‘Salvator Rosa,’ says Sir J. Reynolds, ‘saw the necessity of trying some new source of pleasing the public in his works. The world were tired of Claude Lorraine’s and G. Poussin’s long train of imitators.’
‘Salvator therefore struck into a wild, savage kind of nature, which was new and striking.’
‘The first of these paragraphs contains a strange anachronism. When Salvator struck into a new line, Poussin and Claude, who, though his elders, were his contemporaries, had as yet no train of imitators. The one was struggling for a livelihood in France, the other was cooking and grinding colours for his master at Rome. Salvator’s early attachment to Nature in her least imitated forms, was not the result of speculation having any reference to the public: it was the operation of original genius, and of those particular tendencies which seemed to be breathed into his soul at the moment it first quickened. From his cradle to his tomb he was the creature of impulse, and the slave of his own vehement volitions.’—Note, p. 97–8.
We think this is spirited and just. Sir Joshua, who borrowed from almost all his predecessors in art, was now and then a little too ready to detract from them. We dislike these attempts to explain away successful talent into a species of studied imposture—to attribute genius to a plot, originality to a trick. Burke, in like manner, accused Rousseau of the same kind of malice prepense in bringing forward his paradoxes—as if he did it on a theory, or to astonish the public, and not to give vent to his peculiar humours and singularity of temperament.
We next meet with a poetical version of a picturesque tour undertaken by Salvator among the mountains of the Abruzzi, and of his detention by the banditti there. We have much fine writing on the subject; but after a world of charming theories and romantic conjectures, it is left quite doubtful whether this last event ever took place at all—at least we could wish there was some better confirmation of it than a vague rumour, and an etching by Salvator of a ‘Youth taken captive by banditti, with a female figure pleading his cause,’ which the historian at once identifies with the adventures of the artist himself, and ‘moralizes into a thousand similes.’ We are indemnified for the dearth of satisfactory evidence on this point by animated and graceful transitions to the history and manners of the Neapolitan banditti, their physiognomical distinctions and political intrigues, to the grand features of mountain scenery, and to the character of Salvator’s style, founded on all these exciting circumstances, real or imaginary. On the death of his father, Vito Antonio, which happened when he was about seventeen, the family were thrown on his hands for support, and he struggled for some time with want and misery, which he endeavoured to relieve by his hard bargains with the rivenditori (picture-dealers) in the Strada della Carità, till necessity and chagrin forced him to fly to Rome. The purchase of his Hagar by Lanfranco is the only bright streak in this period of his life, which cheered him for a moment with faint delusive hope.
The art of writing may be said to consist in thinking of nothing but one’s subject: the art of book-making, on the contrary, can only subsist on the principle of laying hands on everything that can supply the place of it. The author of the ‘Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,’ though devoted to her hero, does not scruple to leave him sometimes, and to occupy many pages with his celebrated contemporaries, Domenichino, Lanfranco, Caravaggio, and the sculptor Bernini, the most splendid coxcomb in the history of art, and the spoiled child of vanity and patronage. Before we take leave of Naples, we must introduce our readers to some of this good company, and pay our court in person. We shall begin with Caravaggio, one of the characteristic school both in mind and manners. The account is too striking in many respects to be passed over, and affords a fine lesson on the excesses and untamed irregularities of men of genius.
‘In the early part of the seventeenth century, the manner of the Neapolitan school was purely Caravaggesque. Michael Angelo Amoreghi, better known as Il Caravaggio (from the place of his birth in the Milanese, where his father held no higher rank than that of a stone mason), was one of those powerful and extraordinary geniuses which are destined by their force and originality to influence public taste, and master public opinion, in whatever line they start. The Roman School, to which the almost celestial genius of Raphael had so long been as a tutelary angel, sinking rapidly into degradation and feebleness, suddenly arose again under the influence of a new chief, whose professional talent and personal character stood opposed in the strong relief of contrast to that of his elegant and poetical predecessor.
‘The influence of this “uomo intractabile e brutale,” this passionate and intractable man, as he is termed by an Italian historian of the arts, sprang from the depression of the school which preceded him. Nothing less than the impulsion given by the force of contrast, and the shock occasioned by a violent change, could have produced an effect on the sinking art such as proceeded from the strength and even coarseness of Caravaggio. He brought back nature triumphant over mannerism—nature, indeed, in all the exaggeration of strong motive and overbearing volition; but still it was nature; and his bold example dissipated the languor of exhausted imitation, and gave excitement even to the tamest mediocrity and the feeblest conception.... When on his first arrival in Rome (says Bellori) the cognoscenti advised him to study from the antiques, and take Raphael as his model, he used to point to the promiscuous groups of men and women passing before him, and say, “those were the models and the masters provided him by Nature.” Teased one day by a pedant on the subject, he stopped a gipsey-girl who was passing by his window, called her in, placed her near his easel, and produced his splendid Zingara in atto di predire l’avventure, his well-known and exquisite Egyptian Fortune-teller. His Gamblers was done in the same manner.
‘The temperament which produced this peculiar genius was necessarily violent and gloomy. Caravaggio tyrannized over his school, and attacked his rivals with other arms than those of his art. He was a professed duellist; and having killed one of his antagonists in a rencontre, he fled to Naples, where an asylum was readily granted him. His manner as a painter, his character as a man, were both calculated to succeed with the Neapolitan school; and the maniera Caravaggesca thenceforward continued to distinguish its productions, till the art, there, as throughout all Europe, fell into utter degradation, and became lost almost as completely as it had been under the Lower Empire.
‘In a warm dispute with one of his own young friends in a tennis-court, he had struck him dead with a racket, having been himself severely wounded. Notwithstanding the triumphs with which he was loaded in Naples, where he executed some of his finest pictures, he soon got weary of his residence there, and went to Malta. His superb picture of the Grand Master obtained for him the cross of Malta, a rich golden chain, placed on his neck by the Grand Master’s own hands, and two slaves to attend him. But all these honours did not prevent the new knight from falling into his old habits. Il suo torbido ingegno, says Bellori, plunged him into new difficulties; he fought and wounded a noble cavalier, was thrown into prison by the Grand Master, escaped most miraculously, fled to Syracuse, and obtained the suffrages of the Syracusans by painting his splendid picture of the Santa Morte, for the church of Santa Lucia. In apprehension of being taken by the Maltese knights, he fled to Messina, from thence to Palermo, and returned to Naples, where hopes were given him of the Pope’s pardon. Here, picking a quarrel with some military men at an inn door, he was wounded, took refuge on board a felucca, and set sail for Rome. Arrested by a Spanish guard, at a little port (where the felucca cast anchor), by mistake, for another person, when released he found the felucca gone, and in it all his property. Traversing the burning shore under a vertical sun, he was seized with a brain-fever, and continued to wander through the deserts of the Pontine Marshes, till he arrived at Porto Ercoli, when he expired in his fortieth year.’ p. 139.