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.

[@justentertainmentj.e8987]

Thank you so much I have been hoping to get more information on Salvator Rosa ❤❤❤

[@brandonmass3787]

Wonderful presentation, thank you for bringing more light to such a talented and interesting artist. Personally, I love his engravings, they have a draftsman's hand that disappears not long after Rosa with technical innovations. I mean the transition from hand made lines to the Goltzius style of using devices to make swelling and thinning lines in perfect circular orbits, which results in an impression that is stultifying, too regular and impersonal, in my opinion.

[@brandonmass3787]

The significance of Democritus is that he was a naturalistic philosopher who thought that we all just die when we die, the world is made of matter, period. The significance of Empedocles is that he believed that he himself had become immortal through being enlightened and other people can too, and believed it to the degree that he launched himself into a caldera. Both images are, I think, meant to make a mockery of religion and its institutions, by going to extremes. Just my opinion, would love to hear other interpretations.