Renaissance Lives | 'Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance'

Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance - Helen Langdon in conversation with Paul Taylor (Warburg Institute) and François Quiviger (Warburg Institute)

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.

This event took place on 25 May 2023.

Renaissance Lives is a series of biographies published by Reaktion Books as well as a series of conversations discussing the ways in which individuals transmitted or changed the lives of traditions, ideas and images.