Search

These two volumes comprise the first English translation and critical edition of the extant letters of the Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673). Presented in a revised Italian transcription and a complete English translation, the letters are accompanied by extensive historical notes, a philological apparatus, a comprehensive index, appendices, and photographs of the manuscripts.

Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) was one of the boldest and most powerfully inventive artists and personalities of the Italian seventeenth century. He is still best known as `savage Rosa', the creator of wild landscapes, where bandits and hermits lurk amongst shattered trees and rocks. But his range was wide, and he also painted novel allegorical pictures, distinguished by a melancholy poetry; fanciful portraits of romantic figures; macabre witchcraft scenes, which remain amongst the most bizarre images in all seventeenth-century art; rare scenes from ancient history and from the lives of the ancient philosophers, which brought into painting some of the major ethical and scientific concerns of his age.