page_title: Salvator Rosa
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Salvator Rosa / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Self-portrait Salvator Rosa (Italian, Arenella (Naples) 1615–1673 Rome) Date: ca. 1647 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 39 x 31 1/4 in. (99.1 x 79.4 cm) Classification: Paintings Credit Line: Bequest of Mary L. Harrison, 1921 Accession Number: 21.105
context_page_description: Salvator Rosa was an Italian Baroque painter, poet, and printmaker, who was active in Naples, Rome, and Florence. As a painter, he has been described as "unorthodox and extravagant" as well as being a "perpetual rebel" and a proto-Romantic.
context_section_description: 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 picturesque traditions within painting. Eighteenth-century artists influenced by Rosa include Alessandro Magnasco, Andrea Locatelli, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Marco Ricci. As Wittkower states, it is in 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 capricci 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 Lorrain and Paul Bril, 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 Castle of Indolence", illustrated this: "Whate'er Lorraine light touched with softening hue/ Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew".
  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." This tempestuous spirit became the darling of British Romantics such as Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and Alexander Runciman. A recent exhibit of Turner's work, at the Prado museum in Madrid, notes the influence Rosa had on Turner, in his landscapes. An 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". 
  Rosa's reputation and influence waned in the nineteenth century; when his Monks Fishing was displayed in Dulwich in 1843 it was criticized by John Ruskin as telling "unmitigated falsehoods" and containing "laws of nature set at open defiance". Since the 1960s, Rosa's work has received renewed attention from scholars.
caption: Self-portrait, c. 1647
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