A brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in this moving account of overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer, by an outstanding writer and critic. 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 long underappreciated artist Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), a native of Frankfurt who settled in Rome and whose diminutive 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 early modern scientists were starting to turn to the new "world system" of Galileo. His visual inventions influenced many famous artists—including Rembrandt van Rijn, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.