LITMIR.BIZ

      "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).

      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

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