The Sermon on the Mount

The religious theme of the work is complemented by the noble scale of the landscape, characterized by rich and brilliant blues, painted using ultramarine. This was the most expensive and coveted pigment available to painters at the time, made from the precious stone lapis lazuli.

Though Claude Lorrain is remembered for his landscapes, works such as The Sermon on the Mount indicate the equal significance of history and myth to his oeuvre, an emphasis which was similarly important to his followers. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the landscape would be wholly emptied of human narratives and celebrated entirely on its own terms, by the post-Romantic painters of the Naturalist and Realist schools; though Lorrain's work very much lays the groundwork for this advance.

This painting features many of the typical motifs of Claude's landscapes, including rivers, forests, and distant mountains, all laid out in an atmospherically expansive perspective. The depth of the horizon also allows Claude to provide a condensed Biblical geography within the pictorial space, incorporating Mount Lebanon in the distance, the Sea of Galilee to the right, and the Dead Sea and River Jordan to the left. In the foreground, on a summit of Mount Tabor, Christ and his apostles preach to an ardent crowd of disciples, interspersed with more nonchalant groups of sheep. The diminishing size of the figures enhances the illusionistic depth of the canvas.

The sermon depicted here is drawn from the Gospel of St. Matthew, and includes Christ's expositions on Christian ethics through the Beatitudes; he also pronounced the Lord's Prayer to the multitudes for the first time during this speech.