Salvator Rosa: Paint and Performance

‘Helen Langdon takes on the intriguing figure of Salvator Rosa in this definitive account of the multi-talented – but still elusive – artist (painter and etcher), writer and actor. She is very much at home in the complex world of artistic debate in seventeenth-century Rome and deeply sympathetic to this difficult and ultimately disappointed ‘genius’, as he described himself, who aspired to be a philosopher-painter and satirist.’
Christopher Brown former director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

‘Helen Langdon’s engrossing presentation of the eccentric, conceited, and phenomenally talented Salvator Rosa restores one of Baroque Italy’s most illustrious artists to his rightful place among the seventeenth century’s absolute protagonists. Rosa's phantasmagoric landscapes, home to strange animals, Etruscan priests, and weird witches, were once a must for every ambitious collector, but his most towering work of art, as Langdon suggests, may have been his own remarkable life.’
Ingrid Rowland, Professor, University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway

‘In his passionate defence of the creative autonomy of the artist, Salvator Rosa strikes us as astoundingly modern. Helen Langdon’s superb biography, born of more than half a century of reflection on Rosa, presents the artist in all his brilliance and wit, his vaulting ambition, his potent originality as a painter and his infuriating complexity as a person.’
Gabriele Finaldi Director of the National Gallery, London