"Sincere, free, painter corrector": Salvator Rosa as outsider
Helen Langdon
This paper will look at Salvator Rosa's creation of a new kind of self fashioning for the 17c painter. Rosa began his career as court painter to the Medici in Florence, but, uneasy with the demands of court patronage, he created a new role for the artist as outsider, satirist, privileged intellectual in a world of dissimulation and policy; his role models in this period were Juvenal, the Cynic philosophers Diogenes and Crates, the choleric atomist Democritus. In Rome, free of the demands of the court, Rosa embellished his image as misanthrope and determined individualist. But he also became more interested in experimental philosophers, and the second half of the paper will suggest that in this Roman period Rosa was less concerned with a harsh criticism of society, and more attracted by the idea of natural magic: he was drawn to those pre-socratic philosophers, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Archyta Tarentina, who had fearlessly sought out the secrets of nature. In paintings of these subjects Rosa explored ideas of liberty and inspired genius and created a new ideal of the artists life.
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