If you happened to be an artist living at the beginning of the 17th century, Rome was the place to be. The young Rubens was there, learning his trade. Caravaggio was causing uproar, both inside and outside the studio, with brush and blade. There was another young man too, a diffident German called Adam Elsheimer, freshly arrived from the north.
Elsheimer, the subject of a major retrospective in Edinburgh, was the son of a tailor from Frankfurt. He was neither privileged nor wealthy. He was, however, extraordinarily studious, and he fell in with a circle of intellectuals who were interested in such matters as botany and astronomy. Over a single decade (he died at 32, in 1610) Elsheimer produced a small body of work that was to be enormously influential, ground-breakingly so. Almost the entire Elsheimer oeuvre is gathered at the Royal Scottish Academy, 31 paintings out of the 34 he made during his short lifetime.
Elsheimer was unusual in all sorts of ways. He enjoyed painting small — in fact “he was devilishly good at small things”, as one contemporary put it. He liked to paint on copper, which was a little out of the ordinary, though not uncommon — it was used by printmakers; its surface is hard and unabsorbent, quite the opposite of canvas. Copper holds colours brilliantly; it tends to keep those colours stable, and it gives them a luminous sheen.
Elsheimer worked small, with the finest of fine brushes, often with the aid of a magnifying glass (the cost of admission includes a small magnifying glass so that you can enjoy the fine details), and he worked slowly, painstakingly so. Rubens called him slothful, though that may have been a tease because they were acquaintances — Rubens visited Elsheimer’s studio and often borrowed motifs from his paintings, which he then blew up to gigantic size.
What was Elsheimer working on over so many days and months? He favoured mythological, biblical and historical themes, but his take on them was often extremely unusual and startlingly innovative. Take a great painting in this show called The Flight into Egypt, which takes as its theme the journey of the Holy Family into Egypt on the back of an ass. They have hot-hoofed it there to escape the wrath of Herod. The world seems dark and overwhelming, and the humans terribly vulnerable within it.
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Several other things astonish us about this painting too. Elsheimer has painted the stars and even the surface of the moon in ways that had never been done before. Constellations are recognisable — this is the very first painting in the Western canon to show us the Milky Way. In fact, recent research has been able to date the painting to June 1609 by the position of the moon in relation to the stars.
And then there are Elsheimer’s two other great innovations: the depiction of nature and the use of unusually dramatic and multiple light sources. The light in the painting comes from several directions. The light of the moon gently bathes the scene. Joseph’s torch illuminates the trudging family, and in the background a fire showers sparks up into the air.
Although the painting is small (31 x 41cm), its smallness gives it a very particular drama and intimacy. The figures, though tiny, seem to loom large and monumental. They seem much bigger than their actual size.
This ability to pack so much into a space so small, and to give the whole a kind of unique emotional intensity, is also much in evidence in The Finding and Exaltation of the True Cross. This is an altarpiece, and it consists of seven paintings in all. Each one relates to the story of Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. The central panel, which brings together two quite separate events, both central to the Catholic faith, combines a depiction of the worship of the Cross with the coronation of the Virgin in paradise. Once again, separate light sources give magnification and emotional heightening to the scene. A multitude of figures, human and angelic, are banked up, in tier after tier, as your eye moves from the bottom to the top of the canvas, yet there is no sense of clutter or confusion.
Yes, it is a tiny output when compared with many others — think of Titian or Picasso — but disproportionately important, impressive and influential, and all the more so for the fact that each painting is so tiny and gem-like.
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Devil in the Detail opens on Friday until Sept 3 at the Royal Scottish Academy Building, Edinburgh (0131-624 6200; www.nationalgalleries.org)