Salvator Rosa's Democritus and L'Umana Fragilità
1968; College Art Association; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043079.1968.10789117
ISSN1559-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoSalvator Rosa never put into practice his frequently expressed and precociously romantic yearnings for a life of solitude and hermit simplicity, but these feelings did affect his choice of subject matter considerably, so that he was perhaps most famous in later periods for his landscapes with “savage banditti” and “solitary hermits.”1 There are many examples of his work in this vein; among the most interesting are his St. Paul the Hermit, a painting now in the Brera, Milan, in which the saint is depicted as a shaggy, white-bearded cave dweller in a gloomy forest, and the two large etchings of the hermit St. William and his companion Albert, who are shown bound to trees in uncomfortably penitent positions in the midst of a wilderness.2 For Rosa, a painter of Neapolitan origin who had studied in the Ribera circle, the hermit saint tradition was an especially vivid one, and the Riberesque motive of the isolated figure with a skull often appears in his art, as seen in a drawing now in the British Museum (Fig. 1),3 in his Self-Portrait with a Skull in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 2),4 and in the Portrait of Mr. Altham as a Hermit in the Bankes Collection at Kingston Lacy (Fig. 3).5
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