Salvator Rosa, Follower Of Coastal Landscape With Resting Men-at-arms

Salvator Rosa, follower of
(Naples, 1615 - Rome, 1673)

Coastal landscape with resting men-at-arms

Oil on canvas, cm. 73x87
Monogram “SR” lower left
In very good overall condition
Within a gilded wooden frame

The work depicts a pleasant landscape scene in which, in the foreground in the left corner, a group of five men-at-arms are at rest on a large boulder. The entire painting is a perfect example of the pre-romantic pictorial vision that makes Salvator Rosa's catalog unique and anticipates the landscape genre of the following century.

Painter and engraver, poet of satires, philosopher, theater actor, musician, founder of the Percossi academy, interested in the practices of alchemy and magic and witchcraft, always tense in the difficult attempt to make art, life and thought coincide; free and bizarre spirit, restless and unconventional. Salvator Rosa was an all-round artist and - probably precisely because of his painting - he was ignored or even despised by his century. It was only with the neoclassical season that his work began to meet the favor of the public and critics, thanks above all to the judgment of the landscape architect William Kent, according to whom English gardens had to be distinguished from Italian gardens, that is, they had to be irregular, stormy , «fit for the pencil of Salvator Rosa».

Salvator Rosa's art served as an example and inspiration for the painters of the time; his works, in fact, in particular the landscapes, forcefully convey the perennial tension between man and nature, the latter characterized by harshness, irregularity, overwhelming power, so close to the idea of the Sublime theorized by Burke. Thus Rosa's landscapes, in which man is but a tiny apparition in the midst of a looming and threatening nature, became a model of the romantic landscape.

Compared to the classical landscape of Lorrain or Poussin, based on the values of order, balance and harmony, that of the Italian Salvator Rosa seems to prefigure typically romantic sensitivity and suggestions, for its elements of strong spectacularity, in which measure and balance give way to the eruption of the forces of an often dark and irrational nature, already evident in the browner and earthier colors and in the more vivid chiaroscuro contrasts compared to those of the bucolic scenes of the ideal landscape.

The painter does not stop at the contemplation of nature, transcending reality with the strength of the idea, but dramatically transfigures it, projecting his own inner restlessness onto it. Salvator Rosa's nature detaches itself from objective data, becoming an interior vision, animated by pathos and mysterious and often destructive forces. This can be seen in the presence, in some of his works, of crushed or dried trees, of gnarled and twisted trunks, of steep ravines and cliffs, of rocks, smooth or jagged, which sometimes take on human or animal shapes, or tend to merge with the signs of human presence (towers, broken bridges and fortifications); or on the horizons where grey, heavy and cumulus clouds gather, harbingers of a storm.

The work, prudently attributed to a follower of Salvator Rosa, bears an engraved monogram "SR" on the lower margin, which can be found among those used by the Neapolitan master in the catalog of his signatures.