The Sermon on the Mount (Lorrain)

From a high vantage a vast, luminous landscape rolls toward distant mountains and water, and on a hill at the center the tiny figure of Christ preaches to a scattered crowd. Claude Lorrain makes the Sermon on the Mount an excuse for a panorama of ideal nature, the sacred event almost dissolved into the grandeur and serenity of the world around it. Now in the Frick, it shows how completely he subordinated narrative to landscape, the divine word delivered within a hushed, golden expanse of hills, trees, and far horizons.