Stop and Look: The Stoning of St Stephen by Elsheimer (1604)

Adam Elsheimer is one of the great masters of his age, which an age crowded with great artists. But he is far too little known, perhaps partly because his works are themselves extremely small. They are nearly all, effectively, miniatures, executed with meticulous precision and beautiful draughtsmanship on sheets of copper, richly coloured, often glowing with the magic of nocturnal illumination. Yet for all their small size they are densely packed with detail, with crowds of richly dressed figures and tenderly observed landscape scenery. 

He was born in Frankfort-am-Main, the son of a fashionable tailor, and by the age of twenty-two was established in Rome, already a much-admired and magically gifted master who conjured up exotic worlds in which the figures of mythology or Biblical history enact their stories with vivid immediacy. For all their tiny scale, these pictures are stupendous in conception. When he died much too young, at the age of thirty-two, the great Peter Paul Rubens wrote: “I have never felt my heart more profoundly pierced by grief than at this news.”

That’s an entirely understandable feeling: there’s something irresistibly attractive about these jewel-like images, which embody in miniature form some of the most powerful ideas to be found in Baroque art.  And from an early stage, Elsheimer’s paintings were treasured by collectors across Europe. Considering his short life and the miniature scale of his work, he was astonishingly influential: his landscapes anticipate many of the ideas that were to be made familiar in the work of Claude Lorrain several decades later, and he seems to have exerted a profound influence on such widely differing painters as Guercino in northern Italy and Rembrandt in the Netherlands. The balletic grace of St Stephen’s angel here anticipates many of the Bolognese master Guercino’s visionary messengers, while the oriental costumes of the onlookers remind us of the fancy-dress imaginings of the great Dutchman. 

In this scene of the death of the first Christian martyr, the artist can be seen building on the examples of Titian, Caravaggio and several other masters of the sixteenth century to achieve something quite new, incorporating imagery more typical of the seventeenth, decades after his death.  What’s especially striking is the way Elsheimer combines Italianate grandeur with the sort of searching detail one finds in Dutch domestic scenes. The expression on St Stephen’s face here, as he collapses under the rain of boulders is a completely believable depiction of human distress. The anguish he is suffering overwhelms him, even as he glimpses the majestic vision of the angel and accompanying cherubs that announce his sainthood in a burst of supernatural light.

For all the suave elegance of the figure-drawing and the sweetness of his palette, it’s clear that we are dealing with a northern artist: the way he combines high drama with gritty realism is far removed from the more idealising language of the Italians. And notice the poetic consistency of the imagery as the saint’s persecutors bombard him with stones from the ruined monuments of the old civilisation that Christianity was superseding, which are seen in the sunny background landscape. A vast range of human feeling and aesthetic complexity is compressed into a work that could almost be carried around in your pocket. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life