Renaissance Lives #: Salvator Rosa

- Blurb -

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