The German artist Adam Elsheimer has been described as one of the unsung heroes of the history of Western European art. During his short life he produced only a small number of landscape and figure compositions but he influenced artists as diverse as Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude and Poussin. His work is highly prized by collectors and admired by specialists yet his pictures, which are always small and finely detailed, can easily be overlooked by the gallery-visiting public.

The son of a tailor, Elsheimer was born in Frankfurt where he trained under the local painter and printmaker Philipp Uffenbach. During his early career Elsheimer travelled widely, visiting Strasbourg, Munich and Venice before settling in Rome where he remained for the rest of his life. After converting to Roman Catholicism in 1606, he married a woman of Scottish descent, Carola Antonia Stuart. In Rome, Elsheimer was part of a circle of intellectuals that included Johann Faber, physician and botanist to the Pope and Peter Paul Rubens, who lamented Elsheimer’s tardiness and melancholy disposition. In a career that spanned just fourteen years, Elsheimer worked slowly and meticulously, producing fewer than forty small paintings on copper.

This exquisite work is one of two paint­ings by Elsheimer in the Scottish National Gallery. Saint Stephen is generally regarded as the first Christian martyr. He aroused the anger of the high priests and elders of Jerusalem with a famously provocative sermon for which he was dragged outside the city walls and stoned to death. Elsheimer’s painting shows the saint in his deacon’s costume, already wounded and falling forward on his knees but with his eyes raised towards a vision of the heavens.

Elsheimer stage-manages his composition with great skill. From the shadowy figure in the left foreground (said to be Saul, a witness to the execution) and a magnificent turbaned figure on horseback, our attention is pulled deep into the crowd of onlookers which is at once hostile, bemused or indifferent. In the distance, youths clamber into the trees for a better view of the action. None of this detail, however mesmerising, detracts from the unbearably intense action that plays out in the foreground. The artist uses light, colour and composition to set the banal cruelty of the stoning against the glory of Stephen’s vision. There are few more menacing figures in painting than the athletic figure at the far right, stretched on his toes and poised to bring his missile crashing down on Stephen’s skull. Yet the impending trajectory of the huge stone is countered by the dramatic opposing diagonal of a shaft of heavenly light. Stephen’s ordeal is harrowing, but we follow his eyes along the ray of glaring light to glimpse Jesus seated beside God in the vision that sustains the martyr through his torment.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.