Salvator Rosa  

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"The scene of barrenness was here and there interrupted by the spreading branches of the larch and cedar, which threw their gloom over the cliff, or athwart the torrent that rolled in the vale. No living creature appeared, except the lizard, scrambling among the rocks, and often hanging upon points so dangerous, that fancy shrunk from the view of them. This was such a scene as Salvator would have chosen, had he then existed, for his canvas; St. Aubert, impressed by the romantic character of the place, almost expected to see banditti start from behind some projecting rock, and he kept his hand upon the arms with which he always travelled."--The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe

"There are other descriptive passages, which, like those in The Mysteries of Udolpho, approach more nearly to the style of Salvator Rosa."--Prefatory Memoir to 'The Novels of Mrs Ann Radcliffe'

"No doubt Salvator Rosa’s crypto-romanticism had partisans up and down the peninsula. But allegiance to one trend or the other also changed; some artists were tom between them. Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione seems the most remarkable example."--Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750 (1958) by Rudolf Wittkower

"In the work of Mrs. Radcliffe the Shakespeare of Romance Writers, and who to the wild landscape of Salvator Rosa has added the softer graces of a Claude, may be found many scenes truly terrific in their conception, yet so softened down, and the mind so much relieved, by the intermixture of beautiful description, or pathetic incident, that the impression of the whole never becomes too strong, never degenerates into horror, but pleasurable emotion is ever the predominating result."--"On Objects of Terror" (1798) by Nathan Drake

"Like Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa, the Neapolitan, was a wild and restless spirit. A fugitive from a seminary of priests, he wandered as a lute-player and a serenader through the taverns of Naples. Then he began to paint; and, without having even seen an academy, he wandered with portfolio and colour-box about the neighbourhood of the city; roamed through the wilderness of the Abruzzi, the Capitanata, Apulia, the Basilicata, and Calabria, making drawings of all points connected with historical events: the wild cliffs of the Caudine Forks where the Roman army surrendered to the mercy of the victor; the marshy plains of the Volturno where Hannibaks soldiers wasted away stricken with fever; the jagged summits of Monte Cavo with the fallen cliff of Otranto which the Turks destroyed in 1480. Falling into the hands of robbers, he continued his roamings partly as a prisoner, partly for the pleasure he took in the bandit’s life."--The History of Painting: From the Fourth to the Early Nineteenth Century (1893/94) by Richard Muther

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Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673) was an Italian painter, poet and printmaker known for such paintings as The Witch.

His landscapes and history paintings, often set in dark and untamed nature, exerted considerable influence from the 17th century into the early 19th century. In his lifetime he was among the most famous painters, known for his flamboyant personality, and regarded as an accomplished poet, satirist, actor, musician, and printmaker, as well. He was active in Naples, Rome, and Florence, where on occasion he was compelled to move between cities, as his caustic satire earned him enemies in the artistic and intellectual circles of the day.

As a history painter, he often selected obscure and esoteric subjects from the Bible, mythology, and the lives of philosophers, that were seldom addressed by other artists. He rarely painted the common religious subjects, unless they allowed a treatment dominated by the landscape element. He also produced battle scenes, allegories, scenes of witchcraft, and many self portraits. However, he is most highly regarded for his very original landscapes, depicting "sublime" nature: often wild and hostile, at times rendering the people that populated them as marginal in the greater realm of nature. They were the very antithesis of the "picturesque" classical views of Claude Lorrain and prototypes of the romantic landscape. Some critics have noted that his technical skills and craftsmanship as a painter were not always equal to his truly innovative and original visions. This is in part due to a large number of canvases he hastily produced in his youth (1630s) in pursuit of financial gain, paintings that Rosa himself came to loathe and distance himself from in his later years, as well as posthumously misattributed paintings. Many of his peopled landscapes ended up abroad by the 18th century, and he was better known in England and France than most Italian Baroque painters.

Rosa had a great influence on Romanticism, becoming a cult-like figure in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and myths and legends grew around his life, to the point that his real life was scarcely distinguished from the bandits and outsiders that roamed the wild and thundery landscapes he painted. English writer of gothic novels Ann Radcliffe was greatly influenced by his dramatic landscapes peopled with peasants and banditti. She managed to translate Rosa's visual feeling of awe and the sublime to the Gothic novel popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

By the mid 19th century however, with the rise of realism and Impressionism, his work fell from favor and received very little attention. A renewed interest in his paintings emerged in the late 20th century, and although he is not ranked among the very greatest of the Baroque painters by art historians today, he is considered an innovative and significant landscape painter and a progenitor of the romantic movement.

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Artistic legacy

Rosa was indisputably a leader in that tendency towards the romantic and picturesque. It is an open question how influential his work was in the following decades or in following centuries. Wittkower rightly states that it is his landscapes, not his grand historical or religious dramas, that Rosa truly expresses a novel and innate spark; he may have dismissed them as frivolous capricci in comparison to his other themes, but these academically conventional canvases often restrained his rebellious streak. In general, in landscapes he avoided the idyllic and pastoral calm countrysides of Claude Lorrain and Paul Brill, and created brooding, melancholic fantasies, awash in ruins and brigands. The contrasts between the artists of his day is illustrated by the lines of Poetry written in 1748 (in The castle of indolence and other poems ): Whate'er Lorraine light touched with softening hue/ Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew. He influenced Gaspar Dughet's landscape style.

In a time when artists where often highly constrained by patrons, Rosa had a plucky streak of independence, which celebrated the special role of the artist. Our wealth must consist in things of the spirit, and in contenting ourselves with sipping, while others gorge themselves in prosperity. He refused to paint on commission or to agree on a price beforehand, and he chose his own subjects. He painted in order to be carried away by the transports of enthusiasm and use my brushes only when I feel myself rapt. This tempestuous spirit became the darling of British Romantics.

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Influence on the gothic novel

Ann Radcliffe was greatly influenced by the Italian landscape painter, Salvator Rosa. Where Rosa applied brush strokes, Radcliffe wove words.

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Negative criticism

"Another more celebrated fantasist was Salvator Rosa -- a man who, for reasons which are now entirely incomprehensible, was regarded by the critics of four and five generations ago as a great artist. But Salvator Rosa's romanticism is pretty cheap and obvious. He is a melodramatist who never penetrates below the surface. If he were alive today, he would be known most probably as the indefatigable author of one of the more bloodthirsty and adventurous comic strips." --Aldous Huxley in Prisons (with the Carceri Etchings by Piranesi).


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Satires

Satires (Salvator Rosa)

The satires of Salvator Rosa deserve more attention than they have generally received. There are, however, two recent books taking account of them—by Cesareo[1], 1892, and Cartelli, 1899. The satires, though considerably spread abroad during his lifetime, were not published until 1719. They are all in terza rima, written without much literary correctness, but remarkably spirited, pointed and even brilliant. They are slashingly denunciatory, and from this point of view too monotonous in treatment. Rosa here appears as a very severe castigator of all ranks and conditions of men, not sparing the highest, and as a champion of the poor and down-trodden, and of moral virtue and Catholic faith. It seems odd that a man who took so free a part in the pleasures and diversions of life should be so ruthless to the ministers of these.

The satire on Music exposes the insolence and profligacy of musicians, and the shame of courts and churches in encouraging them. Poetry dwells on the pedantry, imitativeness, adulation, affectation a and indecency of poets—also their poverty, and the neglect with which they were treated; and there is a very vigorous sortie against oppressive governors and aristocrats. Tasso's glory is upheld; Dante is spoken of as obsolete, and Ariosto as corrupting.

Painting inveighs against the pictorial treatment of squalid subjects, such as beggars (though Rosa must surely himself have been partly responsible for this misdirection of the art), against the ignorance and lewdness of painters, and their tricks of trade, and the gross indecorum of painting sprawling half-naked saints of both sexes. War (which contains a eulogy of Masaniello) derides the folly of mercenary soldiers, who fight and perish while kings stay at home; the vile morals of kings and lords, their heresy and unbelief.

In Babylon ofrece, Rosa represents himself as a fisherman, Tirreno, constantly unlucky in his net-hauls on the Euphrates; he converses with a native of the country, Ergasto. Babylon (Rome) is very severely treated, and Naples much the same.

Envy (the last of the satires, and generally accounted the best, although without strong apparent reason) represents Rosa dreaming that, as he is about to inscribe in all modesty his name upon the threshold of the temple of glory, the goddess or fiend of Envy obstructs him, and a long interchange of reciprocal objurgations ensues. Here occurs the highly charged portrait of the chief Roman detractor of Salvator (we are not aware that he has ever been identified by name); and the painter protests that he would never condescend to do any of the lascivious work in painting so shamefully in vogue.

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Works around Rosa

A number of biographies and fictionalizations of the life of Rosa exist:

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List of paintings

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Linking in as of 2022

A Philosopher by Lamplight, A Soldier on Horseback, Albert Christoph Dies, Alessandro Magnasco, Alessio de Marchis, Allegory of Fortune, Allegory, An Adventure of Salvator Rosa, Andrea di Leone, Andrea Locatelli, Andrew Lawrence (engraver), Aniello Falcone, Ann Radcliffe, Années de pèlerinage, Antonio Abati, Antonio Cesti, Antonio Francesco Peruzzini, Antonio Giusti, Architecture of Chiswick House, Art collections of Holkham Hall, Arthur Pond, Artists in biographies by Filippo Baldinucci, Artists in biographies by Giovanni Baglione, Astraea, Australian art, Bamboccianti, Baroque painting, Bartolomeo Pedon, Bartolomeo Pinelli, Bartolommeo Torregiani, Battle of Capo d'Orso, Belisarius, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery, British Institution, Calvet Museum, Campania, Capability Brown, Carlo Bonavia, Catalog of paintings in the Louvre Museum, Catalogue of paintings in the National Gallery, London, Catarina or La Fille du Bandit, Château de Chantilly, Christ Church Picture Gallery, Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, Chrysler Museum of Art, Claude Lorrain, Cluj-Napoca Bánffy Palace, Columbia Museum of Art, Compton Verney Art Gallery, Cornucopia, Crocker Art Museum, Diogenes, Domenico Gargiulo, Ducal Palace of Sassuolo, Duke of Buccleuch collection, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Elbridge T. Gerry Mansion, Elizabeth Coppin, Empedocles, English landscape garden, Esteban March, Eugene von Guerard, Fabriano Cathedral, Fabriano, Ferdinand Dugué, Fernando del Valle, Filippo Farsetti, Finding of Moses, Fondation Calvet, Fortune favours the bold, Four Times of the Day (Joseph Vernet), Francesco Fidanza, Francesco Fracanzano, Francesco Maria Brancaccio, Franciszek Ksawery Lampi, François de Nomé, French landscape garden, Gaetano Martoriello, Galleria Estense, Galleria Spada, Gaspard Dughet, Genoese School, George Lambert (English painter), Gheorghe Asachi, Gheorghe Tattarescu, Giambattista De Curtis, Giovan Battista Ruoppolo, Giovanni Battista Cecchi, Giovanni Battista Passeri, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Giovanni Filippo Apolloni, Giulio Giacinto Avellino, Giuseppe Crespi, Grand opera, Great St Bernard Hospice, Great St Bernard Pass, Grongar Hill, Hafod Uchtryd, Hans de Jode, Harding's Gallery (Boston), Harman Grisewood, Henry Cooke (artist), Het Gulden Cabinet, History of Cumbria, History of engraving, History of gardening, History of Naples, History of painting, Holker Hall, Human Fragility (painting), Ignacio de Iriarte, Italian literature, Ivan Aivazovsky, J. T. Wedgwood, Jacob de Heusch, Jacob H. Studer, Jacobus Mancadan, Jacques Courtois, Jan de Momper, Jeffrey Makin, João Maria Correia Ayres de Campos, 1st Count of Ameal, John Boydell, John Browne (artist), John Eagles, John Hamilton Mortimer, John Ruskin, John Thomson of Duddingston, José García Hidalgo, José Romeo, Joseph Goupy, Joseph Parrocel, Joshua Baldrey, Jusepe de Ribera, Landscape painting, Landscape with Tobias and the Angel (Rosa), Leendert van der Cooghen, Leuchtenberg Gallery, L'huomo di lettere, Light in painting, List of artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide, List of artists represented in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, List of historical ballet characters, List of historical opera characters, List of Italian painters, List of last words, List of music biographies in Rees's Cyclopaedia, List of painters in the Art Institute of Chicago, List of painters in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collections, List of people from Italy, List of people from Southern Italy, List of printmakers, List of Western European paintings in Ukrainian museums, Liver regeneration, Louis Boulanger, Louisa Greville, Luigi Salerno, March 15, Marco Ricci, Marshalsea, Marzio Masturzo, Matthieu van Plattenberg, Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Military art, Musée départemental d'Art ancien et contemporain, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, Musée Fabre, Musée Fesch, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes, Naples, National Museum Cardiff, Nicola Massaro, Nicola Vaccaro, Nicosia Cathedral, Nordic Landscape with a Castle on a Hill, Old Master, Oroetus, Palace of Culture (Iași), Palazzo Chigi of Ariccia, Palazzo Corsini, Rome, Palazzo Costa, Palazzo Falson, Palazzo Martelli, Palazzo Pitti, Palazzo Spada, Pandolfo Reschi, Paolo Giordano II Orsini, Peiraikos, Philipp Hieronymus Brinckmann, Philosophy (Salvator Rosa), Pieter Spierinckx, Pietro Antonio Martini, Pietro Montanini, Pietro Rosa, Pre-Socratic philosophy, Princeton University Art Museum, Prometheus, Prosper Henricus Lankrink, Protagoras, Pythagoras, Quartiere Varesina, Raynham Hall, Robert Adam, Romanticism, Rosa (surname), Rosa Bonheur, Saint George and the Dragon, Salvator Rosa (Naples Metro), Salvator Rosa (opera), Salvator, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Samuel, Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, Santa Maria del Soccorso all'Arenella, Sassuolo, School of Posillipo, Scipione Cignaroli, Scipione Compagno, Scylla, Self-Portrait (Salvator Rosa), Self-portrait, Sexuality in ancient Rome, Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Sir Gregory Page, 2nd Baronet, Sir John Lethbridge, 1st Baronet, Skyclad (Neopaganism), Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, St. Bernard (dog), Stefano Ticozzi, Stowe House, Sydney, Lady Morgan, Teofilo Patini, The Dream of Aeneas (Salvator Rosa), The Honest Woodcutter, Théophile de Viau, Thomas Jones (artist), Thomas Whately, Titans, Tobias and the Angel, Torture of Prometheus (Salvator Rosa), Transcriptions by Franz Liszt, Via del Babuino, Villa Zito, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Viterbo, Waleria Tarnowska, Wallace Collection, Wellington Collection, Welsh art, Western painting, Willem Anne Lestevenon, William Camden Edwards, William Humphreys Art Gallery

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See also


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