1615-1673 Italian Salvator Rosa Galleries Salvatore Rosa (1615 - March 15, 1673) was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel" proto-Romantic. His life and writings were equally colorful. He continued apprenticeship with Falcone, helping him complete his battlepiece canvases. In that studio, it is said that Lanfranco took notice of his work, and advised him to relocate to Rome, where he stayed from 1634-6. Returning to Naples, he began painting haunting landscapes, overgrown with vegetation, or jagged beaches, mountains, and caves. Rosa was among the first to paint "romantic" landscapes, with a special turn for scenes of picturesque often turbulent and rugged scenes peopled with shepherds, brigands, seamen, soldiers. These early landscapes were sold cheaply through private dealers. This class of paintings peculiarly suited him. He returned to Rome in 1638-39, where he was housed by Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, bishop of Viterbo. For the Chiesa Santa Maria della Morte in Viterbo, Rosa painted his first and one of his few altarpieces with an Incredulity of Thomas. While Rosa had a facile genius at painting, he pursued a wide variety of arts: music, poetry, writing, etching, and acting. In Rome, he befriended Pietro Testa and Claude Lorraine. During a Roman carnival play he wrote and acted in a masque, in which his character bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and more particularly of the mind. In costume, he inveighed against the farcical comedies acted in the Trastevere under the direction of Bernini. While his plays were successful, this also gained him powerful enemies among patrons and artists, including Bernini himself, in Rome. By late 1639, he had had to relocate to Florence, where he stayed for 8 years. He had been in part, invited by a Cardinal Giancarlo de Medici. Once there, Rosa sponsored a combination of studio and salon of poets, playwrights, and painters --the so called Accademia dei Percossi ("Academy of the Stricken"). To the rigid art milieu of Florence, he introduced his canvases of wild landscapes; while influential, he gathered few true pupils. Another painter poet, Lorenzo Lippi, shared with Rosa the hospitality of the cardinal and the same circle of friends. Lippi encouraged him to proceed with the poem Il Malmantile Racquistato. He was well acquainted also with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting and War. About the same time he painted his own portrait, now in the National Gallery, London.  Related Paintings of Salvator Rosa :. | Pythagoras Emerging from the Underworld | Jason Charming the Dragon, | Jason Charming the Dragon | The Spirit of Samuel Called up before Saul by the Witch of Endor (mk05) | Jacob Dream |
Related Artists:
Koller, Rudolf
Swiss Painter, 1828-1905 Swiss painter. He studied in Zurich under such artists as Johann Jakob Ulrich before going to D?sseldorf in 1846 to work with Carl Ferdinand Sohn. In 1847 he was in Paris where he shared a studio with Arnold B?cklin. Two years later he went to Munich where he worked with a group of artists called the 'Schweizer', whose leader was Johann Gottfried Steffan. He returned to Zurich in 1851 and painted mainly pastoral landscapes (e.g. Waterfall near Zurich, c. 1851; Zurich, Graph. Samml. Eidgen?ss. Tech. Hochsch.) evoking prevailing romantic sensibilities. His later paintings combine realist subject-matter with a carefully arranged and executed classical composition. He frequently chose rustic farm scenes containing animals, whom he believed represented a dignified and pure image of nature that was to be treated with respect. He was often considered to be the 19th-century counterpart to Paulus Potter whose paintings of animals were emulated at the time. His works are similar to those of Rosa Bonheur, as seen in Cows in the Roman Countryside (1869; Berne, Kstmus.). His most celebrated painting is the St Gotthard Mailcoach (1873; Zurich, Ksthaus), which depicts a coach at full speed attempting to stop suddenly for a herd of cattle obstructing the narrow road. After 1870, problems with his eyesight forced him to paint less, yet even late in life he was still capable of producing such lyrical paintings as Horses at the Drinking Fountain (1890; Le Locle, Mus. B.-A.).
Stanislaw Witkiewicz
(8 May 1851 in Pašiaušė - 5 September 1915 in Lovran) was a Polish painter, architect, writer and art theoretician. Witkiewicz was born in the Lithuanian village of Pašiaušė (Polish: Poszawsze) in Samogitia, at that time, in the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lands ruled by the Russian Empire. Witkiewicz studied in Saint Petersburg, 1869-71, then in Munich, 1872-75. He created the Zakopane Style (styl zakopiaki) (also known as Witkiewicz Style (styl witkiewiczowski)) in architecture. He was strongly associated with Zakopane and promoted it in the art community. His son, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, became a famous painter, playwright, novelist and philosopher, also known (from the conflation of his surname and middle name) by the mononymous pseudonym "Witkacy." The son's godmother was the internationally famous actress Helena Modjeska (Helena Modrzejewska), whom the elder Witkiewicz in 1876 had nearly accompanied to California in the United States. Witkiewicz had strong views against formal education: "school is completely at odds with the psychological make-up of human beings". He applied this principle in his son's upbringing and was disappointed when the 20-year-old Witkacy chose to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakew. In 1908, suffering from tuberculosis, the elder Witkiewicz left his family in Zakopane and relocated to Lovranno, a fashionable resort in what was then Austria-Hungary, which today is in Croatia. He died there in 1915.
paolo uccello
(b Florence, c. 1397; d Florence, 10 Dec 1475). Italian painter, draughtsman, mosaicist and designer of stained glass. His work vividly illustrates the principal issues of Florentine art during the first half of the 15th century. Trained within the tradition of the Late Gothic style, he eventually became a leading exponent of the application of linear perspective based on the mathematical system established by Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. It is the merging of these two diametrically opposed tendencies that forms the basis of Uccello's style. As well as painting on panel and in fresco (many of his works in this medium have been severely damaged), he was also a master mosaicist and produced designs for stained glass.