Salvator Rosa - WikiHQ

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, 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. 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 has been described as "unorthodox and extravagant", a "perpetual rebel", "The Anti-Claude",

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, 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

thumb|left|150px|[[Self-Portrait (Salvator Rosa)|Self-portrait (), oil on canvas, 61 x 45 cm., (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg)]]

thumb|150px|Portrait of Lucrezia Paolini (–1660), oil on canvas, 66 x 50.5 cm., [[Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica]]

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. 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. 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. It was about this time that Rosa wrote his satire named Babylon.

thumb|left|Philosophy (1641), oil on canvas, 116 x 94 cm., [[National Gallery. Inscription "Keep silent or say something better than silence". This painting and its companion, Poetry, are often identified as a self-portrait and a portrait of Lucrezia, but these attributions have been questioned by some scholars.

Legacy

During Rosa's lifetime, his work inspired followers such as Giovanni Ghisolfi, but his most lasting influence was on the later development of romantic and sublime landscape traditions within painting.

In a time when artists were 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. In his own words, he painted "...purely for my own satisfaction. I need to be transported by enthusiasm and I can only employ my brushes when I am in ecstasy."

Salvator Rosa and romanticism

thumb|Salvator Rosa Sketching Banditti, by [[Thomas Cole (1832), oil on pane,17.7 x 24.1 cm., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]]

Rosa's influence on romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was profound. Art historians have described him as a "cult figure", William Kent, who originated the naturalised garden, was known to be a great admirer of Rosa and went so far as to plant dead trees in his gardens to achieve Salvator Rosa effects.

One historian noted, "An extraordinary amount of Rosa's fame and influence in England seems to have rested on verbal and literary transmission, and had an impact that extended far beyond the borderline of purely pictorial concerns." In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke designated Salvator Rosa as the "painter of the Sublime". Horace Walpole, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote highly of his paintings. Rosa was the subject of an opera by Antônio Carlos Gomes, the ballet Catarina or La Fille du Bandit, and a song by Giovanni Bononcini, which Franz Liszt included an arrangement of in his suite Annees de pelerinage, Deuxieme annee: Italie, (S.161) No. 3, Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa.

thumb|left|[[Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditi|Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti, by Thomas Moran (1860), oil on canvas, 101.6 x 169.9 cm., Chrysler Museum of Art]]

Rosa and his tempestuous spirit became the darling of British Romantics such as Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and Alexander Runciman. A recent exhibit of J. M. W. Turner's work, at the Prado museum in Madrid, notes the influence Rosa had on Turner's landscapes. Rosa's influence can also be seen in American art of the period. Thomas Cole counted Rosa among his heroes, and his impact has been identified in the work of artists such as Washington Allston, George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Moran, William Sidney Mount, John Trumbull, Benjamin West and other American artist. Since the 1970s, Rosa's work has received renewed attention from scholars. catalogs of his drawings, the publication of his letters, biographical works, and other volumes ranging from paperback picture books to scholarly monographs.

Satires

Cesareo (1892) and Cartelli (1899) wrote books taking account of Rosa's satires. 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 spirited. 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 downtrodden, and of moral virtue and Catholic faith.

thumb|left|150px|Poetry (1641), oil on canvas, 73 x 58 cm., [[Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica]]

thumb|150px|Music (1641), oil on canvas, 73 x 58 cm., [[Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica]]

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 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, 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, 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) 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.

Though critical of contemporary art and poetry, Rosa is part of his age in his frequent weighty classical allusions, his lexical freedom, and his liking for ornate rhetorical structures. His poetry also shows a directness and accuracy of expression that drives home the satiric point, often laconically.

Galleries

Paintings

File:Salvator Rosa - Portrait of a Man - WGA20041.jpg|Portrait of a Man (1640s), oil on canvas, 78 x 65 cm., Hermitage Museum)

File:Salvator Rosa - The Witches' Sabbath - BF.1982.7 - Museum of Fine Arts.jpg|Witches' Sabbath (), oil on canvas, 87 x 73 cm., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

File:Salvator Rosa - Heroic Battle - WGA20050.jpg|Heroic Battle (–1664), oil on canvas, 214 x 351 cm. Louvre

File:Salvator Rosa - Human Fragility - WGA20047.jpg|Human Fragility (), oil on canvas, 199 x 134 cm., Fitzwilliam Museum

File:Salvator Rosa (Italian) - Allegory of Fortune - Google Art ProjectFXD.jpg|Allegory of Fortune (1658), oil on canvas, 198 x 133 cm., J. Paul Getty Museum

File:Salvator Rosa - Diogenes Casting away his Cup - WGA20045.jpg|Diogenes Casting Away his Cup (1650s), oil on canvas, 219 x 148 cm., private collection

File:Rosa Crucifixion of Polyclitus.jpg|Crucifixion of Polyclitus (1650s), oil on canvas, 108 x 139 cm., National Museum, Warsaw

File:Demokrit, hensunken i betragtninger.jpg|Democritus in Meditation (1650–51), oil on canvas, 344 x 214 cm., National Gallery of Denmark

File:Rosa - The Death of Regulus, ca. 1650-1652.jpg|The Death of Regulus (–1652), oil on canvas, 152.4 × 219.71 cm., Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

File:Rosa - The Baptism of the Eunuch, ca. 1660.jpg|The Baptism of the Eunuch (), oil on canvas, 200 x 122 cm., Chrysler Museum of Art

File:Salvator Rosa - Pythagoras Emerging from the Underworld - Google Art Project.jpg|Pythagoras Emerging from the Underworld (1662), oil on canvas, 131 x 189 cm., Kimbell Art Museum

File:Salvator Rosa - The Shade of Samuel Appears to Saul - WGA20058.jpg|Saul and the Witch of Endor (1668), oil on canvas, 275 x 191 cm., Louvre

</gallery>

Landscapes

File:Rosa - Il ponte, Palazzo Pitti.jpg|Landscape with a Bridge (1645–1649), oil on canvas, 106 x 127 cm., Galleria Palatina

File:Harbour Scene - Nationalmuseum - 17200.tif|Harbour Scene (undated), oil on canvas, 72 x 94 cm., Nationalmuseum

File:Rosa, Saint John the Baptist Baptizing Christ in the Jordan.jpg|Saint John the Baptist Baptizing Christ in the Jordan () oil on canvas, 173 x 258.7 cm., Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

File:Rosa, Saint John the Baptist Revealing Christ to the Disciples.jpg|Saint John the Baptist Revealing Christ to the Disciples () oil on canvas, 173.4 x 260.7 cm., Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

File:Bandits on a Rocky Coast MET DP323412.jpg|Bandits on a Rocky Coast (), oil on canvas, 74.9 x 100 cm., Metropolitan Museum of Art

File:Salvator Rosa - River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumean Sibyl - WGA20057.jpg|Apollo and the Cumean Sibyl (1657–58), oil on canvas, 173.7 x 259.5 cm., Wallace Collection

File:Salvator rosa, paesaggio con mercurio e il boscaiolo disonesto, 1663 ca (cropped).jpg|Mercury and the Dishonest Woodsman (ca. 1663), oil on canvas, 125.7 x 202.1 cm., National Gallery

File:Salvator Rosa, Jacob’s Dream, c. 1665, oil on canvas.jpg|Jacob's Dream (c. 1665), oil on canvas, 137 x 200 cm., Derbyshire, Chatsworth, Devonshire collection

File:Salvator Rosa - The Finding of Moses - 47.92 - Detroit Institute of Arts.jpg|The Finding of Moses (1660–1665), oil on canvas, 123.2 × 202.6 cm., Detroit Institute of Arts

File:Rosa - Landscape with Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit, About 1660 - 1665 (cropped).jpg|St. Anthony Abbot and St. Paul the Hermit (–1665), oil on canvas, 67.3 x 49.9 cm., National Gallery of Scotland

File:The Death of Empedocles by Salvator Rosa.jpg|The Death of Empedocles (–1670), oil on canvas, 135 x 99 cm., private collection

File:Landscape with Tobit and the angel mg 0161.jpg|Tobias and the Angel (), oil on canvas, 121 x 195 cm., Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg

File:Salvator Rosa - Rocky Landscape with a Huntsman and Warriors - WGA20063.jpg|Rocky Landscape with a Huntsman and Warriors (), oil on canvas, 142 x 192 cm., Louvre

</gallery>

Drawings

All drawings are undated: pen, ink, and wash; or pen, ink, wash, and chalk on paper

File:Turbaned Warrior Holding a Mace MET 1970.101.12.jpg|Turbaned Warrior Holding a Mace (13.2 x 8.2 cm.), Metropolitan Museum of Art

File:Martyrdom of St. Andrew MET DP811520 (cropped).jpg|Martyrdom of St. Andrew (19.8 x 13.7 cm.), Metropolitan Museum of Art

File:ROSA Salvator - Femme debout drapée, portant quelque chose, se dirigeant vers la gauche, INV 9747, Recto (cropped).jpg|Woman standing draped (25.4 x 14.7 cm.), Louvre

File:The Abandoned Oidipus (Salvator Rosa) - Nationalmuseum - 23888.tif|Oedipus Abandoned (65 x 45 cm.), Nationalmuseum

File:Witches' Sabbath (recto); Figures Gathered around a tree (verso) MET DP812350 (cropped).jpg|Witches' Sabbath (21.8 x 31.7 cm.), Metropolitan Museum of Art

File:'Forest Scene' attributed to Salvator Rosa, Honolulu Museum of Art.JPG|Forest Scene, Honolulu Museum of Art

</gallery>

Prints

All prints are etchings, or etchings with drypoint

File:Battling Tritons LACMA M.88.233.5 (cropped).jpg|Battling Tritons (1660–61), 11.11 x 16.51 cm.

File:Glaucus and Scylla LACMA 56.15.23.jpg|Glaucus and Scylla (1661), 35.24 x 23.5 cm.

File:Three human skulls, study for "Democritus in Meditation" MET DP836195.jpg|Three Human Skulls (1662), 14.2 × 9.2 cm.

File:Salvator rosa, la crocifissione di policrate, 1662 ca.jpg|The Crucifixion of Polycrates the Tyrant after his Capture by the Persians (1662), 47.3 x 72.2 cm.

File:The infant Oedipus is tied to a tree by the shepherd to whom Wellcome L0032548 (cropped).jpg|Rescue of the Infant Oedipus (1663), 72.4 x 47.2 cm.

File:Jason and the Dragon LACMA 56.15.11.jpg|Jason and the Dragon (1663–64), 33.6 x 21.5 cm.

</gallery>

Works about Rosa

thumb|upright|Rosa's tomb

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

Domenico Passeri speaks of him in Vite de Pittori
Salvini, Satire e Vita di Salvator Rosa
Bernardo de' Dominici, Vita di Rosa (1742, Naples)
In England, Lady Morgan in The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, and Albert Cotton in A Company of Death romanticized his life.
Rosa is the fictional hero of the novella Signor Formica, 1819, also known simply as Salvator Rosa, by E. T. A. Hoffmann.
Salvator Rosa is a 19th-century Italian opera by Antônio Carlos Gomes, with libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, after the novel Masaniello by Eugène de Mirecourt.
The 1846 ballet Catarina by the choreographer Jules Perrot and the composer Cesare Pugni was produced in London at Her Majesty's Theatre, and was inspired by the alleged story of Rosa's dealings with Brigands of the Abruzzi.
One of the pieces included in the piano collection Années de pèlerinage by Franz Liszt is entitled "Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa". That song (Vado ben spesso cangiando loco) was, however, composed by Giovanni Bononcini.
Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditi is an 1860 painting by Thomas Moran.

References

External links

Notes on etchings titled The genius of Salvator Rosa.
Artcyclopedia entry on Salvator Rosa online.
Exhibition 2011, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Jusepe de Ribera, 1591-1652, a full-text exhibition catalogue from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which includes material on Salvator Rosa (see index)