Salvator Rosa : “Self-Portrait” (c. 1647)

An accomplished poet and actor, as well as a painter, printmaker and suspected brigand, Salvator Rosa was a significant figure in the early development of Romanticism. Whereas his contemporaries painted calm pastorals and idyllic countrysides, Rosa produced tempestuous landscapes awash in bandits and ruins. A “perpetual rebel,” he penned controversial satires that inflamed powerful enemies, and may have participated directly in the Neapolitan revolt against Spain. Painting purely for his own satisfaction, he remarked that that artists’ “wealth must consist in things of the spirit, and in contenting ourselves with sipping, while others gorge themselves in prosperity.”

Set against a darkened sky, this brooding self-portrait is emblematic of the romantic spirit that Rosa projected. Wearing a cypress wreath symbolic of mourning, the artist inscribes a skull with the Greek words “Behold, whither, when,” a small, transparent teardrop clinging to the cheek below his right eye. The scrap of paper to the left of the skull reads “Salvator Rosa painted this in a solitary place and gave it to his friend Giovanni Battista Ricciardi.” The name “Seneca” is overpainted upon the spine of the adjacent book.

Art historian Wendy Wassyng Roworth explains that “During the period from August 1656, when Rosa’s son and brother died, to June I657, Rosa’s letters to Ricciardi were filled with anguish and anger, frustration and sorrow, and he constantly sought his absent friend’s support. The letters allude to his melancholy state of mind, his loneliness in Rome, and how very much he missed Ricciardi’s company. He lamented that even the philosophy of the Stoics could not console him; for their theory, as written in notes and recorded by history, was quite different from the practice of Stoic behavior. What we read of Seneca’s bravery in the face of death is no greater than that of the common man condemned to the gallows.”