1811.70
Rocky Landscape
Artist
Salvator Rosa
(Arenella (Naples), Italy, 1615 - 1673, Rome, Italy)
Title
Rocky Landscape
Creation Date
1650-1659
Century
17th century
Dimensions
13 in. x 17 1/2 in. (33.02 cm. x 44.45 cm.)
Object Type
drawing
Creation Place
Europe, Italy
Medium and Support
pen and brown ink, brown wash, over traces of black chalk on paper
Credit Line
Bequest of the Honorable James Bowdoin III
Copyright
Public Domain
Accession Number
1811.70
The desolate mountain landscape in Salvator Rosa’s fantastical drawing makes the human presence appear ephemeral. Rosa contrasts a jagged rock formation in the foreground with diminutive figures further back. They are reduced to mere shadows, dark phantoms amidst the brightly lit boulders and hills. Rosa was known to be confrontational. His biographers described him as a brilliant mind with a volatile temperament. He was one of Italy’s most widely read satirical poets as well as a sought-after painter who at one time abandoned a position at the Florentine court in order to achieve fame in Rome as a history painter. This drawing has been identified as the largest sheet within a group of imagined landscapes from the mid-seventeenth century. They relate to a series of dark paintings with forbidding rock formations that are antagonistic to the then dominant classical tradition represented by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.
