Salvator Rosa

Exhibited by Nicholas Hall

Material oil on copper, oval

Dimensions 29 × 33.5 cm

Place of Creation Florence

Status Vetted

About the Work

Recorded in the 1683 inventory of Carlo De Rossi, this important Stregoneria is the only known work by Salvator Rosa on copper—a metal crucial to the practice of alchemy, which could well have been part of its meaning. The Florentine banker and collector owned another famous painting by Rosa, Witches at their Incantations, now at the National Gallery, London.

A poet-philosopher, draftsman, as well as a painter, Salvator Rosa stands out as one of the most singular figures of the baroque era, famed for his sublime landscapes and esoteric philosophical subjects, but even more so for his small but important body of works depicting black magic.

Born in Naples, Rosa went to Rome, then was summoned by the Medici to paint in Florence in the 1640s. During his Tuscan sojourn Rosa developed a particular interest in the depiction of witches: not the seductive enchantresses such as Circe and Armida but wizened naked hags engaged in bloodthirsty spell-making. Such scenes have their origins in prints and drawings by Northern artists such as Baldung Grien and Albrecht Dürer but reflect a genuine belief in the existence of the supernatural, witches and an underlying fear of the power of women. A monumental painting of a witch by Rosa was recently acquired by the Gallerie degli Uffizi from our gallery.

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Provenance

Listed in the 1683 inventory of Carlo De Rossi, Rome
with Franco di Castro, Rome
Private Collection, Rome

Literature

Luigi Salerno, L’opera completa di Salvator Rosa , Milan, 1975, no. 82, p. 90.
Charles Zika, ‘The Corsini Witchcraft Scene by Salvator Rosa: Magic, Violence and Death’, in David R. Marshall, ed., The Italians
in Australia: Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art, Florence, 2004, p. 185, 190.
Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, in Silvia Cassani, ed., Salvator Rosa: tra mito e magia, Naples, 2008, exh. cat., pp. 77, 168–69,
reproduced no. 41.
Caterina Volpi, Salvator Rosa (1615–1673): ‘pittore famoso’, Rome, 2014, no. 155, p. 475.
Helen Langdon, ‘Salvator Rosa: A Variety of Surfaces’, in Piers Baker-Bates and Elena Calvillo, eds., Almost Eternal: Painting on
Stone and Material Innovation in Early Modern Europe, Leiden, 2018, p. 340, reproduced fig. 10.6.
Caterina Volpi, Beyond the Fringe, New York, 2025, exh. cat., pp. 178–79, reproduced pp. 180–81.