Battle

By the middle of the 1600s, Roman collectors were buying scenes of combat that showed no particular battle, hung for the spectacle of cavalry, smoke and trumpets. Salvator Rosa had learned the genre young in Naples, in the circle of the painter Aniello Falcone, and this canvas is built the way he usually built them, around one sharp point of drama. Here it is a white horse going down in the foreground with its wounded rider, while a trumpeter sounds the advance and armoured horsemen press in under columns of smoke. The picture reached the Borghese in 1787 from the sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, one of eight works he handed over in return for a monthly annuity of 50 scudi. It was listed as a work by Jacques Courtois, a French specialist in such scenes known in Rome as il Borgognone, until the historian Adolfo Venturi gave it to Rosa in 1893.