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 preeminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new biography 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.