Salvator Rosa

Italian, 1615 - 1673

Biographytalian painter and printmaker, poet and actor, most celebrated for a new kind of wild and rocky landscape. Immensely ambitious, and inordinately vain, Rosa claimed a new kind of artistic independence, and came to symbolize the Romantic concept of unfettered genius. Born in Naples, he studied with his brother-in-law Francesco Fracanzano (1612–?56) and with Aniello Falcone (1607–56); his earliest works are genre scenes and battle paintings, close to those of Falcone. He is said to have sketched landscapes directly from nature, in oil on paper, and with Micco Spadaro contributed to a developing school of naturalistic landscape in Naples. He was in Rome 1635–9, and in Florence 1640–9, where he was patronized by Giancarlo de'Medici, and painted landscapes, vast harbour and coastal scenes, and battle pieces. Such works as The Mill (Corsham, Methuen Coll.) and Landscape with a Bridge (Florence, Pitti) are indebted to Dutch and Flemish landscape artists, and to Claude Lorrain, and suggest a Tuscan taste for the charms of country life. But his stern and condemnatory Self-Portrait (early 1640s; London, NG) conveys a darkening vision, which found expression in his satirical poetry, whose theme was the corruption of courtly life, in paintings of the harshest Cynic and Stoic philosophers of Antiquity, and in macabre scenes of witchcraft. In 1649 Rosa, avid for fame, left for Rome, where he wished to cast off his reputation for genre and landscape, and to be accepted as a learned painter of large-scale history paintings. He chose unusual, pessimistic subjects, which suggest the vanity of human endeavour, such as Democritus in Meditation (1650; Copenhagen, Statens Mus. for Kunst) and Humana fragilitas (c. 1656; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam), a new kind of philosophizing allegorical picture. His works of the early 1660s, whose relief-like compositions are indebted to Poussin and Raphael, are increasingly Classical, and a series of large etchings was intended to spread his fame as a history painter. The late 1660s saw a return to a more Baroque style, and a renewed interest in macabre subjects. But his landscapes remained more successful, and Rosa painted both large, heroic works, such as Landscape with the Baptism of Christ (mid-1650s; Glasgow, AG) and smaller paintings, with dead branches and craggy rocks, enlivened by bandits (an etched series of Figurine (1656) were particularly popular) and anchorite saints. These are landscapes of withdrawal, and in the 18th century the landscapes of Rosa and Claude came to typify the sublime and the beautiful.

Langdon, Helen. "Rosa, Salvator." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e2279 (accessed April 12, 2012).

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