Salvator Rosa

Salvator Rosa Synopsis

A compelling biography of the Renaissance painter, known equally for his magnetic personality and unusual subject matter: witchcraft and the sublime.  
 
Painter, poet, and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the preeminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new biography traces Rosa's strategies of self-promotion and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject matter-witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic, and dark violence-and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime.
 
Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.

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