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Salvator Rosa (1615 – March 15, 1673) was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel" proto-Romantic. He was born in Arenella, in the outskirts of Naples, on either June 20 or July 21, 1615. 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 Francanzano, a pupil of Ribera, and afterwards to either Aniello Falcone, a contemporary of Domenico Gargiulo, or Ribera himself. Some sources claim he spent time living with roving bandits. At the age of seventeen he lost his father; his mother was destitute with at least five children, and Salvator found himself without financial support. He continued apprenticeship with Falcone, helping him complete his battlepiece canvases. In that studio, it is said that Lanfranco took notice of his work, and advised him to relocate to Rome, where he stayed from 1634 – 36. 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 his first and one of his few altarpieces with an Incredulity of Thomas. 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 Lorraine. 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 also gained him powerful enemies among
patrons and artists, including Bernini himself, in Rome. By late 1639,
he had had to relocate to Florence, where he stayed for 8 years. He had
been in part, invited by a Cardinal Giancarlo de Medici. 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 housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting and War. About the same time he painted his own portrait, now in the National Gallery, London. In 1646 he returned to Naples, and appears to have sympathised with the 1648 insurrection of Masaniello,
as a passage in one of his satires suggests. His actual participation
in the revolt is dubious. It is alleged that Rosa, along with other
painters — Coppola, Paolo Porpora, Domenico Gargiulo, Pietro dal Po, Marzio Masturzo, the two Vaccari and Cadogna — all under the captaincy of Aniello Falcone, formed the Compagnia della Morte,
whose mission it was to hunt down Spaniards in the streets, not sparing
even those who had sought religious asylum. He painted a portrait of
Masaniello — probably from reminiscence rather than life. On the approach
of Don Juan de Austria, the blood - stained Compagnia dispersed. Other tales recount that from there he escaped and joined with brigands in the Abruzzi. Although this incident which cannot be conveniently dove tailed 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 focussed on
large scale paintings, tackling themes and stories unusual for
seventeenth century painters. These included Democritus amid the Tombs, The Death of Socrates, Regulus in the Spiked Cask (these two are now in England), Justice Quitting the Earth and the Wheel of Fortune.
This last work, with its implication that too often foolish artists
received rewards they did not match their talent, raised a storm of
controversy. Rosa, endeavouring at conciliation, published a
description of its meaning (probably softened down not a little from
the real facts); nonetheless he was nearly arrested. 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 stolen. Rosa
indignantly denied the charges, but one must admit that the satires
deal so extensively and with such ready manipulation of classical
names, allusions and anecdotes, that one is rather at a loss to fix
upon the period of his busy career at which Rosa could possibly have
imbued his mind with such a multitude of semi-erudite details. It may
perhaps be legitimate to assume literary friends in Florence and Volterra coached
him about the topic of his satires, as compositions, remaining
nonetheless strictly and fully his own. To confute his detractors he
now wrote the last of the series, entitled Envy. Among the pictures of his last years were the admired Battlepiece and Saul and the Witch of Endor (latter perhaps final work) now in Louvre, painted in 40 days, full of longdrawn carnage, with ships burning in the offing; Pythagoras and the Fishermen; and the Oath of Catiline (Pitti Palace). 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. In his last moments he married a Florentine
named Lucrezia, who had borne him two sons, one of them surviving him,
and he died in a contrite frame of mind. He lies buried 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 highly popular and influential series of small prints of soldiers, and a number of larger and very ambitious subjects. Rosa's
most lasting influence was on the later development of romantic and
picturesque traditions within painting. As Wittkower states, it is his
landscapes, not his grand historical or religious dramas, that Rosa
truly expresses his innovative abilities most graphically. Rosa himself
may have dismissed them as frivolous cappricci 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 Lorraine and Paul Brill,
and created brooding, melancholic fantasies, awash in ruins and
brigands. By the eighteenth century, the contrasts between Rosa and
artists such as Claude was much remarked upon. A 1748 poem by James
Thompson, The Indolent Castle, illustrated this: Whate'er Lorraine light touched with softening hue/ Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew. He influenced Gaspar Dughet's landscape style. A recent exhibit of Turner's
work, at the Prado museum in Madrid, notes the influence Rosa had on
Turner, in his landscapes. In fact it is reported that Turner
consciously wanted to be associated with the work of Rosa. Another exhibition of Rosa's work, held at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2010, emphasised the strangeness of Rosa's painting and themes, showing his enthusiasm for 'bandits, wilderness and magic'. 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. 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, 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 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. |