English Opinion of Claude and Rosa: Salvator Rosa

For a public which took painting largely as a form of literature, Claude was not so satisfactory as Salvator Rosa. Claude's personality was to them rather nebulous; Salvator’s vivid and stirring. It is a question whether the glamour of that romantic personality, the tales of his consorting with banditti and with revolutionaries, did not greatly help to make his reputation as artist with the English. Certainly, what was known or thought to be known of his life delightfully reinforced his pictures. He is the sort of person about whom stories cluster, as he steps out of the pages of Passeri and Baldinucci, a vigorous, impetuous, bold, and arrogant presence. ... Many are the tales which display both his wit, and his pride; like that of his cutting short the loquacious amateur who presumed to praise a painting in the master's presence: "Think what you would see there if you were Salvator Rosa!

How many English visitors besides Shaftesbury, in the early years of the century, must have picked up such scraps of studio gossip as are noted in the Plastics? - For example, Shaftesbury has named Nicolas Poussin as almost the only French artist worthy of criticism, and goes on: " Being invited back to France, and caballed against fled to Rome with detestation of his country, which made him and Salvator Rosa (as I have been assured by the old virtuosos and painters there) so good friends: the latter being a malcontent Neapolitan, dissatisfied with his countrymen as his satires show. Both these by the way were honest moral men, the latter over-soured and mortal enemy of the priests, who had nothing to take advantage of against him, besides the supposed familiarity had with his woman servant, on which account he married her." So late as 1770 Dr. Burney was able to find the artist's great-granddaughter, and obtain from her the manuscript volume of music and poetry which he used for his History of Music; and Lady Morgan, in the next century, reported members of the family as living, though uncommunicative to her. Salvator's house was long pointed out, along with those of his contemporaries and associates, Claude and the Poussins. Hazlitt lodged in it, but found it, to his disappointment, no help to the imagination.

Though Salvator's relations with "all the Men of Rank and Quality," who "courted and admired" him, were noticed by Graham, Hayley found surprising the revelations of Salvator's letters that he was a sociable being, and remarked that "he was one of the few characters who have possessed a large portion of pleasant vivacity and delightful humour, with a sublime imagination." They preferred to imagine him as a solitary figure, against a background of wilderness. So Northcote in his naive Dream depicts him, in armour and with sabre and lance, rather than pencil and palette: "He trod about in the wild scenery as if he defied the elements. I took him to be one of a banditti, till my conductor informed me it was no other than Salvator Rosa."

His fame as satirist and poet gave the more reason for viewing his paintings as literature. How much his satires in verse were read, we may question. Two Italian editions were published in England, in 1787 and '79. They seem not to have been translated, which suggests that they were not very popular, in spite of the assertion made by a writer in the European for 1792, that they are in everyone's hands. Hayley quotes from them in his note on Salvator as if they were not readily accessible. He felt, no doubt, that Salvator's endowment by the sister muses (it is hard not to use Hayley's own idiom) established him more surely as a kindred spirit, even though unrefined by Taste. Hayley's view is representative not merely of himself, but of his numerous tribe:
Untrodden paths of art SALVATOR tried,
And daring fancy was his favourite guide.
O'er his wild rocks, at her command, he throws
A savage grandeur, a sublime repose.
His bold ideas, unrefin'd by taste,
Express'd with vigour, tho' conceiv d in haste,
Before slow judgment their defects can find,
With awful pleasure fill the passive mind.
Nor could one art, with various beauty fraught,
Engross the labour of his active thought;
His pencil pausing, with satiric fire
He struck the chords of the congenial lyre.
The picture-loving botanist, James Edward Smith, does not admire the satires. He quotes the inscription on Salvator's tomb, and on the words "pictoribus sui temporis nulli secundum, poetarum omnium temporum principibus parem" comments: "Surely the praise ought rather to have been reversed, and still his poetry would have been over-rated."

Poetic enthusiasm is generally imputed to him. So Mason, in The English Garden:
SALVATOR! if where, far as eye can pierce,
Rock pil'd on rock, thy Alpine heights retire,
[Art] flung her random foliage, and disturb'd
The deep repose of the majestic scene.
This deed were impious. Ah, forgive the thought,
Thou more than Painter, more than Poet! HE,
Alone thy equal, who was "Fancy's child."
The association of his name with Shakespeare's is not infrequent, though not always so fervid. Price remarks, as a commonplace, that they are like in being self-taught. Walpole compares one of his monsters to Caliban. Shaftesbury thought that in treatment of the comic grotesque Salvator surpassed Shakespeare; Remember . . . our Shakespeare's Jack Falstaff; a character ... But overdone and spoilt both by poet and players. The painter (a Salvator Rosa and tolerable good satirist in poetry) would not hyperbole so; but moderate the hyperbole and strike the imagination far better."

Residence in Naples naturally heightened Shaftesbury's admiration of Salvator, whose works seem to have been more abundant in his native city at that time than they were later on. When Shaftesbury commends landscapes to his friend Sir John Cropley, as the most desirable pieces for his collection, he thinks especially of Salvator: "As I remember, you have, besides the copies of Poussin, a copy of Salvator Rosa also by Mr. Closterman, which you told me you could not bring to Reigate, because of its bigness. Now I could at this instance for little more than double what you paid for such poor prentice copying, procure an original piece or two of the same Salvator Rosa (a townsman of this very place) equal and even beyond those very fine originals which Mr. Closterman by help of his journeymen, took copies of, and sold to you." This is valuable testimony to the English admiration of Salvator in the first decade of the century.

Salvator's choice of subjects was generally admired. "He understood his subject as a painter, and as a man," says one critic. " His enthusiasm . . . was the child of knowledge; his ideas were rude and majestic, because he drew them from a romantic source. He was faithful to what he saw; -- he was an enthusiast to what he felt; . . . could account for, as a poet, what as a painter he could describe." (General Magazine, 1791) When in his Lectures on the English poets, Percival Stockdale wishes to praise Milton's picture of Sin and Death, he says that by comparison with it "the expression of Salvator Rosa, and of Michael Angelo, is deadened; and their colouring is eclipsed." Such an association of names would not have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds.

To the verb dash, which, thanks to Thomson, almost inevitably accompanies the name of "savage Rosa," Shaftesbury gives amusing warrant in a circumstantial story of the painting of one of those large perspectives which he owned. Having sketched out on a great canvas trees and rocks of stupendous proportions, the artist began to put in the figures:

"And being pushed on still by that vanity to make these also in great perfection . . . he designed and painted them on a forward ground, in full size, or rather larger than naturally the perspective would allow at so near a distance. He had no sooner done this than he perceived what injury he had done at the same time to his first design, and that after doing all in his power to magnify his rock, and raise the majesty and grandeur of that form . . . he had pulled it back again rendered it diminutive, which in that peculiar form and shape of horrour and dismay would prove a sort of burlesque. . . like a little elephant. But what does Salvator upon this. In an instant, ere the paint was well laid, he strikes out with a dash or two of his pencil, destroys his giants niched in his hollow cave. . . . Upon yet nearer ground places just such another figure or two at least three sizes less, by which his hyperbole once again came right, the grandeur of parts in perspective restored, and his rock majestic, terribly impending, vast, enormous; as it should be, and as he first designed it."

Such fine carelessness, if it did not raise his reputation with artists, made part of his charm for the public; for, as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy once pointed out, the mere doing things quickly is felt to be meritorious. An account of Salvator in the Weekly Miscellany makes much of this "freedom of pencil" and fire. "His genius was most irregular. Without ever consulting nature he did all from practice. . . . He was the creator of his own style of painting, which is like no other."

One of his best qualifications as hero, even better than his being a poet, or dashing, was his having been, as Northcote puts it, "one of a banditti." "A roving disposition," says the Reverend Mr. Gilpin, "seems to have added a wildness to all his thoughts. We are told, he spent the early part of his life in a troop of banditti; and that the rocky and desolate scenes, in which he was accustomed to take refuge, furnished him with those romantic ideas in landskip, of which he is so exceedingly fond. . . . His Robbers . . . are supposed also to have been taken from the life." To how many law-abiding and amiable gentlemen and ladies, like the Reverend Mr. Gilpin, who thus speaks, or Anna Seward, William Mason or Mrs. Montagu, must not the consideration that these wild scenes and personages which they beheld with pleasure, were taken from the life, have imparted an extra thrill? And for the liberty-intoxicated spirits at the close of the century, his supposed association with the rebellion of Masaniello was an even greater merit. We suspect that much of Hazlitt's affection for Salvator is due to this; he regrets that he cannot always admire the pictures, when he so loves the man. To Lady Morgan, judging by her preface, it is a dominant consideration in the writing of her romantic biography. Was it that biography, or Salvator's own satires which furnished Ruskin with his tragic conception of Salvator as a sort of fallen angel, a dark and tortured spirit holding in himself the last traces of spiritual life in the art of Europe ... the last man to whom the thought of a spiritual existence presented itself as a conceivable reality," his life passed "in horror, disdain and despair"?

Graham's account of Salvator's merits as painter, prepared before "sublimity" was in vogue, yet stresses that quality in his art which was later so labelled. "He was fam'd for his copious and florid invention, for his solid Judgment in the Ordering of his Pieces, for the gentile and uncommon Management of his Figures, and his general Knowledge in all the parts of Painting: But that which gave a more particular Stamp to his Compositions, was his inimitable Liberty of Pencil, and the noble Spirit with which he animated all his Works." "Salvator Rosa has generally chosen to represent a sort of wild and Savage Nature," say the Richardsons; "his Style is Great and Noble." The Expression in his Witch of Endor of "Horror and Witchery is in Perfection." Gray summarizes: "Excelled in savage uncouth places, very great and noble style; stories that have something of horror and cruelty." Though he was esteemed popularly as history-painter, we notice that Buckridge, in 1754, pronounces him greater in landscape. (Lives of the Most Eminent Modern Painters, 1754).

Walpole says, " His thoughts, his expression, his landscapes, his knowledge of the force of shade, and his masterly arrangement of horror and distress, have placed him in the first class of painters." Sir Joshua Reynolds, while denying him this rank, yet honours him highly: "He gives us a peculiar cast of Nature, which ... though it has nothing of that elevation and dignity which belongs to the grand style, yet has that sort of dignity which belongs to savage and uncultivated nature; but what is most to be admired in him, 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 rude and wild character which animated his figures." Jacob's Dream, one of Salvator's finest landscapes, Reynolds names as one of the examples of "the poetry, as it may be called, of the art; and they are few indeed." The story as set forth on canvas has "the same power of inspiring sentiments of grandeur and sublimity as in the language of Scripture.

Sir Robert Strange (who had some pictures by Salvator in the collection which he brought from Italy for sale in 1769) speaks of his spirited figures, and the "truth and freedom of the whole, as well as the intelligence:
Why do Salvator's daring strokes delight,
While Mieris' care and labour Tire the sight?
Thus an anonymous versifier expresses the common distinction between Italian and Dutch art. He explains in a note, "Salvator Rosa; a famous Italian painter, remarkable for the fire and spirit in all his compositions" (Polite Campanion, 1751). Rosa was primarily "the painter of force, -- force Romantically charming," (Thomas Dermody, The Harp of Erin, 1807) or such as was able "to pierce, to rouse, to terrify the soul."
How drear the scenes that Rosa chose!
Naught but the dark and dreary pine,
Or rocks immense of height sublime,
Co-aeval they with hoary Time,
The marks of Pow'r Divine.
(George Monck Berkeley, Poems)

The effect of art on the average cultivated person of the time is well seen in Arthur Young. To him Salvator appears more generally pleasing than Claude. "A rock, with the broken branches of trees hanging from its clifts: (I apprehend by Salvator) the expression very noble, and romantic wildness of the scene most excellently caught." "The famous picture of Belisarius . . . has more expression in it, than any painting I think I ever saw." "Prodigal son . . . Prodigious expression ... amazingly fine." " A landscape with rocks, wild as the winds, but fine." " Rocks and trees jumbled together in the wildness of that romantic genius, which seemed formed by nature to catch her sublimest hints; with a little group of figures dropped from a whirlwind." The tourist Sullivan describes Salvator as having an "enlarged and comprehensive genius; a lively, fertile and poetic imagination ... great freedom of pencil, and infinite fire in his compositions." Price and Knight, more skillful admirers, are even more enthusiastic, without a jot of dispraise.

Price especially admires the " noble and animated wildness of Salvator's stems and branches." Though "the savage grandeur of that sublime, though eccentric genius is less lavishly praised by him than the beauty of Claude, his "picturesque effects " serve constantly as examples, to illustrate Price's theory. "In no other master are seen such abrupt and rugged forms, such sudden deviations both in his figures and his landscapes; and the roughness and broken touches of his pencilling, admirably accord with the objects they characterize." Knight especially praises his trees. "Scenery . . . to be really sublime, should be, not only wild and broken, but rich and fertile; such as that of Salvator Rosa, whose ruined stems of gigantic trees proclaim at once the vigour of the vegetation . . . and of the tempests that have shivered and broken them." He exalts Salvator's sublimity in the Witch of Endor above Michelangelo's Sistine frescoes. "Salvator indeed scarcely ever attempts grandeur of form, in the outlines of his figures; but he seldom misses . . . grandeur of effect in the general composition of his pictures. In the wildest flights of his wild imagination, he always exhibits just and natural action and expression."

Gilpin apparently admires Salvator more than he does Claude; Salvator is easier to admire for one with literary point of view, and such Gilpin's was, more than the artist's, in spite of his own artistic performances. Salvator's figures, and his blasted trees -- the most obvious elements -- are especially commended; and the brown or " sober "tint, to which Gilpin often refers lovingly. "For the use and beauty of the withered top and curtailed trunk, we need only appeal to the works of Salvator Rosa." "The chesnut in maturity . . . is a noble tree, ... This is the tree which graces the landscapes of Salvator Rosa. . . . That it is naturally brittle . . might be one reason for Salvator's attachment to it." "The chesnut of Calabria is consecrated by adorning the foregrounds of Salvator Rosa." He criticizes unfavourably however, the expression and the realism of some of the histories, and becomes less enthusiastic over Salvator as time wears on. He has often judged falsely at first sight, he says, which implies a fault in the picture, since it should impress favourably at once, if good. An amusing bit of evidence of his waning appreciation appears in the changes made by him in a paragraph of his Essay on Prints. In 1768 Salvator is very great" in composition, draws his " nobly expressive figures in "exquisite taste," groups them "beautifully," and has a manner " wonderfully pleasing." The later edition softens these respectively to: "often happy," " expressive, 'good taste," " well," and " pleasing."

Perhaps this retrenching is due to Gilpin's discovery that artists did not altogether approve of Salvator. Northcote, for instance, follows the imaginary portrait quoted above with: "He raised no sensations in my mind which created any interest." Fuseli, who admired his landscapes, finds that in histories "his line is vulgar; his magic visions ... are, to the probable combinations of nature, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the flights of vigorous fancy." (This from the painter of The Nightmare!) His banditti are "a medley made up of starveling models, shreds and bits of armour from his lumber room, brushed into notice by a daring pencil." Barry, who admires him, speaks of his being "condemned, as frantic, by some cold spiritless artists" who have not viewed the alpine scenery which he depicts. Strutt, in 1785, notes his landscapes as "very wonderful performances! " "He had savages for his masters in painting, and he painted savage subjects," says Constable; "Salvator Rosa is a great favourite with novel writers, particularly the ladies . . . but there is a meanness in all his compositions of history which must ever exclude him from its first ranks." But he too, grants him power in landscape, though not on a level with Claude or Gaspar.

The "ladies" to whom Constable referred probably meant Lady Morgan, though he may have had Mrs. Radcliffe in mind as well. Lady Morgan gives admirably the literary view of Salvator. "The least of his landscapes were pregnant with moral interest, and calculated to awaken human sympathies. His deep and gloomy forests . . . is [sic] only given as the shelter of the formidable bandit. . . . The long line of stony pathway cut through masses of impending rock, is but the defile in which the gallant cavalier ... is overtaken by the pitiless outlaw -- or, by the rush of storms. . . . The wavworn traveller, the benighted pilgrim, the shipwrecked mariner . . . become images that engage the heart as well as the eye, and give to the inanimate character of landscape a moral action and an historical interest." Feeble as is Lady Morgan in critical acumen, she represents the public of her time, and the time before hers. Such feelings as hers made Salvator popular.

Among the admirers of Salvator, and enjoyers of "the terrible sublime," Gray and Walpole are significant examples. The few pictures on which Gray's notes are extant include a disproportionate number of what Gray took for Salvators. "Aeneas and the Sybil, sacrificing to Pluto by torch light in the wood, the assistants in a fright. ... Sigismunda, with the heart of Guiscardo before her. . . . Hannibal passing the Alps; the mountains rolling down rocks upon his army; elephants tumbling down the precipices." These paintings of "Horrour and thrilling Fears" are reflected in the one scenic picture in The Bard:
On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Rob'd in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes, the Poet stood.
Walpole's suggestion that only Salvator could paint "up to the horror" of it is not surprising. Walpole thinks of Salvator, too, as the only one to make endurable the picture of Theodore and Honoria ordered by his nephew; or fitly to illustrate Macbeth for Alderman Boydell's Gallery. He dims his tribute, to be sure, by using Salvator's name for a compliment to Bentley, and to Lady Di Beauclerk for her drawings, "in sut water," for The Mysterious Mother, which have "all Salvator's boldness in landscape."

Smollett suggests Salvator as the artist who might have represented poor Lismahago's escape from the imagined fire; and mentally repaints an unsatisfactory Carlo Maratti: "I imagine Salvator Rosa would . . . amidst the darkness of a tempest have illuminated the blasphemer with the flash of lightning by which he was destroyed; this would have thrown a dismal gleam of light upon his countenance, distorted by the horror of his situation, as well as by the effects of the fire; and rendered the whole scene dreadfully picturesque." Mrs. Piozzi is of course thrilled by Salvator: " A sight of the Santa Croce Palace, with its disgusting Job, and the man in armour so visibly horror-stricken, puts all painters but Salvator Rosa for a while out of one's head." The effect lasts over well into the nineteenth century. Shelley thought that the only things at Rome which sustained comparison with antiquity were Raphael, Guido and Salvator Rosa. Hazlitt describes one picture thus: "Rough, grotesque, wild -- Pan has struck it with his hoof -- the trees, the rocks, the foreground, are of a piece, and the figures are subservient to the landscape. The same dull sky lowers upon the scene, and the bleak air chills the crisp surface of the water."

Constantly the names of Claude and Salvator are linked; occasionally the praise of one is at the cost of the other, as when Gilpin takes Claude to task for failing to see the sublime. "Claude and Salvator received, or might have received, their ideas from the same archetypes. . . . While one . . . admired the tamer beauties of Nature, the other caught fire and rose to the sublime." Oftener they are presented in contrast, especially after the appearance of Burke's Essay,one representing the beautiful and rural, the other the sublime and wild. So Percival Stockdale finds in Spenser "pictures drawn by the hand of a master endowed with contrasted talents; the mild and beaming skies of Claude Lorrain; and the rude and tangled precipices of Salvator Rosa." But as early as 1737 Lord Chesterfield, writing to Lyttelton, makes use of the contrast with a political application, as if it was familiar: "We have a prospect of the Claud Lorraine kind before us, while Sir Robert [Walpole]’s has all the horrors of Salvator Rosa. If the Prince would play the Rising Sun, he would gild it finely." (Mrs. Wyndham, Chronicles of the 18^th Century).

Uvedale Price, one of the chief spokesmen of the Picturesque School, presents them thus. He loves the beauty of Claude, but admires Salvator as an example par excellence of the picturesque. In the Dialogue written as a reply to his friend Knight, who identified the beautiful and the picturesque, he uses Claude and Salvator to prove his point. Two connoisseurs, Mr. Hamilton, standing for himself, and Mr. Howard, for Knight, argue the question in the presence of their friend Mr. Seymour, appropriately named, for his eyes are opened to see more of the picturesque. They begin with real scenery; a gypsies' hut, with Salvatorial adjuncts of gloom and ruined oak, at which the two connoisseurs wax ecstatic, and the unpicturesque Mr. Seymour is disgusted; then "an extensive view over a rich country," with Claudian distances, river, bridge, which Mr. Seymour enjoys in itself, and his friends enjoy because it is like Claude. They enter a gallery, and an excellent display of the average eighteenth century Englishman in a gallery follows. Mr. Seymour, observing with pleasure that the names of the painters are written on the frames, begins the round, "not stopping long at any of them till he came to one of Claude Lorraine."

He at once recognizes the likeness to the fine prospect lately observed. "It is seen in the same manner, between trees; and the river, the bridge, the distant buildings and hills are nearly in a similar situation. I have great pleasure in seeing the same soft lights, the same general glow which we admired in the real landscape represented with such skill, that, now the true splendour of the sun is no longer before us, the picture seems nature itself." And he adds a comment which, we suspect, betrays one strong reason for the English admiration of Claude: "What a picture would this be to have in one's sitting-room! to have always before one such an image of fine weather, such a happy mixture of warmth and freshness !

Soon he is placed before a Salvator, and admires it with due sense of contrast. "There is a sublimity in this scene of rocks and mountains, savage and desolate as they are, that is very striking; and the whole, as you say, is a perfect contrast to the Claude; and it is really curious to look from one to the other. In that every thing seemed formed to delight the eye, and the mind of man -- in this, to alarm and terrify the imagination; in the Claude, the inhabitants inspire us with the ideas of peace, security, and happiness -- in this of Salvator (for now I recollect and feel the full force of those lines I only admired before) – "Appears in burnish'd arms some savage band" (from Knight’s poem, The Landscape). In that sweet scene, the recesses amidst fresh woods and streams, seem bowers made for repose and love; in this, they are caves of death, the haunts of wild beasts, -- "Or savage men, more dreadful far than they." What a stormy, portentous appearance in those clouds, that roll over the dark mountains, and threaten, further on, still greater desolation! while that mild evening sky, and soft tinge upon the distant hills, seem to promise still more charming scenes beyond them! " "Why, Seymour," observes Mr. Howard, "you talk with more enthusiasm than either Hamilton or myself! " And Seymour utters the great explanation of the popularity of Claude and Salvator. "Where there is so much poetry in pictures, it is not necessary to have a painter's eye to enjoy them; although I am well persuaded that a knowledge of the art would greatly enhance the pleasure." (An explanation given by Walter Friedlaender of the popularity of Claude among the English applies also to Salvator; the irrational and Unlimited in picture; infinite space, in contrast to the defined boundaries of Nicholas Poussin, for example. Claude Lorrain, Berlin, 1921)

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