We have seen some of the particulars differently related; but this account is as probable as any; and it conveys a startling picture of the fate of a man led away by headstrong passions and the pride of talents,—an intellectual outlaw, having no regard to the charities of life, nor knowledge of his own place in the general scale of being. How different, how superior, and yet how little more fortunate, was the amiable and accomplished Domenichino (the ‘most sensible of painters’), who was about this time employed in painting the dome of St. Januarius!
‘Domenichino reluctantly accepted the invitation (1629); and he arrived in Naples with the zeal of a martyr devoted to a great cause, but with a melancholy foreboding, which harassed his noble spirit, and but ill prepared him for the persecution he was to encounter. Lodged under the special protection of the Deputati, in the Palazzo dell’ Arcivescovato, adjoining the church, on going forth from his sumptuous dwelling the day after his arrival, he found a paper addressed to him sticking in the key-hole of his anteroom. It informed him, that if he did not instantly return to Rome, he should never return there with life. Domenichino immediately presented himself to the Spanish viceroy, the Conte Monterei, and claimed protection for a life then employed in the service of the church. The piety of the count, in spite of his partiality to the faction [of Spagnuoletto], induced him to pledge the word of a grandee of Spain, that Domenichino should not be molested; and from that moment a life, no longer openly assailed, was embittered by all that the littleness of malignant envy could invent to undermine its enjoyments and blast its hopes. Calumnies against his character, criticisms on his paintings, ashes mixed with his colours, and anonymous letters, were the miserable means to which his rivals resorted; and to complete their work of malignity, they induced the viceroy to order pictures from him for the Court of Madrid; and when these were little more than laid in in dead colours, they were carried to the viceregal palace, and placed in the hands of Spagnuoletto to retouch and alter at pleasure. In this disfigured and mutilated condition, they were despatched to the gallery of the King of Spain. Thus drawn from his great works by despotic authority, for the purpose of effecting his ruin, enduring the complaints of the Deputati, who saw their commission neglected, and suffering from perpetual calumnies and persecutions, Domenichino left the superb picture of the Martyrdom of San Gennaro, which is now receiving the homage of posterity, and fled to Rome; taking shelter in the solemn shades of Frescati, where he resided some time under the protection of Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini. It was at this period that Domenichino was visited by his biographer Passeri, then an obscure youth, engaged to assist in the repairs of the pictures in the cardinal’s chapel. “When we arrived at Frescati,” says Passeri in his simple style, “Domenichino received me with much courtesy; and hearing that I took a singular delight in the belles-lettres, it increased his kindness to me. I remember me, that I gazed on this man as though he were an angel. I remained till the end of September, occupied in restoring the chapel of St. Sebastian, which had been ruined by the damp. Sometimes Domenichino would join us, singing delightfully to recreate himself as well as he could. When night set in we returned to our apartment, while he most frequently remained in his own, occupied in drawing, and permitting none to see him. Sometimes, however, to pass the time, he drew caricatures of us all, and of the inhabitants of the villa; and when he succeeded to his satisfaction, he was wont to indulge in immoderate fits of laughter; and we, who were in the adjoining room, would run in to know his reason, and then he showed us his spirited sketches (spiritose galanterie). He drew a caricature of me with a guitar, one of Canini the painter, and one of the guarda roba, who was lame with the gout, and of the subguarda roba, a most ridiculous figure. To prevent our being offended, he also caricatured himself. These portraits are now preserved by Signor Giovanni Pietro Bellori in his study.” Vita di Domenichino.—Obliged, however, at length, to return to Naples to fulfil his fatal engagements, overwhelmed both in mind and body by the persecutions of his soi-disant patrons and his open enemies, he died, says Passeri, “fra mille crepacuori,” amidst a thousand heart-breakings, with some suspicion of having been poisoned, in 1641.’ p. 150.
We could wish Lady Morgan had preserved more of this simple style of Passeri. We confess we prefer it to her own more brilliant and artificial one; for instance, to such passages as the following, describing Salvator’s first entrance into the city of Rome.
‘In entering the greatest city of the world at the Ave Maria, the hour of Italian recreation’—(Why must he have entered it at this hour, except for the purpose of giving the author an apology for the following eloquent reflections?)—‘in passing from the silent desolate suburbs of San Giovanni to the Corso (then a place of crowded and populous resort), where the princes of the Conclave presented themselves in all the pomp and splendour of Oriental satraps, the feelings of the young and solitary stranger must have suffered a revulsion, in the consciousness of his own misery. Never, perhaps, in the deserts of the Abruzzi, in the solitudes of Otranto, or in the ruins of Pæstum, did Salvator experience sensations of such utter loneliness, as in the midst of this gaudy and multitudinous assemblage; for in the history of melancholy sensations there are few comparable to that sense of isolation, to that desolateness of soul, which accompanies the first entrance of the friendless on a world where all, save they, have ties, pursuits, and homes.’ p. 174.
When we come to passages like this, so buoyant, so airy, and so brilliant, we wish we could forget that history is not a pure voluntary effusion of sentiment, and that we could fancy ourselves reading a page of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian, or Miss Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw! Presently after, we learn, that ‘Milton and Salvator, who, in genius, character, and political views, bore no faint resemblance to each other, though living at the same time both in Rome and Naples, remained mutually unknown. The obscure and indigent young painter had, doubtless, no means of presenting himself to the great republican poet of England;—if, indeed, he had then ever heard of one so destined to illustrate the age in which both flourished.’—p. 176. This is the least apposite of all our author’s critical juxtapositions; if we except the continual running parallel between Salvator, Shakspeare, and Lord Byron, as the three demons of the imagination personified. Modern critics can no more confer rank in the lists of fame, than modern heralds can confound new and old nobility.
Salvator’s first decided success at Rome, or in his profession, was in his picture of Prometheus, exhibited in the Pantheon, when he was little more than twenty, and which stamped his reputation as an artist from that time forward, though it did not lay the immediate foundation of his fortune. In this respect, his rejection by the Academy of St. Luke, and the hostility of Bernini, threw very considerable obstacles in his way. Lady Morgan celebrates the success of this picture at sufficient length, and with enthusiastic sympathy, and accompanies the successive completion of his great historical efforts afterwards, the Regulus, the Purgatory, the Job, the Saul, and the Conspiracy of Catiline, with appropriate comments; but, as we are tainted with heresy on this subject, we shall decline entering into it, farther than to say generally, that we think the colouring of Salvator’s flesh dingy, his drawing meagre, his expressions coarse or violent, and his choice of subjects morose and monotonous. The figures in his landscape-compositions are admirable for their spirit, force, wild interest, and daring character; but, in our judgment, they cannot stand alone as high history, nor, by any means, claim the first rank among epic or dramatic productions. His landscapes, on the contrary, as we have said before, have a boldness of conception, a unity of design, and felicity of execution, which, if it does not fill the mind with the highest sense of beauty or grandeur, assigns them a place by themselves, which invidious comparison cannot approach or divide with any competitor. They are original and perfect in their kind; and that kind is one that the imagination requires for its solace and support; is always glad to return to, and is never ashamed of, the wild and abstracted scenes of nature. Having said thus much by way of explanation, we hope we shall be excused from going farther into the details of an obnoxious hypercriticism, to which we feel an equal repugnance as professed worshippers of fame and genius! Our readers will prefer, to our sour and fastidious (perhaps perverse) criticism, the lively account which is here given of Salvator’s first appearance in a new character—one of the masks of the Roman carnival—which had considerable influence in his subsequent pursuits and success in life.
‘Towards the close of the Carnival in 1639, when the spirits of the revellers (as is always the case in Rome) were making a brilliant rally for the representations of the last week, a car, or stage, highly ornamented, drawn by oxen, and occupied by a masked troop, attracted universal attention by its novelty and singular representations. The principal personage announced himself as a certain Signor Formica, a Neapolitan actor, who, in the character of Coviello, a charlatan, displayed so much genuine wit, such bitter satire, and exquisite humour, rendered doubly effective by a Neapolitan accent and national gesticulations, that other representations were abandoned; and gipsies told fortunes, and Jews hung in vain. The whole population of Rome gradually assembled round the novel, the inimitable Formica. The people relished his flashes of splenetic humour aimed at the great; the higher orders were delighted with an improvisatore, who, in the intervals of his dialogues, sung to the lute, of which he was a perfect master, the Neapolitan ballads, then so much in vogue. The attempts made by his fellow-revellers to obtain some share of the plaudits he so abundantly received, whether he spoke or sung, asked or answered questions, were all abortive; while he, (says Baldinucci), “at the head of every thing by his wit, eloquence, and brilliant humour, drew half Rome to himself.” The contrast between his beautiful musical and poetical compositions, and those Neapolitan gesticulations in which he indulged, when, laying aside his lute, he presented his vials and salves to the delighted audience, exhibited a versatility of genius, which it was difficult to attribute to any individual then known in Rome. Guesses and suppositions were still vainly circulating among all classes, when, on the close of the Carnival, Formica, ere he drove his triumphal car from the Piazza Navona, which, with one of the streets in the Trasevere, had been the principal scene of his triumph, ordered his troop to raise their masks, and, removing his own, discovered that Coviello was the sublime author of the Prometheus, and his little troop the “Partigiani” of Salvator Rosa. All Rome was from this moment (to use a phrase which all his biographers have adopted) “filled with his fame.” That notoriety which his high genius had failed to procure for him, was obtained at once by those lighter talents which he had nearly suffered to fall into neglect, while more elevated views had filled his mind.’ p. 253.
Lady Morgan then gives a very learned and sprightly account of the characters of the old Italian comedy, with a notice of Moliere, and sprinklings of general reading, from which we have not room for an extract. Salvator, after this event, became the rage in Rome; his society and conversation were much sought after, and his improvisatore recitations of his own poetry, in which he sketched the outline of his future Satires, were attended by some of the greatest wits and most eminent scholars of the age. He on one occasion gave a burlesque comedy in ridicule of Bernini, the favourite court-artist. This attack drew on him a resentment, the consequences of which, ‘like a wounded snake, dragged their slow length’ through the rest of his life. Those who are the loudest and bitterest in their complaints of persecution and ill-usage are the first to provoke it. In the warfare waged so fondly and (as it is at last discovered) so unequally with the world, the assailants and the sufferers will be generally found to be the same persons. We would not, by this indirect censure of Salvator, be understood to condemn or discourage those who have an inclination to go on the same forlorn hope: we merely wish to warn them of the nature of the service, and that they ought not to prepare for a triumph, but a martyrdom! If they are ambitious of that, let them take their course.
Salvator’s success in his new attempt threw him in some measure, from this time forward, into the career of comedy and letters: painting, however, still remained his principal pursuit and strongest passion. His various talents and agreeable accomplishments procured him many friends and admirers, though his hasty temper and violent pretensions often defeated their good intentions towards him. He wanted to force his Histories down the throats of the public and of private individuals, who came to purchase his pictures, and turned from, and even insulted those who praised his landscapes. This jealousy of a man’s self, and quarrelling with the favourable opinion of the world, because it does not exactly accord with our own view of our merits, is one of the most tormenting and incurable of all follies. We subjoin the two following remarkable instances of it.
‘The Prince Francesco Ximenes having arrived in Rome, found time, in the midst of the honours paid to him, to visit Salvator Rosa; and, being received by the artist in his gallery, he told him frankly, that he had come for the purpose of seeing and purchasing some of those beautiful small landscapes, whose manner and subjects had delighted him in many foreign galleries.—“Be it known then to your Excellency,” interrupted Rosa impetuously, “that I know nothing of landscape-painting! Something indeed I do know of painting figures and historical subjects, which I strive to exhibit to such eminent judges as yourself, in order that once for all I may banish from the public mind that fantastic humour of supposing I am a landscape, and not an historical painter.”