Torture of Prometheus

For much of its life in this palace the canvas went under the wrong name. Inventories from 1750 into the early 1800s call the man on the rock Tityus, a giant punished in the underworld by vultures tearing at his liver. His story is close to that of Prometheus, chained to a crag in the Caucasus while an eagle fed on him every day, his punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity. What tells them apart is a small detail at the lower right, a burning torch, the fire Prometheus stole. The first owner on record had it right. The inventory drawn up at the death of the collector Carlo De' Rossi in 1683 describes Prometheus chained to a rock, torn open by an eagle or a vulture, with a lit torch. The painter's name wavered too. A family list of 1784 calls it an original by an unknown hand, and one of around 1838 calls it school of Salvator Rosa. The museum now gives it to Rosa himself, between 1645 and 1650, although an older catalogue placed it in his early years in Naples, when he was borrowing details from Ribera's tormented giants.