In one of his self-portraits, Salvator Rosa stares out at the viewer in a dark cloak, holding a tablet inscribed in Latin: Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio, "Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence." It's a perfect summary of the man: proud, prickly and determined to be taken seriously. Rosa was a painter, poet, actor, musician and satirist from Naples who spent his career in Rome and Florence insulting patrons, mocking rival artists and painting subjects nobody else would touch. Witchcraft was one of them.
This drawing, made in the 1640s, belongs to a group of witch scenes Rosa made during those years. The most famous is his painting Witches at Their Incantations, now in the National Gallery in London. His drawings on the theme are looser and more spontaneous, the brush and pen moving quickly, as though the figures were forming out of smoke.
Rosa's interest in witches wasn't only visual. He wrote poetry on dark and satirical themes, and a poem attributed to him, La strega ("The Witch"), was set to music as a cantata. In it a witch rages at the lover who spurned her and calls on dark powers for revenge. For Rosa, the witch was a way to paint passion, fear and forbidden knowledge at their most extreme, and to show off his ability to conjure the night.
Italian courts of the 1640s were not the frenzied witch-hunting grounds of parts of Germany and Scotland, and educated viewers in Florence and Rome could treat these images as thrilling fantasy. But the imagery Rosa drew on came straight out of demonology handbooks: night gatherings, flight, bones, cauldrons, the calling up of spirits. He was painting a real fear, at a comfortable distance.
After his death, Rosa became a legend. The Romantics of the late 18th and 19th centuries adored him as the archetype of the wild genius, and an enduring tale claimed he had lived among bandits in the mountains of Abruzzo as a young man, a story with no real evidence behind it but so good nobody wanted to give it up. His storm-torn landscapes shaped the idea of the "sublime," and English travelers on the Grand Tour went looking for "Salvator Rosa scenery" in the Alps and the Apennines.
This drawing shows why they loved him. It is quick, dark and a little dangerous, the work of an artist who clearly enjoyed frightening his audience and wasn't afraid of what his own imagination could produce.
Salvator Rosa's Witches' Sabbath appears on our: