Most of them are, as the author has it, “rather less than the width of an average iPad screen”. One of the many remarkable aspects of his paintings is their size. 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.”Įlsheimer was born in Frankfurt, and spent most of his brief working life in Rome, where he died in poverty in 1610 at the age of 32. Elsheimer attempted to investigate what it means to be human and in nature, or even against or at the mercy of nature

The young Samuel Beckett, Bell notes, put it as succinctly as we would expect when in 1936 he wrote to a friend that “ Elsheimer is the man”. These included Rembrandt and Rubens, as well as, fascinatingly, the court artists of the Mughal empire. Yet he influenced some of the greatest artists of his day and of following days. It’s even funny, in places.Īdam Elsheimer will not be a name in every household. Natural Light is as light and natural as its subject warrants, a “mystery journey” on which we will encounter wondrous sights and uncover troves of treasure. Given the author’s Bloomsbury antecedents –he is the son of Quentin Bell, the art historian, nephew and biographer of Virginia Woolf – we might expect, we might dread, a precious style and an impregnable self-regard.

This version of nature he sets against the godly supernatural, and against the mind and consciousness.īy now we are on page two. 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’”. A t 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.

Book review the mirror and the light