Salvator Rosa (1615 – 15 March 1673) is best known today as an Italian Baroque painter, whose romanticised 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,Jaffé, Hans L. C., editor. 1967. 20,000 Years of World Painting. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. New York. 418 pp. [page 228] known for his flamboyant personality, and regarded as an accomplished poet, satirist, actor, musician and printmaker. 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, which 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 prototypes of the romantic landscape and the very antithesis of the "picturesque" classical views of Claude Lorrain. Some critics have noted that his technical skills and craftsmanship as a painter were not always equal to his truly innovative and original visions.Venturi, Lionello and Rosabianca Skira-Venturi. 1952. Italian Painting: From Caravaggio to Modigliani. Editions D'Art Albert Skira, Geneva, Switzerland. 174 pp. [pages 67 & 85 ] 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.Langelon, Helen, (with Xavier F. Salomon and Caterina Volpi). 2010. Salvator Rosa. Dulwich Picture Gallery and Kimbell Art Museum in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, London. 240 pp. 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 has been described as "unorthodox and extravagant", a "perpetual rebel",Wittkower, p. 325 "The Anti-Claude", and a proto-Romantic. He 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. By the mid-19th century, however, with the rise of realism and Impressionism, his work fell from favour 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.Pignatti, Terisio. 1985. Five Centuries of Italian Painting 1300-1800: from the collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation. Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation. Houston, Texas. 231 pp. [pages 153-155]
Biography
Early life Rosa was born in Arenella, at that time on the outskirts of Naples, on either 20 June 20 or 21 July 1615. His mother was Giulia Greca Rosa, a member of one of the Greek families of Sicily. His father, Vito Antonio de Rosa, a land surveyor, urged his son to become a lawyer or a priest, and entered him into the convent of the Somaschi Fathers. Yet Salvator showed a preference for the arts and secretly worked with his maternal uncle, Paolo Greco, to learn about painting. He soon transferred himself to the tutelage of his brother-in-law Francesco Fracanzano, a pupil of Ribera, and afterward to either Aniello Falcone, a contemporary of Domenico Gargiulo,Hobbes J.R. p. 241 or to Ribera. Some sources claim he spent time living with roving bandits. At the age of seventeen, his father died; his mother was destitute with at least five children, and Salvatore found himself without financial support and the head of a household looking to him for support.
He continued his apprenticeship with Falcone, helping him complete his battlepiece canvases. In that studio, it is said that Giovanni Lanfranco took notice of his work, and advised him to relocate to Rome, where he stayed from 1634 until 1636.
Returning to Naples, he began painting haunting landscapes, overgrown with vegetation, or jagged beaches, mountains, and caves. Rosa was among the first to paint "romantic" landscapes, with a special turn for scenes of picturesque, often turbulent and rugged scenes peopled with shepherds, brigands, seamen, soldiers. These early landscapes were sold cheaply through private dealers.
He returned to Rome in 1638–39, where he was housed by Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, bishop of Viterbo. For the Chiesa Santa Maria della Morte in Viterbo, Rosa painted the first of his few altarpieces, the Incredulity of Thomas.
Wife and family
In 1640, Rosa met Lucrezia Paolini (–1696) in Florence. Lucrezia was a married woman whose husband had left the city and abandoned her soon after their marriage, never to return. She served as a model for Rosa on occasion, and was likely the model for the allegory of Music (). Rosa and Lucrezia soon became dedicated and lifelong companions. Their first son, Rosalvo, was born in August 1641, probably in Volterra, and another son, Augusto, was born in 1657. Records show at least four more children were born and placed with foundling hospitals between 1641 and 1657, giving some indication of their poor financial condition in those years. The custom of unmarried couples living together was not uncommon in the early years of the 17th century, but as the decades passed, the church grew less and less tolerant of the practice. At times, Rosa's prominent reputation and relationships to powerful patrons helped to shield him from the Inquisition. At other times, the situation left him vulnerable to the many rivals and enemies he made through his satires and ostentatious character. In 1656, feeling pressure in Rome from the poet Agostino Favoriti and his close ally Fabio Chigi, recently elected Pope Alexander VII, Rosa sent Lucrezia and their son Rosalvo to stay in Naples with his family. Soon after she arrived, a severe outbreak of the plague hit Naples, and Rosalvo, Salvator's brother, sister, brother-in-law and their children all died in the epidemic. Lucrezia survived, however and returned to Rome alone. The following year, their son Augusto was born. Near the end of his life, declining in health and anticipating death, Rosa married Lucrezia on 4 March 1673. On 17 March, he died. An inventory of Rosa's house taken in 1673 shortly after his death, indicated the Portrait of Lucrezia Paolini was hanging in a prominent location in the home, and one of the few paintings in his possession when he died.
Career
While Rosa had a facile genius at painting, he pursued a wide variety of arts: music, poetry, writing, etching, and acting. In Rome, he befriended Pietro Testa and Claude Lorrain. During a Roman carnival play, he wrote and acted in a masque, in which his character bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and, more particularly, of the mind. In costume, he inveighed against the farcical comedies acted in the Trastevere under the direction of Bernini.
While his plays were successful, this activity also gained him powerful enemies among patrons and artists, including Bernini himself, in Rome. Around 1640, he accepted an invitation from Giovanni Carlo de' Medici to relocate to Florence, where he stayed until 1649. Once there, Rosa sponsored a combination of studio and salon of poets, playwrights, and painters—the so-called Accademia dei Percossi (Academy of the Stricken). To the rigid art milieu of Florence, he introduced his canvases of wild landscapes; while influential, he gathered few true pupils. Another painter-poet, Lorenzo Lippi, shared with Rosa the hospitality of the cardinal and the same circle of friends. Lippi encouraged him to proceed with the poem Il Malmantile racquistato. He was well acquainted also with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and was housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting, and War. About the same time, he painted Philosophy, now in the National Gallery, London.
A passage in one of his satires suggests that he sympathised with the 1647 insurrection led by Masaniello—whose portrait he painted, though probably not from life. Rosa's tempestuous art and reputation as a rebel gave rise to a popular legend—recounted in a biography of Rosa published in 1824 by Sydney, Lady Morgan—that Rosa lived with a gang of bandits and participated in the uprising in Naples against Spanish rule.Langdon, Helen (2003). Rosa, Salvator. Grove Art Online. Although these activities cannot be conveniently dovetailed into known dates of his career, in 1846 a famous romantic ballet about this story titled Catarina was produced in London by the choreographer Jules Perrot and composer Cesare Pugni.
He returned to stay in Rome in 1649. Here, he increasingly focused on large-scale paintings, tackling themes and stories unusual for seventeenth-century painters. These included Democritus amid the Tombs, The Death of Socrates, The Death of Regulus (these two are now in England), Justice Quitting the Earth and the Allegory of Fortune. This last work raised a storm of controversy among religious and civil authorities who perceived in it a satire directed at them. Rosa, endeavouring at conciliation, published a text in which he provided anodyne explanations for the painting's imagery; nonetheless, he was nearly arrested.Elmes, James (1825). The Arts and Artists: Or Anecdotes & Relics, of the Schools of Painting, Sculpture & Architecture. London: John Knight & Henry Lacey. p. 91. . It was about this time that Rosa wrote his satire named Babylon.
His criticisms of Roman art culture won him several enemies. An allegation arose that his published satires were not his own, but Rosa vehemently denied the charges. It may be possible that literary friends in Florence and Volterra coached him about the topic of his satires, while the compositions of which remained nonetheless his own. To confute his detractors, he wrote the last of the series, entitled Envy.
Among the pictures of his last years were the Saul and the Witch of Endor and Battlepiece now in the Musée du Louvre, the latter painted in 40 days, full of longdrawn carnage, with ships burning in the offing; Polycrates and the Fishermen; and the Oath of Catiline (Palazzo Pitti).
While occupied with a series of satirical portraits, to be closed by one of himself, Rosa was assailed by dropsy. He died a half year later. His tomb is in Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, where a portrait of him has been set up. Salvator Rosa, after struggles of his early youth, had successfully earned a handsome fortune.
He was a significant etcher, with a series of small prints of soldiers, and a number of larger subjects.
Among his pupils were Evangelista Martinotti of Monferrato and his brother Francesco. Another pupil was Ascanio della Penna of Perugia.Storia della pittura in Perugia e delle arti by Angelo Lupattelli (1895), page 70.
Legacy