Elsheimer, exh. cat., op. cit., 2006, cat. nos. 42-45), but the fact remains that the technical combination seen here is unique in the artist’s work: nowhere else do we find a very visible, strong pen drawing, worked up in full colour in a manner more reminiscent of Elsheimer’s paintings than of his drawings or gouaches. 

The unique technique seen here can, however, be at least partly explained by the function of the work. As the inscription on the verso reveals, the drawing was made for an album amicorum, a sort of aristocratic autograph book, carried by gentlemen on their travels and particularly popular at this time (for a fuller discussion of these albums, see P. Amelung, ‘Die Stammbücher des 16./17. Jahrhunderts als Quelle der Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte,’ in Zeichnung in Deutschland. Deutsche Zeichner 1540-1640, exh. cat., Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, 1980, vol. II, pp. 211-22).  This was clearly also a tradition which Elsheimer was happy to espouse, as at least two other drawings of the 20 or so that are known were also made for such albums (see K. Andrews, Adam Elsheimer: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Oxford 1977, cat. nos. 27 and 32).  Though more highly worked up than Elsheimer’s other drawings made for such albums, the present work nonetheless fits into this tradition, and its more finished nature can perhaps be explained by the importance of the person for whom it was made (Elsheimer’s other album amicorum drawings seem to have been made for fellow artists). 

As Rapp has described, the man for whom this drawing was made was Aegidius Krix (or Grix), a Fleming from Brussels who held an important position as a secretary and herald at the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague.  Krix was clearly a talented diplomat, whom Rudolf entrusted with various sensitive missions to Italy, and subsequently thanked for his efforts by ennobling him in 1594.  The inscription on the verso further reveals that Krix in fact commissioned the drawing not for himself, but for the burgrave Wratislaw Freiherr von Dohna, an important nobleman from north Bohemia who was also connected with the court of the Emperor.  On the basis of his research into the biographical details of the burgrave’s life, Rapp has established that this drawing could only have been dedicated to him between 1599 and 1604. 

The subject of The Burning of Troy, which Elsheimer – or perhaps his patron – chose for this drawing is one that had long been popular with both Italian and Northern artists.  In 1595-6, Jan Breughel the Elder painted a famous version, now in Munich, while some time during his first two years or so in Rome (1600-1602), Elsheimer executed his own, celebrated painting of the subject (fig. 1; also now in Munich; see Adam Elsheimer, exh. cat., op. cit., 2006, cat. no. 10).  More specifically, Elsheimer has here extracted from the larger composition the motif of Aeneas Saving Anchises from Burning Troy, showing (in reverse to the corresponding figures in the painting) the young man carrying his aged father on his back, with the panorama of the burning city behind.  Though clearly related in subject to the larger, Munich picture, the gouache conveys a very different message, and one that is much more appropriate to the context of an album amicorum, where exemplars of piety and illustrations of upstanding moral actions frequently appear.  This reading of the classical subject of Aeneas Saving Anchises had already been overtly acknowledged in 16th-century emblematic literature, and Elsheimer’s depiction owes a more than passing debt to the illustrations of the subject in editions of Alciati’s Emblemata published in Frankfurt in 1567 and Leiden in 1591 (fig. 2). In purely compositional terms, all these images also, of course, look back to the relevant section of Raphael’s Vatican fresco of The Fire in the Borgo (fig. 3). 

In the recent exhibition catalogue, the note for this drawing states that “despite its unusual medium and support, it should be classified as a painting rather than a drawing.” Considered in terms of the approach to the modelling of the figures, and the rendering of the fall of light, it is perhaps true that this work has more in common with Elsheimer’s paintings than with his drawings, but the remarkable thing about this work is precisely that it is not a painting.  Although the effects created in some ways parallel those of the artist’s paintings, these effects are achieved using the tools of dynamic, linear drawing, combined with relatively thin and translucent water-based colours – a remarkable achievement, and yet another demonstration of Elsheimer’s endless ingenuity and technical brilliance.  Here, Elsheimer shows that, like Rembrandt, he was an artist who constantly experimented, and who used all the methods and media at his disposal in the most appropriate and effective ways, to achieve the results that he desired.  When asked to make an album amicorum illustration for an extremely important patron, he turned to a combination of techniques that he had not previously employed, and produced this virtuoso work, which can be related in various ways to his other paintings and drawings, yet remains a fascinating and illuminating unicum within the artist’s surviving work.