The Genius of Salvator Rosa

Abstract

One of Salvator Rosa's most striking works is the etching Jason and the Dragon (Fig. 1)1 in which he transforms the tame description of the event in the basic source, Ovid's Metamorphoses (7. 149–155), into an image of extraordinary drama and violence.2 As such Rosa's Jason is an excellent representative of that aspect of the artist's genius that was best loved by the romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were fascinated by the savage grandeur, horror, and sublimity that they saw in his works.8 Uvedale Price, for example, in his Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful expresses a typical romantic attitude toward Rosa, and also unintentionally provides a description which fits the Jason quite closely. In comparing a landscape by Claude to a Rosa landscape with banditti he says “… there is a sublimity in this scene of rocks and mountains, savage and desolate as they are, that is very striking: the whole, as you say, is a perfect contrast to the Claude; … every thing seems formed … to alarm and terrify the imagination: … they are caves of death, the haunts of wild beasts….” Even more interesting for the present study of the genius of Rosa is the fact that Price opens his discussion by making his dilettante protagonist, Mr. Howard, say, “Let me show you … this landscape, with banditti, by Salvator Rosa, a painter of a wild original genius, and of whom I am a most enthusiastic admirer.” Elsewhere Price speaks of “the savage grandeur of that sublime though eccentric genius.” In still another place he says, “Mola … is as remarkable for many of those … qualities which distinguish S. Rosa, though he has not the boldness and animation of that original genius…. Salvator has a savage grandeur often in the highest degree sublime.”4