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" [1]
proto-Romantic. His life and writings were equally colorful.
Early Biography
He was born in Arenella, in the outskirts of Naples: 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, thus secretly worked with his
maternal uncle Paolo Greco to learn about painting, and soon transferred himself to his own brother-in-law Francesco Francanzano, a pupil of Ribera, and afterwards
to either Aniello Falcone[2], contemporary with Domenico Gargiulo[3], or Ribera himself. Some sources claim he spent time living with roving
bandits[4]. 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.
Life
He continued apprenticeship with Falcone, aiding 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 for from 1634-6.
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. This class of paintings peculiarly suited him.
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 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, 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 some place of 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 tell 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).
Finally he returned to stay in Rome in 1649. Here he painted some important subjects, showing the uncommon bent of his mind as
it passed from landscape into history Democritus amid Tombs, 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 satirical work
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); none the less he was nearly arrested. It was about this time that Rosa wrote his satire named
Babylon, under which name Rome was of course indicated.
A landscape by Salvator Rosa.
Much enmity still brooded there against him. An allegation arose that his published satires were not his own, but filched.
Rosa indignantly denied the charges, although it is true that the satires ~deal so extensively and with such ready manipulation
in 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 none the less 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 the Chiesa degli Angeli, 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.
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
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. The contrasts between the artists of his day is illustrated by the lines of
Poetry written in 1748: Whate'er Lorraine light touched with softening hue/ Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew[5]. 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[6]. This tempestuous spirit became the
darling of British Romantics.
Satires
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 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.
A number of biographies and fictionalizations of the life of Rosa exist:
- Domenico Passeri speaks of him in Vite de Pittori
- Salvini, Satire e Vita di Salvator Rosa
- Baldinucci
- Bernardo de' Dominici, Vita di Rosa (1742, Naples)
- In England, Lady Morgan in A Life, and Albert Cotton in A Company of Death' romanticized his life.
- Rosa is also the fictional hero of the novella Signor Formica, 1819, also known simply as Salvator Rosa, by
E.T.A. Hoffmann.
- Salvatore Rosa is a 19th century Italian Opera by A. Carlos Gomes, with libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, after the novel Masaniello by Eugene
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.
References
References
- ^ Wittkower, p. 325
- ^ Wittkower, p. 325
- ^ Hobbes J.R. p. 241
- ^ "Salvatore Rosa". Catholic Encyclopedia. (1913). New York: Robert Appleton Company.
- ^ Lines from The Indolent Castle, James Thompson, 1748 quoted by Helen
Langdon in Burlington Magazine 115(84):p779 (1973)
- ^ Salvator Rosa quoted in Getty Museum biography
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External links
Salvator ROSA The Blog created by one of his descendant.http://rosasalvator.over-blog.com/
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