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.