Salvator Rosa

Salvator Rosa built a legend around himself as much as a body of work. Born near Naples in 1615, he painted wild, broken landscapes of crags, blasted trees, and lonely soldiers or bandits, scenery that felt dangerous at a time when most landscape aimed to soothe. He liked it that way.

He was also a poet, a satirist, and an actor who performed his own biting comic characters, and he cultivated the pose of the free artist who painted what he pleased rather than what patrons ordered. In Rome and Florence he gathered a circle that half-feared his sharp tongue.

His scenes of witches and his savage wildernesses put him a little outside the polished Baroque of his day, and later, when Romantic taste swung toward the sublime and the untamed, admirers rediscovered him as a kindred spirit. He died in Rome in 1673, and on his deathbed he finally married the Florentine woman he had lived with for years and by whom he already had children.