ONE
Salvatoriello Goes to Rome
alvator Rosaâ, wrote Giovanni Battista Passeri, his friend and biographer, âwas born in the city of Naples, the garden of the world.â
1 An ancient Greek city, Naples had long been renowned as an earthly paradise, its natural beauties enhanced by the scattered ruins of classical antiquity. In the seventeenth century this Arcadian setting framed a newly magnificent cosmopolitan city, the second largest in Europe. It was the Spanish capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, reigned over by an absent monarch, Philip
IV, and governed by a succession of Spanish viceroys, the splendour of whose court was renowned. The city boasted a rich literary, artistic and scientific life. Caravaggio had introduced a dramatic naturalism and chiaroscuro that had transformed its painting, while the most celebrated Italian poet of the age, Giambattista Marino, had in 1623 returned in triumph from Paris to his native Naples, bringing with him a passion for all that was new and wondrous, and a fascination with an aesthetic of horror. Naples stood in the forefront of the new empirical science then challenging deeply rooted Aristotelian traditions. The natural philosopher, dramatist and author of
Magia naturalis (1558) Giambattista della Porta was a resident of Naples and admired throughout Europe. The apothecary
Ferrante Imperatoâs Dellâ Historia Naturale museum, with its display of wonders and curiosities, was a famed attraction in the city. Dialect poets, above all Giulio Cesare Cortese and Giambattista Basile, in an astonishing and unusual corpus of dialect literature, were creating a new sense of identity for the city, and giving, for the first time, a voice to the vivid street types â maids, servants, fishermen, bandits â of the boisterous Neapolitan world. But beneath all this magnificence and vitality lurked another, darker reality. Vesuvius loomed over the magical seas and skies, symbolically evoking the cityâs long association with natural disaster and rebellion, and with social tensions and banditry. In 1631 the volcano, which had been silent for five centuries, burst into terrifying life, a prelude to an overwhelmingly harsh decade. In these years the demands of the viceroys for men, money and arms to serve the political interests of Spain caused grave economic crises and extreme oppression. Naples became the stage for a tumultuous civic life: sumptuous court spectacles contrasted with uprising and revolts, scenes of extreme cruelty were common and the chains of men pressed into service created intense anger. The cityâs stark differences, the parallel worlds of the idyllic and the dark and brutal, are woven together throughout Rosaâs art.
Rosa was born in Arenella, a small village set high above the bay of Naples, on 21 July 1615.2 His father was Vito Antonio de Rosa, a land surveyor and master builder, and his mother Giulia Greco, daughter of Vito Greco, whose family included several artists and a lute maker. Her father and her brother, Domenico Antonio Greco, were both undistinguished painters, who probably made cheap devotional images. Soon after Rosaâs birth the household moved to Naples, where, by 1619, Vito Antonio had built a home for them near the convent of GesĂč e Maria. However, a ruinously expensive illness and his death in 1621 left the family in desperate poverty. Rosaâs mother remarried in 1625 and in 1632 Rosaâs grandfather, Vito Greco, was named legal guardian of her three children, Giuseppe, Salvator and Giovanna.
The Rosa brothers were fortunate in being placed in a school for poor children run by the Piarist order and received an education unexpectedly rich with promise. The Piarist schools had been established in Rome by the priest St Giuseppe Calasanzio, the founder of this religious teaching order, and a man who was passionately concerned to bring free education to impoverished children. He opened schools in the most deprived areas of Naples, driving out the cardplayers and vagabonds and replacing, he boasted, six hundred prostitutes with six hundred schoolboys.
Rosa (now aged eleven) and his brother, Giuseppe, attended a school near their house and somehow, in spite of the harsh and sometimes chaotic classrooms (in one school two low rooms contained one hundred boys), from very early on they stood out as exceptional students. They caught the attention of Calasanzio himself, and he was to continue to take an interest in their careers. Calasanzio was a true Catholic Reformation saint, harshly ascetic, and a rigid disciplinarian, but he was a courageous supporter of the ideal of free education for all classes and, perhaps most surprisingly, the Piarists were to be unusually open to the new science and sympathetic to Galileo. Rosa attended classes in grammar, where he would have studied Cicero and Virgilâs Aeneid, and then advanced to rhetoric and logic, based on the works of Seneca and Martial, and so acquired the rudiments of a classical education that was to serve him well in later years. The brothers entered the novitiate as trainee priests â Giuseppe in 1629, when he took the name of Domenico di San Tommaso Aquino, and Salvator in 1630, with the name of Salvator di San Pietro. The following year, however, Rosa abandoned the novitiate and went to live with his motherâs family in their workshop on the via Toledo near the Piazza della CaritĂ .3 He was already attracted to painting, and when his sister, Giovanna, married the young artist Francesco Fracanzano in 1632, Rosa, a witness at the wedding, signed himself as a painter with a studio in the neighbourhood of the church of Spirito Santo.4 Rosa had also been studying painting with his uncle, Domenico Antonio Greco; now his brother-in-law, Fracanzano encouraged him to copy his paintings in oil.
Rosaâs situation in these early years was entirely typical for a young Neapolitan artist. Artistic communities were close-knit, their families interlinked and painters, sculptors, carvers and gilders lived near one another. The Piazza della CaritĂ , and the adjoining neighbourhood of Spirito Santo, teemed with artists. And yet, from this first moment, Rosa seemed to be touched by something exceptional. His early biographers, perhaps encouraged by Rosa himself, weave around him all the biographical topoi long associated with the discovery of artistic talent. Rosa, who was quick to reveal his many gifts and spirited charm, was beset by not only servile poverty but obstacles of every kind. Impatient with books, he firmly halted his school studies at grammar and rhetoric and declared that he wished to be an artist. His family objected. They acknowledged his unusual gifts, but encouraged him to study architecture, music and poetry instead, and dreamed that he might become âthe miracle of his times in the world of lettersâ, or perhaps a lawyer, with the power to restore the family fortunes. But Rosa began to draw, so exuberantly that there was no wall in his home, or anywhere else, that he did not cover with charcoal drawings, âcreating little figures and small landscapesâ. He was even reprimanded for covering the walls of a cloister.5
Rosaâs first paintings were small sketches of the coastline around Naples. The art historian Bernado De Dominici creates a charming picture of these very early years, recalling how, when Rosa was still almost a boy, he and a sixteen-year-old Marzio Masturzo (today known only as a minor battle painter) enjoyed taking a boat out to âdraw views of the beautiful coast of Posillipo and towards Pozzuoli, and other similar spectacles produced by natureâ.6 Rosa, unusually, made landscape sketches in oil on paper and then graduated to small canvases. These were novel works, whose freshness, spontaneity and graceful figures âdelighted all who saw themâ, and Rosa was quick to work out a highly successful commercial strategy.7 He sold his works cheaply to the second-hand dealers whose shops were clustered around the via Toledo and, to get the best publicity possible, concentrated on those in the streetâs busiest piazzas. Rosaâs efforts were crowned with unexpected success, for his small landscapes, which were exhibited anonymously, caught the eye of the celebrated painter Giovanni Lanfranco, who was in Naples in 1634 to work on the frescoes in the church of GesĂč Nuovo. Lanfranco so liked these works that he paid a dealer over the asking price, and others he bought and gave to friends as gifts. One day, as the artist passed the shop of the dealer Pietro di Martino in his carriage, he saw hanging outside a Rosa, Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, which he bought immediately and took back with him to Rome. Rosaâs fame spread. The dealers were so impressed by the great Lanfrancoâs esteem that they asked the young artist for more work. Rosa, âwho never lacked shrewdnessâ, swiftly raised his prices.8 Rosaâs precocious urgency, and the chance discovery of his youthful talent by a well-known artist, are common motifs in artistic biography. Rosa already had a strong sense of self, and the combination of a quick commercial awareness and an ability to attract the glamour of artistic myth remain characteristic of the artist. It is striking that he retained the name âSalvatorâ when he became a novice. Rosaâs biographer Filippo Baldinucci stresses that he âwas himself both pupil and masterâ â and would go on to foster the image of Rosa as the independent and original artist.9
The chronology of how Rosa spent the years circa 1635â8 is unclear, and the early sources are conflicting. It seems likely that at the start of the 1630s, by now in his early twenties, Rosa worked first in the studio of JosĂ© de Ribera and then that of Aniello Falcone.10 In 1635 he went to Rome and over the next two years shuttled back and forth between there and Naples. He probably returned to Naples in 1637, and spent a second period in Falconeâs studio in 1638. In the autumn of 1638 he left for Viterbo in the entourage of Cardinal Brancaccio, and in 1639 settled in Rome.
Rosaâs spirit and wit, and his many talents, enchanted his contemporaries, and encouraged his rise in these Neapolitan studios. Francesco Fracanzano, Rosaâs brother-in-law, probably introduced him to Ribera, and the young artist, âwith his playing of the lute and singing, obtained the favour not only of Ribera but of all his sons as wellâ.11 Ribera was to be overwhelmingly important for Rosa. From him comes the younger artistâs fascination with horror, his expressive power and the brutal naturalism of his large-scale figure paintings. Rosaâs early closeness to the Spanish artist was long to cast its lustre around him, and, above all, he appropriated two of Riberaâs most celebrated subjects to establish his own reputation in Rome and in Florence. First came the horrific suffering of the furias, depicted in vast canvases that show mighty figures in complex poses, subjects which, after a period of silence in the late sixteenth century, had been reborn in the 1620s and â30s. Ribera painted a superlative and original series on the theme, the learning and ambition of which challenged the famous prototypes by Titian and Rubens.12 The subject offered artists the opportunity to display their skill in portraying extreme emotion and complicated postures, and Rosa would long remember Riberaâs Tityus (illus. 2), where he foregrounded the figure of the Greek giant, thrusting the screaming face, open palms and angular limbs towards the spectator, so heightening the overwhelming and disturbing horror of the thread of intestine being pulled out from his stomach by an eagle. Next come the half-length philosophers and hermit saints, the two most popular genres issuing from Riberaâs studio; his assistants were commissioned to paint veritable squadrons of these types. The ancient philosophers, heirs to a genre established in the Renaissance for the decoration of libraries, are now ugly and tattered, in torn clothes tied up haphazardly by bits of string or bizarrely patched together. Riberaâs Democritus (1630; illus. 3) and Diogenes (1637) have an astonishing vitality, suggesting the dark world of the marginal and dispossessed in the alleys of Naples, or perhaps the beggar heroes of the picaresque novel. Yet these are learned works, intended to delight the erudite, and often based on the immensely popular Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by the biographer Diogenes LaĂ«rtius (3rd century AD), or the satires of the Greek poet Lucian (2nd century), both rich in amusing descriptions of the eccentric behaviour of the ancients. Giovanni Battista della Portaâs Della fisionomia dellâuomo (The Physiognomy of Man; 1586) includes descriptions of ancient philosophers, sometimes based on literary sources, sometimes on ancient sculptures. Della Portaâs brother, Vincenzo, had a celebrated âmuseoâ, and Giovanni describes his bust of Plato as having a head âa little too greatâ (a sign of a sublime intellect). Artists enjoyed the opportunity to bring to new life such expressive heads, and in the seventeenth century the philosophers live on, hovering between comedy an...