Rocky Landscape With Soldiers And Hunters – Salvatore Rosa Around 1650

Oil on canvas. Neapolitan school from the mid-17th century, Salvatore Rosa and workshop.
Resting soldiers and hunters sit at the water's edge and converse. Despite the calm that seems to reign, the force that emerges from the scene is striking. The central element of the decor, the group of trees firmly anchored, despite the sudden outrages (broken branches and trunks that seem to have been struck by lightning), is majestic. Between air and water, under a summer sky crossed by a trail of clouds and on the rocky bank of a peaceful river, the protagonists are painted in naturalistic attitudes, the sharp rocks and tortured trees appearing as threats, an exaltation of an all-powerful nature. It is necessary to see here the work of the most nonconformist of Neapolitan painters of his time, considered the precursor of Romanticism, Salvatore Rosa. Breaking with classicism in search of the ideal landscape, Rosa gives a fantastic and even disturbing dimension to nature and our composition is the perfect illustration.

Our large composition is presented in a french frame in carved and gilded wood from the Louis XIV period.
Dimensions: 134 x 94.5 cm - 160 x 123 cm with the frame

Biography: Salvator Rosa (Naples 1615 - Rome 1673). At the same time painter, engraver, musician and composer, poet and author of satires, Salvatore Rosa is an immense artist who worked in Naples, Rome and Florence in the 17th century. Main representative of the trend called proto-romanticism, he is recognized for the originality of his wild landscapes showing an inclination towards the picturesque which, with the sublime, became one of the two poles of romantic sensibility. Rejecting the pastoral and idyllic calm of the landscapes of Claude Lorrain or Paul Bril, he creates lugubrious and melancholic scenes filled with ruins and brigands. After an apprenticeship with Francesco Francanzano or Aniello Falcone depending on the source, both disciples of Giuseppe de Jusepe de Ribera, he made a brief stay in Rome, then returned to Naples where he began to paint his first pre-romantic landscapes.

Bibliography:
- VOLPI, Caterina, Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673), pittore famoso, Catalog raisonné, Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2014.
- LANGDON, Helen, Salvator Rosa, exhibition catalog Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), bandits, wilderness and magic (Dulwich Picture Gallery, autumn 2010, then Kimbell Art Museum, winter 2010/201 1), Paul Holberton, 2010.
- SALERNO, Luigi, L'Opera completa di Salvator Rosa, Milano Rizzoli, 1975.
- SALAMON, Silverio, Salvatore Rosa, l'Opera grafica, 1993
- SCOTT, Jonathan, Salvator Rosa, his life and times, Yale University Press, 1976.