Conjuring genius: Salvator Rosa and the dark arts of witchcraft
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
During the 1640s and 1650s, the notoriously audacious Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) produced a small group of shocking scenes of witchcraft. This dissertation is a corpus-defining analysis of Rosa’s multimedia images of black magic, pictures that typically were not commissioned, but rather came from the aspirations and imagination of Rosa himself. Rosa’s paintings, drawing, and poem were innovative works that departed from both Italian and Northern European visual traditions and reveal connections to literary and philosophical traditions, the macabre, antiquity, witty satire, allegory, horror, and art theoretical principles alongside the contemporary debates surrounding witchcraft. In investigating these pictures both as individual objects and as a thematic whole, I demonstrate how the rigorous construction, experimental theories, and phenomenological and fantastic fun that characterize Rosa’s pictures substantiates black magic as a venue for experimentation and propaganda – not for or against witchcraft, but for the genius of the artist himself. I argue that Rosa composed his witchcraft scenes – pictures typically interpreted as genre scenes in line with Rosa’s interests in satire, vanitas, and dissent – with an emphasis on allegory and utilizing the lofty design principles of history painting; in doing so he crafted a completely new, hybrid genre of painting. In investigating these enigmatic, terrifying, entertaining, affecting artworks, I aim not only to distinguish the achievements of Rosa, but also to offer a new approach to understand the "dark arts" of witchcraft in seicento art and culture.
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Keywords
Art theory, Baroque art, Rosa, Salvator, Self-fashioning, Witchcraft, Witches