中文简介：

在十七世纪的欧洲，人们对于真实和自然的定义存在着许多猜想和争论。这些思潮很快汇聚成了现代科学的力量。《自然光》探讨了那个时代不确定性的主题，正如德国画家亚当·埃尔海默（Adam Elsheimer）作品中所提炼出来的那样。埃尔斯海默通过小型、强烈和神秘的叙事性构图以新颖方式将人物与景观联系起来，在卡拉瓦乔以其激进祭坛画分化观众和“自然哲学家”圈子、早期现代科学家开始转向伽利略新“世界体系”的时候，投射出陌生空间愿景。

朱利安·贝尔（Julian Bell）带我们回到16世纪充满活力的罗马，埃尔斯海默和其他年轻北方移民，特别是他朋友彼得·保罗·鲁本斯，交换了画作和诗歌的参考点。贝尔专注于埃尔斯海默一些最令人不安的作品，并推动其背后的焦虑情绪。传统图像主题以新紧迫性被表达出来，最重要地，在埃尔海默最后一幅画中：一幅对夜空展望具有前所未有的诗意力量完成于天文学发酵时期。

埃尔斯海默的画作通过印刷品流传，影响了伦勃朗、洛兰和普桑等不同的想象力，甚至影响到了印度莫卧儿王朝的艺术家，他们同样充满激情的微型画拓展了我们对“自然”的认识。当我们专注于微观精细的艺术作品时，整个17世纪的地球和它的困惑开始在我们周围展开。

英文简介：

Seventeenth-century Europe swirled with conjectures and debates over what was real and what constituted 'nature', currents that would soon gather force to form modern science. Natural Light deliberates on the era's uncertainties, as distilled in the work of painter Adam Elsheimer – a short-lived, tragic German artist who has always been something of a cult secret. Elsheimer's diminutive, intense and mysterious narrative compositions related figures to landscape in new ways, projecting unfamiliar visions of space at a time when Caravaggio was polarizing audiences with his radical altarpieces and circles of 'natural philosophers' – early modern scientists – were starting to turn to the new 'world system' of Galileo.

Julian Bell transports us to the spirited Rome of the 1600s, where Elsheimer and other young Northern immigrants – notably his friend Peter Paul Rubens – swapped pictorial and poetic reference points. Focusing on some of Elsheimer's most haunting compositions, Bell drives at the anxieties that underlie them – a puzzling over existential questions that still have relevance today. Traditional themes for imagery are expressed with fresh urgency, most of all in Elsheimer's final painting, a vision of the night sky of unprecedented poetic power that was completed at a time of ferment in astronomy.

Circulated through prints, Elsheimer's pictorial inventions affected imaginations as disparate as Rembrandt, Lorrain and Poussin. They even reached artists in Mughal India, whose equally impassioned miniatures expand our sense of what 'nature' might be. As we home in on artworks of microscopic finesse, the whole of the 17th-century globe and its perplexities starts to open out around us.