Hell on earth
When Salvator Rosa painted witches and demons, he wasn't indulging his macabre imagination - he was depicting real life.
Jonathan Jones
Monday March 21, 2005
The Guardian
'A brutal portrait of death itself'... detail from Salvator Rosa's Human Frailty. Photo: courtesy of Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Say Caravaggio and everyone knows who and what you mean; say Salvator Rosa and you get a blank look. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the other way around. Caravaggio, currently packing out the National Gallery, was forgotten. His 17th-century successor was so notorious that you didn't even have to use his full name - "Salvator" was enough for everyone to see wild landscapes before their eyes.
The influence of Rosa on the great age of British landscape art is impossible to exaggerate. Painters and novelists alike wallowed in the violence and solitude his name conjured up. The Welsh landscape artist Richard Wilson painted travellers attacked by bandits in Italy and a hermit alone in the woods - classic Rosa themes. And Ann Radcliffe has only to mention "Salvator" in her gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho to denote the kind of landscape she is trying to describe: rugged, southern, dangerous, infested by bandits or worse. Salvator is Radcliffe's favourite painter - in effect she imagines her characters inhabiting his paintings. Collectors, too, were besotted, which is why so many of his best works are in Britain.
Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, said Rosa's views have "the power of inspiring sentiments of grandeur and sublimity". It's hard for us to get as excited about landscape painting - the theme of the exhibition Salvator Rosa: Wild Landscape that opens this week at Compton Verney - as people did in in the 18th century. To men and women then, Rosa's world looked wicked and gothic. Yet the sinister qualities of his art - which still induce a shudder - were actually not fantastic at all. They are truthful descriptions of the world he lived in.
Consider Rosa's River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl, in the Wallace Collection. The god Apollo and the Sibyl meet beside shadowed water in an overpoweringly mountainous and melancholic landscape where he will give her the cursed gift of eternal life without eternal youth. Rocks, trees, and most of all deep voids of blackness create a world of mystery and the macabre. Rosa also indulges in archaeology. On a hill in the distance is a fortified town - the painter's reconstruction of the ruins of Cumae, which survive to this day outside Naples.
It is Salvator Rosa's own landscape, his own experience, that darkens this picture. He was born in Naples in 1615, but worked most of his life in Rome and - when he was hounded out of the city for writing a satire on the pope's favourite, Bernini - Florence, where he founded his own literary academy. But the landscape that 18th-century viewers saw as so typical of Rosa, so much his territory, is always southern, and primitive.
Far from a romantic, Rosa was a realist. And instead of painting phantoms and spectres, the inner demons of gothic imagination, he painted horrors that, in his eyes and those of his contemporaries, were real - including the reality of witchcraft.
In the 15th century a new intellectual discipline appeared in Europe: the scientific study of witches. Demonology was a serious scholarly field of enquiry, one that possessed brilliant minds such as the French jurist Jean Bodin. As a result of theories published in the Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches and later books, a wave of legal prosecutions of witches led to the deaths of thousands of people, mainly women. The witch craze finally dried up but it left a permanent legacy in European culture - not least because it inspired some of the most terrifying paintings of all time.
From the Renaissance nightmares of Bosch and Dürer to Goya's black paintings, the delineation of demons, devils and witchcraft has been a goal of European art. And this wasn't simply the free exercise of fancy; it laid claim to objective truth. Goya's painting The Witches' Gathering is a dismally real scene: poor, ignorant peasant women sit on the ground before the black-cloaked, goat-headed incarnation of evil. These witches haunted Goya in the early 1820s.
If Goya seems to believe in witches in the era of the industrial revolution, there is no reason at all to doubt the sincerity of Rosa when he painted Witches at their Incantations, today in the National Gallery, at a time when the witch craze was very much still bubbling. Everything in this dark little picture, done in Florence in about 1646, is miserable. A hanged man dangles from a makeshift gallows, a dead tree, in a landscape whose cliffs and woods enclose the foreground under a dreary, nocturnal, clouded sky. Only peeks of deep blue and dawn red in the distance illuminate the murk. The corpse is grey and bloated, the rope constricts his swollen throat, but these postmortem degradations are just the beginning of the night's horrors. Witches are making use of the man's dead flesh - one fiddles with his feet, another holds a burning pot under him to release God knows what properties. The witches are naked old women, one sitting on the ground mixing a potion, as her weird sisters play with a voodoo doll. The painting is an encyclopedia of the black arts.
While naked witches attend the corpse, robed brethren get a skeleton to sign a contract, feed a baby to a demon, possess a knight. The demons who manifest themselves at this deathly sinful gathering include a fish-like creature straight out of German late medieval art, and something more original - a skeletal monster that dominates the night sky and looks like a dinosaur. The best way to comprehend how people in Rosa's time saw a scene like this is by analogy with the modern cult of dinosaurs. We're fascinated by dinosaurs because they were real - fossils prove they existed. In just the same way, confessions gathered by prosecutors across Europe offered ample "proof" of the witches' sabbath and the horrors in this painting are documented realities.
Rosa painted this masterpiece for patrons in Florence who had an avid interest in the subject, commissioning a series of witch scenes from him. As a painting of the dark side of human nature it belongs in the sinister company of Max Beckmann's The Night.
In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge hangs Rosa's most disturbing canvas of all, Human Frailty. No tourist spectacle of southern exotica, this is a brutal portrait of death itself. A newborn child writes on a sheet proffered by a winged, skeletal figure of mortality. All around in the gloom are images of life's fragility - boys blowing bubbles and lighting candles, the Roman god Terminus in the shadows. What the infant writes at Death's direction is: "Conception is sinful; Birth a Punishment; Life, Hard Labour; Death Inevitable." The words, from a 12th-century poem, had direct pertinence to the painter who had lost a baby son to an outbreak of plague in Naples. Plague and the devil were everyday realities of his world.
Rosa was famous in his time, not as a fabulist, but someone whose truth-telling got him into trouble. In his Self-Portrait in the National Gallery he looks at us sternly and angrily. He is a man who blazes to tell the truth. But it's dangerous; a poem inscribed on the tablet he holds urges the wisdom of silence. Keep quiet unless you have something to say. And keep quiet in case the wrong ears are listening.
There is a painting by him in Vienna that looks, at first sight, like a religious image. Peasants gather round a woman who is floating up into the sky - a saint, you assume, or the Virgin Mary. But the woman is handing them a pair of scales, a symbol of justice. She is Astraea, the pagan goddess of justice, who was the last deity to leave earth at the beginning of the iron age. Rosa's painting shows Astraea leaving earth - justice leaving earth. This is an angry protest: where is justice in this world? Although it initially looks like a religious image, this is a travesty of Christian art - a heretical suggestion that the really meaningful gods are the classical ones and the best values the virtues they symbolised. Justice is what the countryfolk need, not piety. A self-professed believer in the pre-Christian philosophy of Stoicism, Rosa paints death as something that is a full stop, a terminus - the end.
There is no Christian hope in his painting in the Fitzwilliam. There is, however, an incantatory power to his picture of the witches' sabbath, as well as a grotesque absurdity. In Italian Renaissance art there is an ambivalence about magic, which fascinates as well as frightens, and it extends to this picture. Like the farmers who mourn the departure of Astraea, the people drawn to black magic are powerless peasants, deprived of justice. How can they get a bit of control over their lives? By making potions from a corpse. Salvator Rosa has a secret to tell us: how the romantic imagination feeds on terrors andbeliefs that were once all too real.
· Salvator Rosa: Wild Landscape is at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, from Friday. Details: 01926 645500.
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