Salvator Rosa

Paint and Performance

Helen Langdon

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789145748
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

A compelling biography of the Renaissance painter, known equally for his magnetic personality and unusual subject matter: witchcraft and the sublime. Painter, poet, and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the preeminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new biography traces Rosa's strategies of self-promotion and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject matter—witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic, and dark violence—and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime. Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.

ONE

Salvatoriello Goes to Rome

alvator Rosa’, wrote Giovanni Battista Passeri, his friend and biographer, ‘was born in the city of Naples, the garden of the world.’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 Imperato’s Dell’ 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 – maids, servants, fishermen, bandits – 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 city’s 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 city’s stark differences, the parallel worlds of the idyllic and the dark and brutal, are woven together throughout Rosa’s 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 Rosa’s birth the household moved to Naples, where, by 1619, Vito Antonio had built a home for them near the convent of Gesù e Maria. However, a ruinously expensive illness and his death in 1621 left the family in desperate poverty. Rosa’s mother remarried in 1625 and in 1632 Rosa’s 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 Virgil’s 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 – 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 mother’s family in their workshop on the via Toledo near the Piazza della Carità.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.

Rosa’s 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 Carità, 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 ‘the miracle of his times in the world of letters’, 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, ‘creating little figures and small landscapes’. He was even reprimanded for covering the walls of a cloister.⁵

Rosa’s 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 ‘draw views of the beautiful coast of Posillipo and towards Pozzuoli, and other similar spectacles produced by nature’.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 ‘delighted all who saw them’, 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 street’s busiest piazzas. Rosa’s 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 Gesù 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. Rosa’s fame spread. The dealers were so impressed by the great Lanfranco’s esteem that they asked the young artist for more work. Rosa, ‘who never lacked shrewdness’, swiftly raised his prices.⁸ Rosa’s 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 ‘Salvator’ when he became a novice. Rosa’s biographer Filippo Baldinucci stresses that he ‘was himself both pupil and master’ – 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 1635–8 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 José 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 Falcone’s studio in 1638. In the autumn of 1638 he left for Viterbo in the entourage of Cardinal Brancaccio, and in 1639 settled in Rome.

Rosa’s spirit and wit, and his many talents, enchanted his contemporaries, and encouraged his rise in these Neapolitan studios. Francesco Fracanzano, Rosa’s brother-in-law, probably introduced him to Ribera, and the young artist, ‘with his playing of the lute and singing, obtained the favour not only of Ribera but of all his sons as well’.¹¹ Ribera was to be overwhelmingly important for Rosa. From him comes the younger artist’s fascination with horror, his expressive power and the brutal naturalism of his large-scale figure paintings. Rosa’s early closeness to the Spanish artist was long to cast its lustre around him, and, above all, he appropriated two of Ribera’s 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 ’30s. 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 Ribera’s 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 Ribera’s 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. Ribera’s 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 Laërtius (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 Porta’s Della fisionomia dell’uomo (The Physiognomy of Man; 1586) includes descriptions of ancient philosophers, sometimes based on literary sources, sometimes on ancient sculptures. Della Porta’s brother, Vincenzo, had a celebrated ‘museo’, and Giovanni describes his bust of Plato as having a head ‘a little too great’ (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...