It happened one day that Salvator Rosa, in his youth, on his way to
mass, brought with him by mistake, his bundle of burned sticks, with
which he used to draw, instead of his mother's brazen clasped missal;
and in passing along the magnificent cloisters of the great church of
the Certosa at Naples, sacred alike to religion and the arts, he applied
them between the interstices of its Doric columns to the only unoccupied
space on the pictured walls. History has not detailed what was the
subject which occupied his attention on this occasion, but he was
working away with all the ardor which his enthusiastic genius inspired,
when unfortunately the Prior, issuing with his train from the choir,
caught the hapless painter in the very act of scrawling on those sacred
walls which required all the influence of the greatest masters to get
leave to ornament. The sacrilegious temerity of the boy artist, called
for instant and exemplary punishment. Unluckily too, for the little
offender, this happened in Lent, the season in which the rules of the
rigid Chartreuse oblige the prior and procurator to flagellate all the
frati, or lay brothers of the convent. They were, therefore, armed for
their wonted pious discipline, when the miserable Salvatoriello fell in
their way; whether he was honored by the consecrated hand of the prior,
or writhed under the scourge of the procurator, does not appear; but
that he was chastised with great severity more than proportioned to his
crime, is attested by one of the most scrupulous of his biographers,
Pascoli, who, though he dwells lightly on the fact, as he does on others
of more importance, confesses that he suffered severely from the monks'
flagellation.