page_title: Salvator Rosa
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Salvator Rosa / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Self-portrait, Salvator Rosa, oil on canvas, circa 1645. Accession number 987.3.7
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: 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 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 his first and one of his few altarpieces, the 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 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 his own portrait, now in the National Gallery, London.
  A passage in one of his satires suggests that he sympathized 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. 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, Regulus in the Spiked Cask (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.
  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 seri
caption: Self-portrait, c. 1645 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg)
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