Salvator Rosa

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 pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account 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.

'Helen Langdon takes on the intriguing figure of Salvator Rosa in this definitive account of the multi-talented 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

'Helen 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 defence of the creative autonomy of the artist, Salvator Rosa strikes us as astoundingly modern. Helen 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 of the National Gallery, London