Claude was the most successful and influential landscape painter in the history of art. Working almost exclusively for high court patrons, he endowed nature with courtly social and political hierarchies, eternal land ownership, absolutism empire in space and time (world history as a series of linked empires), mythological politics whereby the gods (and their earthly counterparts, the aristocracy) rule over everything and defeat all usurpers, and a new sense of poetic truth, grounded in hundreds of drawings and sketches made on site. His new visual truth confirmed courtly values as natural and eternal even as his refinement of style and subject (here court dance) triumphed over all lesser creatures and passions. Pending further revision, I will post my draft for a short book on the courtly politics of Claude Lorrain. This is one of 200 shots taken in the Toledo Museum of Art, a great mid-western museum.
