THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Before the end of the sixteenth century German art had entered upon a period of complete decadence. The only painter who claims attention, not so much for the undeniable merit of his very highly finished landscapes, but for the fact that he exercised a certain influence upon Rembrandt, is the Frankfort painter, Adam Elsheimer (1578–1621?), who worked at Rome, and who is represented at the Louvre by The Flight into Egypt (No. 2710) and The Good Samaritan (No. 2711).
For the rest, the German painters of his period and of the whole of the seventeenth century retained scarcely a trace of national character, and were completely under the sway of the foreign, and particularly of the Italian, schools. Thus, Johann Rottenhammer (1564–1623), the painter of The Death of Adonis (No. 2732) and Diana and Calisto (No. 2733), was successively dominated by Jan Brueghel and by Tintoretto. The flower painter, Abraham Mignon (1640–1679), though born at Frankfort, was a pupil of David de Heem and a Dutchman in his art. His pictures at the Louvre (Nos. 2724–2729) are distributed between the German and the Dutch sections. Philipp Peter Roos, better known as Rosa da Tivoli (1665?–1705), who painted the Wolf devouring a Sheep (No. 2731), lived in Rome and adopted the style of the country of his domicile. The Bear Hunt (No. 2734) is the work of Carl Ruthart, another unimportant Italianising German of the second half of the seventeenth century.