Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance (Renaissance Lives) - Hardcover

Book 22 of 28: Renaissance Lives

Helen Langdon

 
9781789145731: Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance (Renaissance Lives)

Synopsis

'Helen Langdon takes on the intriguing figure of Salvator Rosa in this definitive account of the multi-talented - but still elusive - artist (painter and etcher), writer and actor.' - Christopher Brown, former director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

'[this] superb biography . . . presents the artist in all his brilliance and wit, his vaulting ambition, his potent originality as a painter and his infuriating complexity as a person.' - Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, London

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account traces Rosa's strategies of self-promotion, and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject-matter - witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic and dark violence - and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime.
Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.

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About the Author

Helen Langdon is an art historian with a special interest in the Italian Baroque. She is author of Claude Lorrain (1989) and Caravaggio: A Life (1999) and is based in London.

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