24 Facts About Salvator Rosa

Salvator Rosa is best known today as an Italian Baroque painter, whose romanticized landscapes and history paintings, often set in dark and untamed nature, exerted considerable influence from the 17th century into the early 19th century.

Salvator Rosa 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.

Salvator Rosa rarely painted the common religious subjects, unless they allowed a treatment dominated by the landscape element.

Salvator Rosa produced battle scenes, allegories, scenes of witchcraft, and many self portraits.

Salvator Rosa had a great influence on Romanticism, becoming a cult-like figure in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and myths and legends grew around his life, to the point that his real life was scarcely distinguished from the bandits and outsiders that roamed the wild and thundery landscapes he painted.

Salvator Rosa's mother was Giulia Greca Rosa, a member of one of the Greek families of Sicily.

Yet Salvator Rosa showed a preference for the arts and secretly worked with his maternal uncle Paolo Greco to learn about painting.

Salvator Rosa soon transferred himself to the tutelage of his brother-in-law Francesco Fracanzano, a pupil of Ribera, and afterward to either Aniello Falcone, a contemporary of Domenico Gargiulo, or to Ribera.

At the age of seventeen, his father died; his mother was destitute with at least five children and Salvator Rosa found himself without financial support and the head of a household looking to him for support.

Salvator Rosa continued apprenticeship with Falcone, helping him complete his battlepiece canvases.

Salvator 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.

An inventory of Salvator 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.

Salvator Rosa was well acquainted with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and was housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting, and War.

Salvator Rosa, endeavouring at conciliation, published a text in which he provided anodyne explanations for the painting's imagery; nonetheless he was nearly arrested.

An allegation arose that his published satires were not his own, but Salvator Rosa vehemently denied the charges.

Salvator Rosa's tomb is in Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, where a portrait of him has been set up.

Salvator Rosa 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.

Eighteenth-century artists influenced by Salvator Rosa include Alessandro Magnasco, Andrea Locatelli, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Marco Ricci.

Salvator Rosa himself dismissed his early landscapes as frivolous capricci in comparison to his history paintings and later work, but the academically conventional history canvases often restrained his rebellious streak.

Salvator Rosa generally avoided the idyllic and pastoral calm country-sides of Claude Lorrain and Paul Bril in his landscapes, and created brooding, melancholic fantasies, awash in ruins and brigands.

Salvator Rosa refused to paint on commission or to agree on a price beforehand, and he chose his own subjects.

Since the 1970s, Salvator Rosa's work has received renewed attention from scholars.

Salvator 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.

Envy represents Salvator 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.