_Salvator Rosa_ (Neapolitan: 1615-1673).
"What is most to be admired in the works of Salvator Rosa,"
says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is the perfect correspondence
which he observed between the subjects which he chose and his
manner of treating them. Everything is of a piece: his rocks,
trees, sky, even to his handling, have the same wild and rude
character which animates his figures." There is perhaps no
painter whose life is more accurately reflected in his work
than Salvator. Conspicuous in this picture are a withered tree
on the right and a withered tree on the left: they are typical
of the painter's blasted life, and "indignant, desolate,
and degraded art." He was born near Naples, the son of an
architect and land-surveyor. In early youth he forsook his
father's business and began secretly to learn painting. At
seventeen his father died, and Salvator, being one of a large
and poor family, was thrown on his own resources. He "cast
himself carelessly on the current of life. No rectitude of
ledger-lines stood in his way; no tender precision of household
customs; no calm successions of rural labour. But past his
half-starved lips rolled profusion of pitiless wealth; before
him glared and swept the troops of shameless pleasure. Above
him muttered Vesuvius; beneath his feet shook the Solfatara. In
heart disdainful, in temper adventurous; conscious of power,
impatient of labour, and yet more of the pride of the patrons
of his youth, he fled to the Calabrian hills, seeking, not
knowledge, but freedom. If he was to be surrounded by cruelty
and deceit, let them at least be those of brave men or savage
beasts, not of the timorous and the contemptible. Better the
wrath of the robber than enmity of the priest; and the cunning
of the wolf than of the hypocrite." It was in this frame of
mind that he sought the solitudes of the hills: "How I hate
the sight of every spot that is inhabited," he says in one of
his letters. It was thus that he formed the taste for the wild
nature which distinguishes his landscapes. It is said indeed
that he once herded for a time with a band of brigands in the
Abruzzi. "Yet even among such scenes as these Salvator might
have been calmed and exalted had he been, indeed, capable of
exaltation. But he was not of high temper enough to perceive
beauty. He had not the sacred sense--the sense of colour; all
the loveliest hues of the Calabrian air were invisible to him;
the sorrowful desolation of the Calabrian villages unfelt. He
saw only what was gross and terrible,--the jagged peak, the
splintered tree, the flowerless bank of grass, and wandering
weed, prickly and pale. His temper confirmed itself in evil,
and became more and more fierce and morose; though not, I
believe, cruel, ungenerous, or lascivious. I should not suspect
Salvator of wantonly inflicting pain. His constantly painting
it does not prove he delighted in it; he felt the horror of it,
and in that horror, fascination. Also, he desired fame, and saw
that here was an untried field rich enough in morbid excitement
to catch the humour of his indolent patrons. But the gloom
gained upon him, and grasped him. He could jest, indeed, as men
jest in prison-yards (he became afterwards a renowned mimic in
Florence); his satires are full of good mocking, but his own
doom to sadness is never repealed." It is characteristic of
the man that the picture on the reputation of which he went
up from Naples to Rome was "Tityus torn by the Vulture." At
Rome, besides his fame as a painter, he made his mark as a
musician, poet, and improvisatore. He cut a brave figure in
the Carnival, and his satires were bold and biting. Partly on
this account he afterwards found it well to leave Rome for
Florence, where he formed one of the company of "I Percossi"
(the stricken)--of jovial wits and artists--who enjoyed the
hospitalities of Cardinal Carlo Giovanni de' Medici. But in
spite of his merry-making he knew (as he says in a cantata)
"no truce from care, no pause from woe." He ultimately died
of the dropsy, having shortly before his death married the
Florentine Lucrezia, who had borne him two sons. "Of all men
whose work I have ever studied," says Mr. Ruskin, in summing
up his career as typical of the lives which cannot conquer
evil but remain at war with, or in captivity to it, "he gives
me most distinctly the idea of a lost spirit. Michelet calls
him, 'Ce damné Salvator,' perhaps in a sense merely harsh and
violent; the epithet to me seems true in a more literal, more
merciful sense,--'That condemned Salvator.' I see in him,
notwithstanding all his baseness, the last traces of spiritual
life in the art of Europe.... All succeeding men ... were men
of the world; they are never in earnest and they are never
appalled. But Salvator was capable of pensiveness, of faith,
and of fear. The misery of the earth is a marvel to him; he
cannot leave off gazing at it. The religion of the earth is a
horror to him. He gnashes his teeth at it, rages at it, mocks
and gibes at it. He would have acknowledged religion had he
seen any that was true.... Helpless Salvator! A little early
sympathy, a word of true guidance, perhaps, had saved him.
What says he of himself? 'Despiser of wealth and of death.'
Two grand scorns: but, oh, condemned Salvator! the question
is not for man what he can scorn, but what he can love." At
the "opposite poles of art are Fra Angelico and Salvator Rosa;
of whom the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often,
prayed constantly, and never harboured an impure thought. His
pictures are simply so many pieces of jewellery, the colour of
the draperies being perfectly pure, as various as those of a
painted window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon
a gold ground. Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist,
a man who spent his life in masquing and revelry. But his
pictures are full of horror, and their colour is for the most
part gloomy grey. Truly it would seem as if art had so much
eternity in it that it must take its dye from the close rather
than the course of life; 'in such laughter the heart of man is
sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness'" (_Modern
Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. See also vol. i. pt. i. sec.
ii. ch. ii. § 9; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 21; vol. v. pt.
ix. ch. viii. § 14. _Stones of Venice_, vol. ii. ch. v. § 31.
For a full record of fact and romance about this painter, see
Lady Morgan's interesting _Life and Times of Salvator Rosa_;
London, 1855).
An illustration of Æsop's fable of the dishonest woodman who, hearing
of the reward which an honest fellow-labourer had obtained from Mercury
for not claiming either the gold or silver axe which the god first
offered, threw his axe also into the water, hoping for like good
fortune. Mercury--here seen standing in the stream--showed him a golden
axe. He claimed it, and the god having rebuked him for his impudence,
left him to lose his axe and repent of his folly. The painting of the
picture is conspicuous for that want of sense for colour, noted above
as fatally characteristic of Salvator:--
There is on the left-hand side something without doubt intended
for a rocky mountain, in the middle distance, near enough
for all its fissures and crags to be distinctly visible, or,
rather, for a great many awkward scratches of the brush over it
to be visible, which, though not particularly representative
either of one thing or another, are without doubt intended to
be symbolical of rocks. Now no mountain in full light, and near
enough for its details of crags to be seen, is without great
variety of delicate colour. Salvator has painted it throughout
without one instant of variation; but this, I suppose, is
simplicity and generalisation;--let it pass: but what is the
colour? _Pure sky blue_, without one grain of grey, or any
modifying hue whatsoever; the same brush which had just given
the bluest parts of the sky has been more loaded at the same
part of the pallet, and the whole mountain thrown in with
unmitigated ultramarine. Now, mountains can only become pure
blue when there is so much air between them that they become
mere flat dark shades, every detail being totally lost:
they become blue when they become air, and not till then.
Consequently this part of Salvator's painting, being of hills
perfectly clear and near, with all their details visible, is,
as far as colour is concerned, broad, bold falsehood, the
direct assertion of direct impossibility.
In connection with Salvator's want of sense for colour one should
take his insensitiveness to other beauty. For instance, his choice
of withered trees, which are here on both sides of us, "is precisely
the sign of his preferring ugliness to beauty, decrepitude and
disorganisation to life and youth" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii.
sec. ii. ch. ii. § 4; vol. v. pt. vi. ch. viii. § 7).