Marine Landscape with Towers

Salvator Rosa spent the 1640s in Florence, and this picture was not painted for the court. It went to Giovan Battista Ricciardi, a writer and philosopher who was his closest friend in the city and belonged with him to the Accademia dei Percossi, the circle that met in Rosa's own house. The canvas is dated to about 1645 to 1648, and it has a companion made for the same man, a landscape with a broken bridge. Ships lie moored in a shallow inlet with their rigging and their crews set down in detail, and on the right a ruined tower is joined by a causeway to a round classical building with fluted columns. The people along the shore are tiny. The painting stayed with Ricciardi's heirs until the family died out, passed to an Arezzo painter called Felice Acciai, and was sold in 1820 to Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany.