ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Helen Langdon is an art historian with a special interest in the Italian Baroque. She is the author of Claude Lorrain and Caravaggio: A Life and is based in London.

REVIEWS

"Langdon takes on the intriguing figure of Salvator Rosa in this definitive account of the multitalented—but still elusive—artist (painter and etcher), writer, and actor. She is very much at home in the complex world of artistic debate in seventeenth-century Rome and deeply sympathetic to this difficult and ultimately disappointed ‘genius,' as he described himself, who aspired to be a philosopher-painter and satirist."

— Christopher Brown, former director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

"Langdon’s engrossing presentation of the eccentric, conceited, and phenomenally talented Salvator Rosa restores one of Baroque Italy’s most illustrious artists to his rightful place among the seventeenth century’s absolute protagonists. Rosa’s phantasmagoric landscapes, home to strange animals, Etruscan priests, and weird witches, were once a must for every ambitious collector, but his most towering work of art, as Langdon suggests, may have been his own remarkable life."

— Ingrid Rowland, professor, University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway

"In his passionate defense of the creative autonomy of the artist, Salvator Rosa strikes us as astoundingly modern. Langdon’s superb biography, born of more than half a century of reflection on Rosa, presents the artist in all his brilliance and wit, his vaulting ambition, his potent originality as a painter, and his infuriating complexity as a person."

— Gabriele Finaldi, director, National Gallery, London

"London-based art historian Langdon has been studying baroque painter Salvator Rosa (1615–73) for almost fifty years and yet maintains a critical distance from her subject, for whom at times she implies a soupçon of distaste. She intends her well-illustrated introduction to the painter, etcher, and poet—a reluctant outsider in Rome, disgruntled and boastful, a thorn in the side of Bernini, and an aspirant to intellectual status along the lines of Poussin—to appeal to an audience that includes beginners. At the same time, because of her deep and thorough engagement with the subject, scholars will not want to ignore this summary with its glinting insights. . . . Recommended."

— Choice

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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