Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Claude (Claude Gellée, Claude Lorrain)
French; 17th-century
New York, NY: Frick Collection
57%
The Sermon on the Mount. c1656. Oil on canvas
If Bruegel's Tower of Babel were the Evil Twin, this painting by Claude would be the Good Twin. I think that saying that is to badmouth the Frenchman, who's often worth liking but in spite of his rationalism and orderliness and mensuration (ditto Poussin). When Claude paints disorder, as he's done here, he does so with the aim of overcoming it; the Northern artist, instead, always leans into chaos (and thereby actually tends to conquer it). This painting, like Bruegel's, has in a bottom corner a repoussoir of land with busy people on it, and its main feature is, at center, a squat, hulking, ovoid hump of great Christian import. And like another Bruegel painting (The Conversion of Paul), this one by Claude minimizes the titular biblical action and stows it away in a little slot of the scene. But what allows Bruegel to get away his unfocus and all of his devices is a sense for the totality of his pictures, and a usual subordination to it of their many constituent parts. The way Claude, instead, has here worked over every rapt figure, every lamb, every leaf in every tree seems to be at the expense of the painting as a whole: you get the tonal richness and all the brooding of Baroque but none of its psychic stakes, only a dry perfection and a cascade of isolated and highly refined local effects. (TFS, 2025)