SALVATOR ROSA,
One of those high names which are everlasting monuments of the success with which true genius bids defiance to the hostilities of poverty and envy might be claimed, with pride and fondness, by either of the sister arts of Poetry and Music, were it not that his greatest triumphs were won in Painting. The wildness and sublimity of his canvas had their types in the scenery of his birth-place—the ancient and decayed villa of Renella, within view of Mount Vesuvius, and near to Naples. His father was a poverty-stricken artist, and descended from a family to whom poverty and painting had been heirlooms for generations. Determined to avert the continuance of this inauspicious union of inheritances in the life of his child, he took counsel with his wife, and they resolved to dedicate him to the service of the Church. He was, accordingly, taken to the font in the grand church pertaining to the “Monks of the Certosa,” and piously named “Salvatore,” as a sign and seal of the religious life to which his parents had vowed to devote him. But the method they took to bind him down to religious lessons was not wise, though their meaning was no doubt good; and the boyish Rosa often became a truant, wandered away for days among the rocks and trees, and frequently slept out in the open air of that beautiful climate. His worship of the sublime scenery with which he thus became familiar was soon evinced in the fidelity of numerous sketches of picturesque he drew upon the walls of one of the rooms in the large old house his father inhabited. Unchecked by the reprehension of his parents, who dreaded nothing more than the event of their child becoming an artist, he one day entered the monastery of the Certosa, with his burnt sticks in his hand—his only instruments of design—and began, secretly and silently, to scrawl his wild sketches upon such vacant spaces as he could find, on walls that abounded in the most splendid decorations of gold and vermilion and ultra-marine. The monks caught him at his daring labour, and inflicted upon him a severe whipping; but neither did this subdue his thirst to become an artist.
The perplexity of Salvator’s parents was now very great, and they saw no chance of restraining the wayward spirit of their boy but in confiding him to other tutelage; not reflecting that he had displayed talents which it was peculiarly in their own power to direct and foster into a perfection, the result of which might have been their own relief and their child’s happiness. He was, at length, sent to a monastic school; and “Salvatoriello,” the nickname his restlessness and ingenious caprices had gained him, was thenceforth clad in the long gown of a monk, in common with his young schoolfellows. Repulsive as confinement might prove to his vehement disposition, it was at this period that his mind received the solid culture which enabled it to produce claims to literary distinction at a future time. So long as his lessons were confined to Homer, Horace, and Sallust, he manifested no disquiet in his restraint; but when the day came that he must enter on the subtleties of the scholastic philosophy, all his youthful rebelliousness against the forced and injudicious religious tasks imposed on him by his own parents rose up, and he was expelled the school of the monastery for contumacy. The grief of his father and mother, at beholding their boy, in his sixteenth year, thus sent back in disgrace to his indigent home, may be easily conjectured. Yet this heavier disaster does not, in the slightest degree, appear to have opened their eyes, as to the want of judgment they had displayed in their child’s training: the mother grew increasingly passionate in her desire that “Salvatoriello” should be a churchman; and the father resolved, let the cast-out schoolboy take whatever stamp he might, he should not, by his parents’ help, become a painter.
The occurrence of his eldest sister’s marriage to Francanzani, a painter of considerable genius, opened, in another year, the way for Salvator’s instruction in the art to which nature so strongly inclined him. He had already essayed his powers in poetry and music, having composed several lyrics, and set them to airs dictated by his own imagination, feeling, and taste. These were great favourites with the crowds of Naples, and were daily sung by the women who sat to knit in the sunshine. His devotion to the composition of canzonets was, however, ardently shared with the novel lessons of the studio, as soon as the house of his sister’s husband was opened to him for an asylum from the harshness of his parental home. To the teaching of Francanzani he speedily added the copying of nature in the wilds of his truant childhood: and often, when he returned from the mountains with his primed paper full of sketches, his teacher would pat him on the shoulder encouragingly, and say, “Rub on, rub on, Salvatoriello—that is good!” The great painter often related to his friends, in the after days of his fame, what energy he had derived from those simple words of friendly approbation.
Having learnt the elements of his profession, the young Rosa set out to take his giro, according to the custom of all young painters at that period. He did not, however, take his way through the cities of Italy most famous for their galleries of Art, like other youthful artists; but yielding to the bent of his natural genius struck up, adventurously, into the mountains of the Abruzzi and the wilds of Calabria. Here he was taken prisoner by banditti, and suffered great hardships. Whether he escaped from them, or was, in the end, liberated, is not clear; but when he returned to Naples, his mind was full of the wondrous pictures of wild volcanic and forest scenery, and striking forms and features of mountain robbers, which he, forthwith, began to realise.
New and more severe difficulties than he had ever yet had to encounter fell to his lot, at his return. His father died in his arms; a few days after, his brother-in-law, Francanzani, was overwhelmed with poverty, and Salvator was left to struggle for the support of his mother and sisters. Yet his strong spirit did not sink. He laid aside music and poetry, and although too poor to purchase canvas, began to depict his wild conceptions on primed paper; and, at night, used to steal out and sell his sketches to some shrewd Jew chapman for a vile price. His gains were pitiful, but he strove, by redoubled industry, to swell their amount for a sufficient supply of the family’s necessities.
An accident served to bring into notice the genius whose high merit had hitherto met with no public recognition. Lanfranco, the artist who, with the courtly Spagnuoletto, shared the patronage of the rich in Naples, stopped his equipage, one day, in the “Street of Charity,” and called for a picture to be brought to him which arrested his eye in the collection of one of the rivendotori, or second-hand dealers. It was a masterly sketch of “Hagar in the Wilderness,” and the obscure name of “Salvatoriello” was subscribed at the corner of it. Lanfranco gave orders that all sketches which could be found bearing that name should be bought for him. Rosa immediately raised his prices; but, although this high acknowledgment of his merit brought him the acquaintance of several influential names in his profession, he was speedily so deeply disgusted with the jealousy and envy of others, that he strapped all his fortune to his back, and at the age of twenty set out on foot to seek better treatment at Rome. There he studied energetically, worshipping, above all, the kindred genius of Michael Angelo; but meeting with a renewal of neglect, and taking a fever from the malaria, once more returned to Naples. The misery in which his family was plunged was still greater than at his departure; and another period of keen life-combat followed. This repeated struggle did not depress him; but it gave his mind that bitter tendency which he afterwards displayed in his poetical “Satires.”
At twenty-four, under the humble patronage of a domestic of the Cardinal Brancaccia, he again went to Rome; and through the friendship of the same plain acquaintance had a large and lonely apartment provided for him, as a studio, in the cardinal’s palace. Dependence nevertheless revolted his lofty spirit, and he again returned to Naples, but engaged to send his pictures to his friend for public exposure in Rome. His “Prometheus” was the first of his pictures exhibited at one of the annual shows in the Pantheon, and the public voice adjudged it to be the greatest. He obeyed a renewed invitation to Rome, but it was still to meet with disappointment. The next carnival furnished his versatile genius with an occasion for winning, by humorous stratagem, the attention denied to his more sterling merit. He put on a mask, and played the charlatan and improvisatore in the public streets, among a crowd of such exhibitors as abound in Rome at such seasons; but soon eclipsed them all by the splendour of his wit. Curiosity was raised to the highest pitch, at the close of the carnival, respecting the identity of this unequalled exhibitor; and when he was proclaimed to be the painter of the “Prometheus” the admiration was unbounded. Salvator, now, for some successive months, gave himself up to conversaziones, wherever invited; and there, by his wit, his lute, and canzonettes, paved the way for his greater acceptance as a painter.
Jealousy, in that age of corrupt patronage and jealous artists, still pursued him; but his genius, thenceforth, rose above all opposition. His landscapes were in every palace, and he soon rose to affluence. Yet the remainder of his life was chequered with difficulties into which the vehemence of his nature perpetually plunged him. That nature was unsubduable amidst all vicissitudes. The magnificent creations of his “Socrates swallowing Poison,” “Purgatory,” “Prodigal Son,” “St. Jerome,” “Babilonia,” and “Conspiracy of Catiline,” with an almost innumerable catalogue of lesser pieces, flowed from his pencil, during a life alternately marked by devotion to each of the sister Arts, and, during one portion of it, to political contest—for he flew to Naples, with all the ardour of patriotism, and joined Masaniello, in his sincere but short-lived effort to rescue his countrymen from a crushing despotism. His participation in the celebrated fisherman’s conspiracy placed him in danger of the Inquisition on his return to Rome; but, on retiring to Florence, he became the favourite of the Grand Duke, Cosmo the Third, and entered on a career of opulent success, which attended him to the end of life.
The life-passages of Salvator Rosa, by injudicious thwarting of his nature, were rendered thorny beyond those of the great majority of men, and the amazing versatility of his talents, combined with almost volcanic ardour of spirit, defied common rules; but the strength of his judgment so completely gave him the victory over influences that might have destroyed him, as to lead him to seek the memorable “Triumphs of Perseverance” he secured by his supreme devotion to that Art, in which there is reckoned no greater name for sublimity and originality, and none of greater general excellence than those of Raffaelle and Michael Angelo. Let the brief sketch of Salvator Rosa be compared with the much more “even tenor” of the life of another, that it may be seen how clearly, in spite of contrast, many of the same valuable lessons are deducible from it.