Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica:
Eloquent Gesture and the Pursuit of Artistic Decorum
Alexandra Hoare
Detail from Francesco Albani,
Portrait of Andrea Calvi, 1636
(plate 8).
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12034
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
36 | 5 | November 2013 | pages
944-967
© Association of Art Historians 2013
Salvator Rosa’s allegory of Philosophy has become a signature work for the artist (plate 1).
Perhaps his most well-known painting, it frequently appears as the cover illustration
for publications on the artist.1 Indeed, the painting encapsulates many of the
concepts fundamental to Rosa’s artistic persona. The protagonist of the painting, with
his toga-like mantle and cap, penetrating stare, and censorious motto ‘AVT TACE,/
AVT LOQVERE MELIORA/ SILENTIO’ (‘Either be silent or say something better
than silence’), is considered to represent an identity central to Rosa’s professional
ambitions: the painter-philosopher. Rosa’s classicist, moral-intellectual view of the
artist informed his predilection for grand philosophical themes, irst in Florence
among academic circles and then with greater urgency after returning to Rome in
1649, where he would take up the role of painter-philosopher par excellence, rejecting
genre scenes, battle paintings and landscapes in favour of erudite and obscure
philosophical subjects that catered more to his own tastes than to the market demand.
These aspects of Rosa’s professional ambitions have received ample scholarly
treatment.2 The present essay re-examines the identity represented in Rosa’s Philosophy
in the light of a speciic, overlooked detail within the painting that suggests a further
dimension of the work’s signiicance: the gesture adopted by the igure’s left arm.
A sign of Rosa’s interest in and conviction about the value of the pictorial poetics of
gesture, the pose can be understood in connection with art-theoretical currents in
which Rosa engaged concerning judgment, decorum, and eloquence. It suggests a
further and important dimension of meaning, the ideal of the artist-orator, be added
to the current interpretation of the painting.3
Rosa and the Allegorical Self-Portrait
Conventionally understood as a self-portrait, Rosa’s painting has been reidentiied as
an allegory of Philosophy on the basis of the igure’s dress, his physiognomic differences
to Rosa’s more certain autonomous painted self-portraits and to Giovan Battista
Bonacina’s portrait print of the artist of 1662, and a complex documentary record
that suggests alternative identiications for the painting’s subject as ‘philosopher’ or
‘self-portrait’.4 The Philosophy is usually paired with another canvas of almost identical
dimensions, considered its pendant: an allegorical portrait of Rosa’s partner Lucrezia
Paolini as Poetry (plate 2). The earliest mention of both paintings is a record of
payment from Filippo Niccolini (1586–1666), on 19 September 1641, to a goldsmith
for a gilded frame to give to Rosa for ‘two half-igures’ by the artist that were then in
Niccolini’s possession.5 Marchese of Ponsacco and Camugliano, Niccolini was the
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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica

tutor and maestro di camera of Cardinal Gian’ Carlo de’ Medici, who in 1640 had invited
Rosa to Florence to work as court painter.6
An interpretation of the Philosophy as a self-portrait remains compelling. Best
understood as an allegorical self-portrait, it is (like all of Rosa’s self-portraits) Rosa in the
guise of a character.7 Certain physiognomic features are congruent with Rosa’s own,
but are iltered into a more abstract personiication. Rosa frequently gave the subjects
of philosophy and poetry a self-relexive turn. His interest in idealized self-portrayal, a
feature of his approach to portraiture more generally, is also apparent from his letters,
where he compares himself to the authors or protagonists of the poetic and philosophical
texts he scoured for pictorial ideas (ranging broadly from Plutarch’s Lives and Virgil’s
Georgics to Giovanni Tarcagnota’s Delle historie del mondo (1562), Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme
Liberata (1581), and Antonio Santacroce’s La Secretaria d’Apollo (1650)).8 The persecuted and
misunderstood held a particular appeal: ‘Am I not to become the Socrates, the Tasso, and
the Guarino of my own time’, Rosa lamented in 1654 to his best friend Giovan Battista
Ricciardi (1624–86), a poet and playwright from Pisa, amid the swirl of accusations of
plagiarism levied against Rosa by members of the Roman Accademia degli Umoristi.9 In 1661,

1 Salvator Rosa, Self-Portrait

(Philosophy), c. 1641. Oil on
canvas, 116.3 × 94 cm. London:
National Gallery. Photo: ©
National Gallery, London/Art
Resource, NY.

© Association of Art Historians 2013 946

Alexandra Hoare
2 Salvator Rosa, Lucrezia as
Poetry, c. 1641. Oil on canvas,
116.2 × 94.2 cm. Hartford,
CT: Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art. Photo: ©
Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art/Art Resource,
NY.
3 Salvator Rosa, The Genius of
Salvator Rosa, c. 1662. Etching
with drypoint, 45.5 × 27.5 cm.
London: British Museum.
Photo: © Trustees of the
British Museum.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
Rosa compared his unsociable nature to that of the misanthrope Timon of Athens, joking
that the rarity of his public appearances prompted applause in the street.10 Allegory,
too, is a prevailing theme in Rosa’s pictorial oeuvre, frequently employed to express
his multi-faceted virtuosity. His autonomous self-portraits, in which he embodies the
roles of painter, poet, soldier, philosopher and actor, ind a collective counterpart in his
etching, The Genius of Salvator Rosa (c. 1662) which depicts allegorically the constituents of his
creative genio, or spirit: Sincerità, Libertà, Pittura, Equità, and Satira (plate 3).11 Like many of Rosa’s
self-portraits, the London Philosophy operates simultaneously as self-image and allegory,
both speciic and universal, expressing a performative conception of identity that also
informed his life-long love of theatre.12
The ‘Arm-Sling’ Gesture
The role Rosa performs in the Philosophy is identiiable from his costume, comportment,
and props: the thick brown mantle, the stern facial expression, the placard with its
disapproving inscription, and the ominous dark clouds overhead all underscore the
subject as a moral invective, or vituperatio. This moral-philosophical theme is reinforced
and given an addition layer of meaning by the gesture of the igure’s left arm and hand
– pressed against his torso and tightly wrapped in the sling of his mantle. Scholars
have interpreted the igure’s comportment and attire in connection with the quasi-
antique dress of the philosopher. The gesture resonates with a conception of the artist
as philosopher, and its symbolic import has been interpreted alternatively as a reference
to silence or brevity of speech, defensive self-containment, or sincerity of conviction.13
Wrapping oneself in a cloak can also be linked with the desire to conceal artistic secrets,
as Giovan Pietro Bellori noted of Domenichino (who habitually ‘hid under his cloak
to draw, swathed like a philosopher in his pallium’), and we know from Rosa and his
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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica

4 Giovanni Antonio Boltrafio,

Portrait of a Young Man
(possibly Girolamo Casio), c.
1500. Oil on panel, 42.6 × 29.9
cm. Bakewell, Derbyshire:
Chatsworth House. Photo:
© Devonshire Collection,
Chatsworth/Reproduced by
permission of Chatsworth
Settlement Trustees/The
Bridgeman Art Library.

5 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-

Portrait in a Velvet Cap with
Plume, 1638. Intaglio etching,
13.4 × 10.3 cm. London:
British Museum. Photo:
© Trustees of the British
Museum.

6 Anonymous Roman copy

after a Greek original,
Aeschines, c. 79 CE. Marble,
210 cm (height). Naples:
Museo Archeologico
Nazionale. Photo: © Alinari/
Art Resource, NY.

biographers of his own inclinations in this regard.14 Conspicuously identiiable as the

‘arm-sling’ pose, however, the swaddled arm in Rosa’s Philosophy is one of the modes of
corporeal expression adopted by ancient Greek orators. Associated, perhaps, by modern
eyes with a state of physical injury, the ‘arm-sling’ pose (as it is conventionally referred
to by scholars of classical art and archaeology) is in fact one of numerous variations on
the theme of the restrained hand (analogous, for example, to the ‘hand-in-waistcoat’
pose15 ) (plate 4 and plate 5) that appear in portraiture from antiquity to the nineteenth
century. First seen in Greek fourth-century BCE portrait statues, one arm (usually, but
not always, the right) is ‘held diagonally across the chest and nestled inside the drapery
as if in a sling’, a pose that also performed the practical function of holding the toga in
place.16
In common use in the i fth-century BCE, the ‘arm-sling’ pose was endorsed
as a sign of ‘good bearing’, decency, modesty, and respect.17 Ancient texts locate

© Association of Art Historians 2013 948

Alexandra Hoare

it i rst in the statues of early Greek orators and

statesmen like Solon of Athens (c. 638–558 BCE),
an early paragon of moral virtue, and Aeschines
of Macedonia (389–331 BCE), one of the ten
Attic orators who were characterized (according
to Plutarch and Cicero, among others) by their
‘restraint and simplicity’.18 Aeschines, who
adopts the pose in a portrait statue (plate 6),19
explained it in his speech Against Timarchus, a
defence against the politician Timarchus’s
accusations of treason. Chastizing Timarchus for
public lewdness, Aeschines noted that Solon and
the orators of his generation adopted the ‘arm-
sling’ gesture when speaking in order to give
visual expression to their decorous self-control
and moral-ethical respectability (sˉ phrosynˉ) as
speakers: ‘And so decorous were those public men
of old – Pericles, Themistocles, and Aristeides . . .
that to speak with the arm outside the cloak, as we
do nowadays as a matter of course, was regarded
then as an ill-mannered thing, and they carefully
refrained from doing it.’20 Describing himself as
a ‘quiet and modest man’, Aeschines advocated
the revival of the pose, citing by way of example
the statue of Solon then in the market place in
Salamis, his arm slung inside his cloak.21

The Artist as Decorous Orator

The ‘arm-sling’ gesture saw a renewed popularity
in early modern portraiture. Frequently used by
Dutch and Flemish painters like Frans Hals (plate 7),
for whom it expressed a more pervasive interest in
the rhetorical potential of clothing and gesture and
the all’antica fashion, and articulated a social code of
masculine civility, the pose also appears in Italian
paintings like Francesco Albani’s portrait of the
lawyer and priest Andrea Calvi (plate 8).22 Artists,
in portraits and self-portraits, frequently adopt the
‘arm-sling’ pose as a sign of their own rhetorical
decorum. In Anthony Van Dyck’s Iconography (late
1620s), the gesture is adopted in a series of portrait
prints of artists as an apparent point of analogy with
the orator’s eloquence, virtue, wisdom and ancient
pedigree.23 Here, rhetorical gestures and clothing
produce portraits that operate simultaneously as
individuals and ideal types.24 The igures in Van
Dyck’s Iconography share certain commonalities with
Rosa’s Philosophy, such as the half-length treatment and
the inclusion of a descriptive Latin inscription. The
portraits of Adriaen Brouwer and Orazio Gentileschi

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica

(plate 9 and plate 10) are especially noteworthy, both of which display the ‘arm-sling’
pose and (in the case of Gentileschi) a furrowed brow comparable to that in Rosa’s
painting. As in other images of artists where the subject uses conversant hand gestures,
such as Agostino Carracci’s self-portrait of the 1580s (Galleria degli Ufizi, Florence) or
Justus Sustermans’s portrait of Giovanni Lanfranco of c. 1627 (private collection, Milan),
Rosa’s Philosophy presents the artist as participant in the popular art-theoretical topos of
ut pictura rhetorica.25 His is an image of the intellectual painter not merely as taciturn
philosopher but decorously eloquent orator, an association of particular prestige for
all artists, culminating as it did in Roger de Piles’s direct analogy in 1677 between the
painter and orator:

The painter is like the orator, and the sculptor like the grammarian. The
grammarian is correct and exact in his words, and he explains [his thoughts]
clearly and without ambiguity . . . The orator must have learned the things
that the grammarian knows, and the painter those known to the sculptor
. . . but the orator and the painter must go beyond them. The painter must
persuade our eyes as an eloquent man must touch our hearts. 26

7 Frans Hals, Portrait of

a Young Man, c. 1640–41.
Oil on canvas, 81 × 59 cm.
Vienna: Gemäldegalerie,
Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Photo: © Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna.

© Association of Art Historians 2013 950

Alexandra Hoare
8 Francesco Albani, Portrait
of Andrea Calvi, 1636. Oil on
canvas, 114 × 93 cm. Cardiff:
National Museum of Wales.
Photo: © National Museum of
Wales, Cardiff.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
The association was of great personal signiicance for
Rosa’s own moral-philosophical identity. Here it is
signiicant to recall one of the precepts of Leon Battista
Alberti’s rhetorical theory of art, in which he advocated
gestural restraint in the pictorial representation of
philosophers in particular (a category also newly
occupied by painters), who should ‘when speaking,
show modesty in every limb rather than the attitudes of
a wrestler’.27
In the Lucrezia as Poetry, Rosa treats his allegorical
subject according to the conventional symbolism of
emblem books like Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593).28 In
the Philosophy, however, the ‘arm-sling’ pose indicates
Rosa’s desire to produce a novel, unifying conceit for
the two distinct virtues of decorum and silence, usually
represented individually and in emblematic terms.29
Familiar with Cicero’s and Quintilian’s writings on
oratory, and with Plutarch’s histories of orators, Rosa
would also have encountered the ‘arm-sling’ pose
in early modern treatises on conduct, gesture and
physiognomy that cite from rhetorical authorities like
Quintilian. Rosa’s interest in these texts is attested
by his broader pictorial oeuvre, replete with a rich
and highly controlled vocabulary of gestures. The
movements of Rosa’s igures, evidence of his conviction about the mute eloquence
of physical gesture and facial expression as the key components of painted rhetoric,
can be found in treatises on humorology and physiognomy like Giambattista della
Porta’s widely read Fisonomia dell’huomo (1598) and texts on gestural expression like
Giovanni Bonifacio’s L’arte de’ cenni (1616).30 In his allegorical self-images, Rosa used
physiognomic and humorological codes to manipulate his natural facial features
in order to enhance certain aspects of his character. In the Philosophy, appearance
and expression are treated according to Della Porta’s principles. The igure’s half-
shadowed face, furrowed brow and thin, tightly pursed lips, which have been
interpreted in connection with the emblematic representation of silence, ind many
parallels in Della Porta’s physiognomic description of melancholy, a humor allied
with the intellectual introspection of poets and philosophers.31 For Della Porta,
lowering the brow also signalled annoyance, an emotion central to the censorious
identity of the orator and a vital component of Rosa’s self-image as moral satirist.
The facial expression of the igure in Rosa’s Philosophy has also been linked to a line
in his satire Il Tirreno of 1657: ‘I jest with the thrysus, and threaten with the brow.’32
Hand gestures are especially prevalent in Rosa’s istorie, as his contemporaries also
noted. Rosa’s friend, the poet Antonio Abati (c. 1600–67), for example, noted the
‘querulous’ gestures of the igures in Rosa’s landscapes.33 The gestures Rosa deploys
in his pictorial works also frequently correspond to the deinitions Bonifacio provides
in his L’arte de’ cenni: the ‘hand raised in denial’, for example, appears in Rosa’s painting
of Phryne and Xenocrates (1662–63, private collection, UK); the ‘joining of right hands’ or
‘pledge of faith’ features in The Conspiracy of Catiline (1663, Casa Martelli, Florence); and
the gesture of ‘enumeration’ appears in Rosa’s Saint John the Baptist Preaching in a Landscape
(late 1650s, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri).34 In Book I, Bonifacio describes the
‘hand below the mantle’ (the ‘arm-sling’ pose), a gesture also adopted by one of the
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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica
9 Schelte Adams Bolswert,
after Anthony van Dyck,
Adriaen Brouwer, probably
1626 or 1641. Engraving, 24
× 15.8 cm. Washington, DC:
National Gallery of Art.
Photo: Courtesy National
Gallery of Art, Washington.
10 Lucas Vorsterman, after
Anthony van Dyck, Orazio
Gentileschi, probably 1626 or
1641. Engraving, 24 × 15.8 cm.
Washington, DC: National
Gallery of Art. Photo:
Courtesy National Gallery of
Art, Washington.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
igures, at far right, in Rosa’s painting of Diogenes Casting Away his Bowl (1651–52, Statens
Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), by the protagonist in one of the prints from his
series of Figurine etchings (1656–58), and by a igure, at far left, in his etching of the
Academy of Plato (1662).35 Bonifacio makes special note of the gesture’s importance for
Solon and Aeschines as a sign of decorous eloquence and restraint.36 This description
appears shortly after two other entries on gestures related to silence, one of which
refers to a verse from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in which the allegorical igure
of ‘Silence’ is described as clothed in a brown mantle – a further, interesting point of
connection with the iconography and theme of Rosa’s painting .37
For Della Porta, expression was not only a manipulable code, but a decidedly
moral vocabulary for performing self-improvement, a tool in the exercise of
corporeal self-control also essential to the orator for conveying his moral message.38
Rosa’s belief in the body as an effective carrier of not merely subjective but ethical
meaning echoes the broader, classicist interpretation of the body as a text from
which moral character could be read.39 His activity as an actor gave him an additional
familiarity with the movements of the hands and the face, the central rhetorical
components of the affetti. In their biographies of the artist, both Filippo Baldinucci
and Giovanni Battista Passeri noted the vivacity of the poetry recitals Rosa hosted at
his private Accademia dei Percossi in Florence, during which he dazzled his listeners with
his ‘admirable expression of voice and gestures’ to such a degree that he seemed to
‘paint them with language’.40 The encomiastic poetry Rosa’s friends wrote in praise
of his paintings likewise framed the eficacy of his pictorial rhetoric in theatrical
terms.41 Baldinucci claims that Rosa adopted the popular practice of provare in se, or
952
Alexandra Hoare

self-embodiment of one’s subject in emulation of the actor, considered essential

to the painter’s skilful representation of emotion. Like the great ancient orator
Demosthenes who used a mirror to reine his gestures and rhetorical delivery, Rosa
purportedly kept a large mirror in his studio in order to study the movements of his
own body and face in composing his painted igures.42 That Rosa may have used his
own mirror relection while painting the Philosophy also bears upon the signiicance
of which of the artist’s hands is restrained in the ‘arm-sling’ pose. Rosa’s letters reveal
that he wrote with his right hand, and his Self-Portrait as a Painter (c. 1641–43, Galleria
degli Ufizi, Florence) also suggests he painted with his right.43 (In the presumed
mirror-relection of his Self-Portrait, Rosa poses with a paintbrush and arrow – the
latter signifying his profession as satirist – in his left hand, the meticulously painted
focal point of the composition. The pose would thus have freed his right hand to
paint the image.) If we likewise regard the igure in the Philosophy as Rosa’s mirror-
relection, then the restrained hand is, signiicantly, the artist’s right, painting
hand – the hand with which he exercises his pictorial rhetoric. In his Philosophy, Rosa
uses gesture to both emblematize and embody rhetoric itself, making mimeticism
and pathos the central themes of his painting. By using his own body as a model,
moreover, Rosa presents himself as the moral exemplum that is his subject.

Albrecht Dürer as Artist-Orator: A Source for Rosa’s Philosophy

Even more compelling than the Italian and Dutch examples above, which offer
iconographic precedents for Rosa’s Philosophy, is a self-portrait that incorporates the
‘arm-sling’ pose with a set of pictorial and compositional elements that, together,
produce a composition strikingly comprehensive in its resemblance to Rosa’s
painting: Albrecht Dürer’s witness self-portrait in his altarpiece of 1511, The Adoration
of the Trinity (plate 11 and plate 12).44 Among the most frequently reproduced of Dürer’s
self-images in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (in both paintings and
prints),45 the Adoration self-portrait shares with Rosa’s Philosophy not only the left-turned
three-quarter pose, the ‘arm-sling’ gesture and the penetrating stare, but also the
outdoor setting, the presence of an inscribed tablet supported by the artist’s hand, the
artist’s cap, and the brown mantle with black stripes. Dürer wears the kind of fur-
trimmed coat he considered a sign of his distinction – consistently reproduced in the
copies of his self-portraits46 – its stripes also echoed in the fabric clothing the igure
in Rosa’s Lucrezia as Poetry (plate 2). Both Dürer’s self-portrait and the igure in Rosa’s
Philosophy perform the simultaneous functions of portrait and allegory: Dürer’s image,
in particular, operates like a pictorial signature within the larger composition of his
altarpiece.47 The possibility that Rosa knew Dürer’s self-portrait suggests further
insights into both the composition and theme of the Philosophy. Many of Rosa’s images
show his interest in Dürer’s work, particularly prints by the German master like
the Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), the Melencolia I (1514), and Dürer’s various scenes of
witchcraft. Rosa’s interest ties him to the more pervasive seventeenth-century ‘Dürer
cult’.48 Aspects of Dürer’s seventeenth-century reputation, as a kind of rags-to-riches
folk-hero famed as a graphic artist, master of anatomy, polymath, melancholic and
proliic self-portraitist, would also have greatly appealed to Rosa.
Dürer’s own use of the ‘arm-sling’ pose in his Adoration self-portrait exempliies
his broader cultivation of a pictorial repertoire of rhetorical gesture in images like
the Christ Among the Doctors of 1506 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), a prelude
to the Roman seventeenth-century ‘age of eloquence’.49 In the Adoration self-portrait,
the gesture also provides the opportunity for Dürer to display in particular his
illusionistic virtuosity, the dramatic folds of the cascading mantle recalling his well-

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica

known drapery studies. Nowhere does Dürer comment explicitly on the subject
of the artist as orator, but his pictorial production offers evidence of his interest
in rhetoric and decorum, and in a letter of 1506 he likens himself to an orator,
interestingly in the context of a lack of exercise of restraint.50 Dürer was lauded
by contemporaries and posthumous admirers as a painter-poet, and celebrated in
particular for his virtue and decorum.51
Rosa might have seen one of the many copies after Dürer’s Adoration self-portrait,
the production of which had become a veritable industry by the early seventeenth
century. Especially noteworthy in connection with Rosa’s Philosophy is the fact that
most of the painted and graphic copies of Dürer’s Adoration self-portrait, including one
by Hans Sebald Lautensack (possibly a seventeenth-century copy of a lost original)
and another by an anonymous artist (plate 13 and plate 14), treat their model as an
isolated, autonomous subject.52 Lucas Kilian’s widely circulated Ehrentempel (Temple
of Honour) of c. 1628 (plate 15) is the kind of image Rosa might have seen: here Kilian
reproduces two of Dürer’s ‘witness’ self-portraits, extracting them from their
original settings in the Adoration altarpiece and the 1509 Heller Altar (The Coronation of the
Virgin). Both igures are accompanied by the inscribed tablets they each hold in their
respective altarpieces, standing before a triumphal arch festooned with symbols of
Dürer’s professional virtuosity.53 The inscription at the bottom of the print declares

11 Albrecht Dürer, The

Adoration of the Trinity, 1511.
Oil on wood panel, 135 × 123
cm. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Gemäldegalerie.
Photo: © Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna.

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Alexandra Hoare
12 Detail of Albrecht Dürer,
The Adoration of the Trinity,
1511.
13 (Attributed to) Hans
Sebald Lautensack, View
of Nürnberg with Albrecht
Dürer in the Foreground, 1553.
Oil on panel, 29 × 38.3 cm.
Hannover: Niedersächsisches
Landesmuseum. Photo:
© Niedersächsisches
Landesmuseum, Hannover/
Arthothek.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
Kilian’s idelity to the originals, and refers to the altarpieces from which the portraits
were taken.54
The visionary context of Dürer’s Adoration self-portrait, which presents him as
a kind of seer or witness to the apparition taking place above him, lends the ‘arm-
sling’ gesture he adopts a particularly prophetic, declarative meaning that is also
expressed in Rosa’s Philosophy. Like Saint John on Mount Patmos, Dürer appears in the
painting like a mystic observer of revelation, proclaiming with the tablet in his hand
his own prophetic declaration as ‘creator’ (‘FACIEBAT’) or recorder of the event.55
In presenting the viewer with the date (1511) of his ‘recording’ of the apparition,
Dürer produces a temporal tension between his own sixteenth-century ‘presentness’
and the timelessness of the event he records – a tension further enhanced by the
juxtaposition of the life-like self-portrait and the idealized biblical scene above.
Dürer’s visionary role, however, is sustained by the tablet he holds. As a tabula ansata,
a tablet with two dovetailed handles on either side that is intended to be held aloft
or fastened to a wall,56 it points speciically to the declarative dimension of Dürer’s
prophetic enterprise – one that ties him closely to the orator.57 Although the inscribed
tablets that Dürer and Rosa display are of different kinds (Dürer’s is a signature, while
Rosa’s is a philosophical maxim), they perform essentially self-referential functions.
They share, moreover, a united purpose in symbolizing the orator’s declarative
intent, offering a visual analogue for auditory experience. (In 1672, beset by illness,
Rosa in fact compared himself in his taciturnity to a taverlino or writing tablet: ‘I swear
to you,’ he wrote to Ricciardi, ‘that I’m suffering such gloomy days that you wouldn’t
be able to tell the difference between me and a little writing tablet – such that, if a law
was passed that men no longer had to speak, I’d be the irst one to embrace it, and to
preach it zealously. 58) Rosa’s inscription in particular, with its reference to speaking
and silence, highlights the acoustic dimension of artistic mimesis, soliciting an
emotive and auditory response from the viewer according to the rhetorical principle
of pathos. In its jointly declarative and solicitous condition (the igure ‘speaks’ the
words of the inscription while prompting the viewer to read it aloud), the painting
conveys a ‘double presence’ in its simultaneous presentation of a igure’s gaze and a
text.59 The same conceit is at work in Nicolas Poussin’s well-known self-portraits of
1649 (Staatliche Museen, Berlin) and 1650 (Musée du Louvre, Paris),60 as well as in
the Portrait of a Gentleman attributed to Zacchia il Vecchio (1519, Pinacoteca Comunale,
Lucca), where the igure holds a moralizing tablet inscribed ‘Ne quid nimis’ (‘Nothing
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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica
14 Anonymous, Portrait
of Albrecht Dürer, c. 1600.
Oil on copper, 22.5 × 15.9
cm. Nürnberg: Museen der
Stadt Nürnberg, Graphische
Sammlung (Property of
Albrecht-Dürer-Haus,
Nürnberg). Photo: Courtesy
of the Museen der Stadt
Nürnberg.
15 Lucas Kilian, Ehrentempel,
c. 1628. Engraving, 38 × 26.4
cm. London: British Museum.
Photo: © Trustees of the
British Museum.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
in excess’).61 Dürer’s and Rosa’s tablets also recall those of the great prophets, orators
and law-makers of antiquity such as Solon and Moses. Solon’s inscribed and publicly
displayed tablets of law, comprised of axones (wooden beams revolving in oblong
frames) and kyrbeis (stelae in stone or bronze), are perhaps echoed in the material of
Rosa’s tablet, variously interpreted by scholars as wood, stone or even the canvas-like
support of a painter’s panel.62 The igure in Rosa’s Philosophy seems only to rest his
hand on the edge of his tablet, which is tilted on a slight angle, suggesting it might be
made of a more substantial material like stone or wood, either rooted in or resting
on the ground. As the props of the active, eficacious orator, intimately tied to law-
making and its enforcement, tablets such as these express a desire to both persuade
and exert an enduring authority. With his tablet, Rosa’s protagonist in the Philosophy
becomes the artist as moral guide, eager to create a set of rules for the making of art,
inscribing his art-theoretical proclamations into his paintings and demanding the
viewer’s compliance.
Speaking in Silence
As a confrontational and expectational image, Rosa’s Philosophy underscores the
demonstrative power of painting itself, considered by orators as unique among the
arts for its accomplishment of rhetoric’s most prized achievement: enargeia. This is the
rhetorical principle of vividness, through which the orator (or artist) is able to place
the subject ‘before the very eyes of the audience’ and make ‘an abstract idea palpably
real and present’.63 Rosa’s Philosophy highlights the presentness of painting, the quality
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Plutarch saw as its point of difference from poetry (which offers events as if they
have already taken place), and a distinction Franciscus Junius noted in evidence
of painting’s superiority.64 The Philosophy resonates with a number of rhetorical
igures that hinge upon the relationship between seeing, silence and speech. Rosa’s
inscription is like a sententia, the rhetorical igure Aristotle deined as ‘thought’ in
which a pithy aphorism is used to summarize a preceding speech.65 The inscription
also recalls two rhetorical devices closely linked to enargeia, known as illustratio or
evidentia, whereby the orator produces a verbal description so lifelike the audience
actually sees his subject.66 The conceit of holding forth a tablet and ceasing to speak,
however, is particularly analogous to the rhetorical igure of aposiopesis, a break in the
oration in which the speaker – overcome by emotion or modesty – comes to a halt
and, allowing his audience to absorb his argument, supplements it with supporting
visual evidence like a written document or a painting.67 Quintilian describes
aposiopesis as a device for expressing passion and anger or giving ‘an impression of
anxiety or scruple’, the same emotional imperatives of Rosa’s painting, in which
silence – conceived not as an absence but as an integral moment of rhetorical speech
– becomes replete with expressive meaning and agency.68 Speaking and silence, the
pivotal concepts on which the sentiment of Rosa’s inscription turns, can therefore
be understood not as opposed conditions but as the uniied components of a
fundamental rhetorical category, one that is given visual expression and emphasis in
the ‘arm-sling’ pose.
A Latin variation on two Greek Pythagorean dictums from Stobeaus’s ifth-
century Anthologia (one of a number of such compilations popular in seventeenth-
century Florence), Rosa’s inscription demands that we ‘say something better’, or
exercise a qualitative judgment in our choice of words.69 Gabriele Finaldi suggested
the link between Rosa’s motto and a simlilar aphorism in Dionysius the Elder’s
Fragments: ‘Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.’70 Helen Langdon pointed
to a contemporary Florentine inscription in the Grand Duke’s audience chamber at
the Palazzo Pitti: ‘Rada tu parla, e sii breve e arguto’ (‘Talk little, and be brief and
witty’).71 Rosa, who did not know Greek but regarded it highly, was perhaps assisted
in the use or formulation of his own inscription (which turns Pythagoras’s Greek
into Latin) by knowledgeable colleagues like Ricciardi, from whom Rosa frequently
solicited subjects for paintings and poetry.72 Connections have been drawn between
the ‘silence’ of Rosa’s inscription and his engagement in philosophical currents
concerning the virtue of silence as a route to wisdom and truth. Pythagoras’s well-
known ‘rule of silence’ its well with the source of Rosa’s inscription, and inds
mention in Rosa’s letters and parallels in his collection of maxims, Il Teatro della Politica
(c. 1669).73 Interpreted in metapictorial terms, however, the inscription’s reference
to both speaking and silence has been understood as an allusion to the conventional
topos of ut pictura poesis, an idea further borne out by the Philosophy’s relationship to its
presumed pendant, Lucrezia as Poetry: the igure in the Philosophy represents ‘painting
as silent poetry’, which rivals and complements poetry (the Lucrezia pendant) in its
emotive and expressive aims.74 Along these same lines, the conceits of speaking and
silence can also be construed as an ut pictura poesis in praise of painting as incapable of
verbal description, playing on the popular early modern rhetorical topos of aporia or
speechlessness that yielded the victory to painting.75
The scholarly discourse on Rosa’s Philosophy as a pictorial ode to ut pictura poesis offers
a number of useful points of connection with the alternative (though connected)
interpretation, proposed here, of the painting as an ut pictura rhetorica. Silence – a
locus of restraint, invention, or philosophical virtue – is also an attribute of Pittura.76

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica
16 Salvator Rosa, Alexander in
the Studio of Apelles, c. 1662.
Etching with drypoint, 45.3
× 27.4 cm. London: British
Museum. Photo: © Trustees of
the British Museum.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
Wendy Roworth has argued that Rosa’s phrase ‘LOQVERE MELIORA SILENTIO’ can
be interpreted not only as ‘speaking better than silence’, but ‘speaking better through
silence’: an expression of the painter as wise moral philosopher who speaks with
his brush.77 This was the argument of Passeri’s academic discourse on silence, ‘Il
Silenzio’ (c. 1662–63), one of four discourses delivered at the Accademia di San Luca in
Rome. Here, the communicative erudition of Painting, although mute, outshines
the useless loquaciousness of Poetry. (This erudition, moreover, is linked to Cicero’s
perfect orator, well-read in all of the philosophical sciences.)78 Silence in this context
can also be linked to art theory: Rosa could be arguing, as Kristine Patz has suggested,
that it is better to keep silent than say something incorrect or ridiculous about
painting itself.79 This is the theme of Rosa’s etching of Alexander in the Studio of Apelles
(1662) (plate 16), in which Apelles attempts to silence Alexander’s ignorant comments
about painting – highlighting, moreover, the notion (frequently voiced by Rosa) of
the artist as privileged practitioner of decorous artistic judgment.80
The rhetorical argument of Rosa’s Philosophy operates in both textual and pictorial
(or performative) modes. Interpreted as a rhetorical rather than merely poetic-pictorial
category, the ‘silence’ of Rosa’s inscription in the Philosophy inds an important correlate
in the ‘arm-sling’ gesture adopted by the igure. The moral, rhetorical dimension
of silence (and of painting) is suggested by Rosa’s now-lost canvas entitled Pittura
Solitaria. Painted in Florence around 1640, it represented the silent, solitary female
personiication of Painting, motivated to break her silence in order to express an
incensed fury at the contemporary decline of the art – a moral indignation also echoed
in Rosa’s contemporary satires on painting, poetry and
music.81 An interpretation of silence as decorum inds
expression in a passage from Epictetus’s Encheiridion,
linked by Roworth to Rosa’s inscription, in which
silence is advocated over redundancy, excess and tedious
subject matter. Requesting ‘the suppression of idle talk,
rude language and behaviour, and . . . the avoidance of
. . . the company of those not cognizant of philosophy’,
Epictetus articulates the same admonishments levied by
Rosa against transgressors of artistic decorum.82
Rhetorical silence is not simply the void of speech,
but the skill of exercising restraint in its use. Interpreted
in a pictorial context, Rosa’s Philosophy demands
prudence, judgment and selectivity within the painter’s
practice: select the best possible subject and express it in
the best possible way. Judgment (giudizio), the complex
concept of reasoned, prudent selection central to early
modern art theory, is integral to the paragone of painting
and rhetoric, bearing as it does on the philosophy of
truth and virtue.83 With the increasing emphasis placed
on the moral content of early modern art, the virtuous
characteristics of the orator were transferred to the
artist who was required to appropriate the orator’s
skills and qualities of morality, judgment and eficacy.84
Conceived of by seventeenth-century practitioners
as the faculty of the individual artist and a sign of
autonomous agency, judgment (variously deined as an
innate, unlearnable faculty of the eye, the hand, or the
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Alexandra Hoare

mind) applied to all stages of the artistic process including invention, selection and
execution.85 Following the analogy of ut pictura rhetorica, the ‘something’ that Rosa’s
inscription requires the viewer to say can be likened to the invention (the res or materia
of the orator), while the ‘saying’ can be compared to the processes of selection and
delivery. Decorous judgment is required of both the orator and the artist throughout
this creative process.86
The moral imperative of the classicist theory to which Rosa subscribed meant
that the best kind of materia were noble, worthy subjects that, as Nicolas Poussin put
it, ‘should be great as would be battles, heroic actions, and divine things’.87 Rosa’s
preference for histories and philosophical subjects relects the more generally
endorsed hierarchy of genres, in which landscape and genre scenes ranked low
on the list. The primacy granted to history painting – or the ‘grand style’ (a genre
deemed inherently moral and virtuous by both ancient and seventeenth-century
classicist theorists) – is relected in Rosa’s own comments about histories, and battle
paintings in particular, as an iconographic route to professional glory.88 In addition
to its moral and erudite qualities, the ‘best’ kind of subject according to Rosa was
also of entirely novel origins and obscure or enigmatic in nature, a characteristic of
the Philosophy itself. Enigmatic iconography was deemed by certain viewers to be both
more pleasurable and memorable than easily legible images,89 and Rosa mocked the
notion that highly recognizable images might secure better prices on the art market
in his satire on painting, La Pittura.90 Historical accuracy was also paramount for Rosa,
as his epistolary comments make clear. In October 1666, he argued with Ricciardi
over the correct representation of the poet Pindar in his large canvas of Pan and Pindar –
particularly the question of whether or not he wore a beard – explaining his prudent
approach: ‘As for Pindar, I can’t ind in Plutarch this distinction as to whether or not
he wore a beard, and if I’d been obliged to adhere to the text, I’d have taken license
to alter it, in order to excuse the offense to good custom and modesty. . . . In my
opinion, it’s more important to represent the admirable aspects of poetry than its
beauties, so as not to fall into the error I condemn other painters for in my satire on
Painting. It’s true that I’ve rarely included any beards.’91
For Rosa, then, the best kind of subject was historically accurate, emotionally
affective, rendered with an idiosyncratic and inimitable painterly brush, and chosen
by the artist himself (‘Woe to him’, wrote Baldinucci of Rosa’s clients, ‘who dared to
administer his thoughts or prescribe any manner of order on his inventions!’92 ). These
conditions emphasized the artist’s freedom and subjective agency, a perennial concern
for Rosa and an underlying dimension of his Philosophy.93 In this regard Rosa differed
from Poussin, who promoted invention as the artist’s domain but (like Torquato
Tasso, his guide) considered representation rather than content the primary realm for
the artist’s display of agency. For Poussin, novelty consisted in putting a new spin on
existing ideas in their inventive recombination.94 For Rosa, conversely, both content
and style (or the res and verba of rhetoric) were sites of autonomous self-expression.
As indices of individuality, the content and its expression (the ‘something’ and the
‘saying’) alluded to in Rosa’s Philosophy suggest, too, that the painting is as much about
who should be doing the choosing as it is about what subject should be chosen.95

Demosthenes, Bernini, and the Bamboccianti

Rosa’s own writings, together with those of his biographers, reveal his interest in
judicious decorum as both an art-theoretical category and a principle of everyday conduct.
The themes of decorum and judgment appear throughout Rosa’s satires on poetry, music
and painting in the context of composition and the choice of subject matter.96 Rosa’s

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica

biographer Passeri called him a ‘truly Christian painter, who evades obscenity’,97 while
Baldinucci, making special note of Rosa’s prudence, his skilled exercise of judgment,
and his ‘natural eloquence’ (as well as his ‘mute eloquence’ or ‘muta facondia’ in painting),
testiied to Rosa’s conviction about judgment as a subjective venue for the display of his
superior opinions in matters of painting: in evidence of Rosa’s ‘typically very sharp’ (in
the dual sense of discerning and acerbic) judgment, Baldinucci recounts the story of
Rosa’s exchange with a certain dilettante who, looking at a painting in Rosa’s company,
praised it highly; in full agreement with him, but desirous to belittle the man’s opinion
in favour of his own, Rosa replied: ‘You praise this picture highly, but think what you
would have done if you had seen it with the eyes of Salvator Rosa!’98 Rosa’s preoccupation
with decorum in the years just before and after he painted the Philosophy (that is, from
around 1638 through the 1640s) is suggested by a series of biographical anecdotes about
the artist and works of art and writing he produced in those years. The irst of these is
Passeri’s reference, in his biography of the artist, to a now-lost encomium entitled ‘The
Demosthenes of Painting’.99 Written by Rosa’s friend Niccolò Simonelli (c. 1611–71) – a
connoisseur and art dealer instrumental in Rosa’s introduction to the Roman art world in
the late 1630s, and in his re-introduction to it in the early 1650s – the poem is one of many
compositions written by friends in praise of Rosa’s paintings.100 Intended (and successful
in its aim, according to Passeri) to promote Rosa’s talents as an emerging artist, Simonelli’s
poem praised in particular a now-lost Tityus that was painted in Naples and sent to
Simonelli in Rome for display at the annual exhibition of the Festa di San Giuseppe at the
Pantheon, probably in 1638.101 The Tityus is now lost, and was for a long time presumed to
be known through a 1786 engraving by Ferdinando Gregori. Various scholars, however,
have proposed that Rosa’s large painting of Prometheus (plate 17), which probably dates to the
same period, may be the canvas in question, and that Passeri misidentiied the subject.102
The allegorical content of Simonelli’s poem, ‘The Demosthenes of Painting’, is
suggested by the title, which likens the young, ambitious Rosa to Demosthenes of Athens,
the great ancient orator popular in early modern intellectual circles as the paragon of
eloquence.103 Perhaps Simonelli drew from a work like the Encomium on Demosthenes by
Lucian,104 an ancient Greek satirist whose writings also held a particular appeal for
Rosa himself.105 Quintilian had drawn direct parallels between artists and orators in
his attempt to use the progress of the ine arts to illustrate that of oratory.106 In the early
modern period, however, orators were less frequent points of direct comparison for
artists (Guido Reni, for example, was described as an orator by Adriano Banchieri in his
1633 panegyric on Reni’s Abduction of Helen, and Demosthenes appears, along with Cicero, in
Giulio Cesare Guarini’s epistolary praise of Reni’s pictorial skills), although the vocabulary
of rhetoric was often borrowed to celebrate an artist’s descriptive and emotive prowess.107
Simonelli’s poem for Rosa perhaps echoed the praise lavished on the painter in poems by
other friends, with variations on the conventional theme of the expressive and eloquent
paintbrush as mimetic rival of Nature, rhetorical talents that a subject like Tityus or
Prometheus presented a particularly good opportunity to showcase. (Life-giving powers,
not incidentally, are themselves central to the story of Prometheus, to whom Giambattista
Manzini had explicitly likened Guido Reni for the ‘vivifying’ force of his pictorial
talents.)108 The visceral animation and illusionism of Rosa’s Prometheus was celebrated by his
friends, a rhetorical achievement that was surely not lost on Simonelli.109 Rosa’s Prometheus
was praised in a poetic letter by his friend Paolo Vendramin, the Venetian ambassador to
Florence, in which the author constructs a paragone of poetry and painting and highlights
the emotional eficacy of Rosa’s graphic representation of torture. Lauding Rosa as a
‘ilosofo nel dipingere’, Vendramin also draws upon the analogies between painting, rhetoric
and theatre: ‘You have expressed Prometheus in such a savage attitude because your

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workshops are theatres, your canvases are veins, your colours are events, and your igures
are performances, which purify spectators’ emotions through moral imitation.’ The hand
that painted the image, says Vendramin, reveals its owner to be a master of ‘docta loqui digitis’,
that is, of ‘talking with the ingers’.110 The gruesome verisimilitude of Rosa’s depiction of
Prometheus might well have caused offence to some viewers, and Rosa had certainly been
accused of transgressing decorum on other occasions – for the controversial content of his
poetic satires, for example, which he refused to censor, or for satirical paintings like his
Allegory of Fortune (1659, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), a thinly veiled critique of the
papal court.111 But in its rhetorical, and therefore moral, condition, Rosa’s particularly gory
treatment of his subject in the Prometheus can be defended as ‘decorous’ (and excused from
any potential offence) – just as Vendramin suggests in his poem – according to the essence
of the term: the suiting of style and treatment to subject matter.
Renowned for his skill in improvised speech, his inventiveness, his iery
disposition, and his passionate pursuit of civic freedom, Demosthenes seems an
apt doppelganger for the artistic persona Rosa began to cultivate in Florence in the

17 Salvator Rosa,
Prometheus, c.1639–42 (?).
Oil on canvas, 220 × 176 cm.
Rome: Galleria Nazionale
d’Arte Antica, Palazzo
Corsini. Photo: Courtesy
of the Soprintendenza
Speciale per il Patrimonio
Storico Artistico ed
Etnoantropologico e per il
Polo Museale della città di
Roma.

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica

1640s.112 Demosthenes was a model of moral virtue, and Simonelli perhaps intended
Rosa as a ‘new’ Demosthenes who would advance and improve the art of painting.113
Demosthenes was also well known as the great rival of Aeschines, and Simonelli’s
choice of epithet could have spurred or revived in Rosa an interest in these ancient
orators and their rivalrous discourse over the orator’s decorous display: Aeschines’s
complaints about Timarchus’s conduct were echoed in similar charges against
Demosthenes, whom Aeschines accused for his ‘debased proclivities’ and ‘lack of self-
control’ in oratory, advocating in this instance, as before, a remedy in the adoption of
the ‘arm-sling’ gesture.114 Demosthenes, in turn, challenged Aeschines on the necessity
of the ‘arm-sling’ pose, promoting instead a general adoption of corporeal modesty.115
In this he echoed Quintilian, who had recommended on one occasion that the orator
conduct a certain ‘bodily indecorousness’ in letting the toga slip from the body.116
Elsewhere, however, Quintilian had himself condemned wild gestures, advocating the
orator’s restraint of his left hand.117 Like Demosthenes, Aeschines was also praised for
his oratorical skills, his wit, and his fondness for poetry,118 all points of connection with
Rosa, for whom an association with Aeschines allowed an appropriation of Simonelli’s
poetic tactic of self-fashioning and the opportunity to create his own ancient moral-
philosophical persona in pictorial form.
The artist’s moralizing incentive underlies a second biographical event that helps
contextualize the Philosophy’s epideictic sentiment: a theatrical performance in Rome,
in 1639, the year before Rosa moved to Florence. In 1635, when Rosa had irst moved
to Rome from Naples,119 he struggled to make a name for himself as a painter and
turned to acting – street performance, in particular – as an alternative route to fame.
Acquiring some public recognition, Rosa began to gather his friends at his house
on the Via Margutta to devise more elaborate, improvised comedic performances.
During a fateful public performance in 1639, Rosa appeared on stage dressed as
Coviello Formica (his unique spin on one of the zanni characters of the commedia
dell’arte) and, agreeing with the other characters that a comedy would relieve them
from the heat, laid down a few ground rules with his prologue:

I don’t want us to act comedies like some people who spread dirt about all
and sundry, because, in due course, you can see that the dirt spreads faster
than the poet’s ink. And I don’t want us to bring on stage couriers, brandy
sellers, goatherds and rubbish of that sort, which are the folly of an ass.120

Well known for his elaborate, machine-driven performances, Gianlorenzo Bernini had
earlier that year performed a comedy (probably the Fiera di Farfa) in which, as Passeri
recounts, in order to lend naturalism to the representation of Dawn, he had introduced
all manner of extraneous characters, including ‘brandy-sellers, couriers and goatherds
in the city, things entirely against the rules that do not allow any such personage who
is not included in the story’.121 Bernini was in the audience during Rosa’s performance,
and took revenge on him for his mockery in subsequent comedic productions.122 Passeri
presents the episode as a trigger for Rosa’s move to Florence, noting the artist’s adoption
of ‘complete prudence’ in dealing with the incident, ‘keeping to the modest recreations
of his friends’.123 Implicit in this affair is its close connection to the heated and prolonged
seventeenth-century debates over decorum and morality in the visual arts, debates that,
not incidentally, often made gesture and action particular points of concern and that
culminated in the French academic discourse on decorum and unity of action.124
Rosa’s moral castigation of Bernini’s transgression of theatrical decorum
inds echoes in a third context of relevance to the Philosophy: Rosa’s lamentations

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over the iconographic indiscretions of the Bamboccianti, a seventeenth-century

Roman community of Dutch and Flemish genre painters led by Pieter van Laer
(Il Bamboccio). In his satire on painting, La Pittura, Rosa famously chastized the
Bamboccianti and their unenlightened patrons for heroicizing low-life subjects,
‘boors and rogues and pickpockets, vineyards, carriages, limekilns, and inns, a
multitude of drunkards and gluttons, scab-ridden tobacconists and barbers, baggy
pants loafers, who search for lice and scratch themselves . . . one who urinates, one
who defecates, and one who sells tripe to a harlot.’125 The satire itself can be dated to
1650, but it expresses a moralizing inclination apparent in the poetic and pictorial
work of Rosa’s earlier years in Florence, and one circulating at the time among other
artists, art theorists and their colleagues.126 In his satires of those years, La Musica
(1641) and La Poesia (1642), Rosa also lambastes contemporary musicians as a ‘crowd
of vagabond saltimbancs’ and poets as ‘erudite brutes’, accusing both of being servile,
ignorant, lascivious and incompetent.127 Rosa’s critique of the Bamboccianti painters
is usually interpreted as part of his desire to distance himself from the traditions of
genre and landscape painting that launched his career in Naples, in favour of the
grand history painting of the classical tradition. But it also relects a broader epideictic
critical viewpoint among contemporary painters like Andrea Sacchi, Francesco
Albani, Pietro Testa, and Lorenzo Lippi (who was Rosa’s good friend),128 as well as
theorists like Giovanni Battista Armenini, whose exhortation of artists to seek only
noble and decorous subject matter anticipates the later French academic discourse on
artistic judgment, encapsulated in the writings of Charles Alphonse Dufresnoy.129
In their critique of the Bamboccianti and other offenders, Rosa and his colleagues
emphasize that decorum is demanded of personal conduct and appearance as much
as subject matter. Like Aeschines, who criticized Timarchus for his ‘lewd’ behaviour,
or Baldassare Castiglione, who in his inluential Il Cortegiano reprimanded Roberto da
Bari for allowing his clothes and shoes to fall off while dancing, the protagonist of
Rosa’s Philosophy censures contemporaries who threaten the classicist ideal of the artist-
orator as a good citizen and instructive model.130 Rosa’s painting performs like the
honoriic portrait busts or statues of ancient orators, produced in order to preserve the
ideal of the orator as the voice and guide of civilization and to remedy the overthrow
of this ideal by offering lasting, instructive externalizations of the orator’s desirable
moral-ethical characteristics.131 By using his own body as the model for the decorous,
eloquent orator-painter in his painting (the moral censor, exemplar and corrective
to the imperfect painters of his day), Rosa presents himself as the worthy subject
he seeks, giving visual force to the ancient adage that the orator’s good judgment is
achieved only through self-knowledge.132 The ‘arm-sling’ gesture emblematizes and
embodies Rosa’s eloquent, mimetic skill, while the inscription locates this process more
speciically in the artist’s search for exemplary and eficacious invenzioni. The Philosophy
responds to Socrates’s anxiety about texts that, like images, can suffer illegibility or
incomprehension as a consequence of their muteness: ‘it can fall into the hands of those
who do not understand it, and if so has no way of explaining itself, or if it is ill-treated
it has no way to answer back.’133 Rosa overturns the potential ineptitude of the mute
picture by giving visual expression to the subject of silent speech itself: located at the
conceptual and compositional crux of his painting, the rhetorical gesture and the
litigious dictum jointly comprise the rhetorical device of actio (the union of voice and
gesture), considered to be the most important component of oratory on account of its
forceful presentation of emotion.134 Interpreted as an allegory of ut pictura rhetorica, Rosa’s
Philosophy presents not only a self-relexive and metapictorial message about silence and
speech, but one concerning decorous invention and expression, the primary tasks of

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the rhetorical painter and fundamental elements of Rosa’s moral-ethical viewpoint. The
‘arm-sling’ pose declares both the oratorical imperative and procedure of Rosa’s poetic-
philosophical enterprise as an artist, announcing his rhetorical skills of eloquence and
the decorous manner in which he deploys them.
Notes
This article expands signiicantly upon an idea I irst developed
while writing my doctoral dissertation in 2008–09. I would
like to thank Elizabeth Cropper, Jessica N. Richardson, Joseph
Hammond, and Kathryn Barush for their careful reading of drafts
and for their comments. I also wish to thank Dawson Carr and
Nicholas Donaldson at the National Gallery, London, for allowing
me to examine Rosa’s Philosophy and its conservation and
curatorial iles in June 2011.
1 See for example Luigi Salerno, L’opera completa di Salvator Rosa, Milan, 1975;
Walter Regel and Hartmut Köhler, Hoch gerühmt, fast vergessen, neu gesehen:
der italienische Maler und Poet Salvator, Würzburg, 2007; Salvator Rosa tra Mito e
Magia, Naples, 2008; Almo Paita, Salvator Rosa. La leggenda del pittore maledetto,
Florence, 2008; and the January 2011 volume of Burlington Magazine
(153: 1294, 2011).
2 See Wendy Roworth, Pictor Succensor: A Study of Salvator Rosa as Satirist, Cynic
and Painter, New York, 1978, esp. 165 and 251; and Helen Langdon, ed.,
Salvator Rosa, London, 2010, 18–28, 30–2, 108–9 and 194–201.
3 On the rhetorical dimension of Rosa’s Philosophy see also Roworth,
‘Salvator Rosa’s self-portraits: Some problems of identity and
meaning’, The Seventeenth Century, 4, 1989, 142–3; and Victoria von
Flemming, ‘Giochi di ruolo: gli autoritratti iorentini di Salvator Rosa’,
in Elena Fumagalli et al., eds, Firenze milleseicentoquaranta. Arti, lettere, musica,
scienza, Venice, 2010, 282, 301–9.
4 On Rosa’s Philosophy, see Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 108–9. For Rosa’s
self-portraits, see Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 17 (ig. 5), 29 (ig. 13), 50
(ig. 19), and Brigitte Daprà in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, Naples, 2008,
62 (ig. 5). For Bonacina’s engraving, see Andreas Stolzenburg, in
Salvator Rosa. Genie der Zeichnung, Cologne, 1999, frontispiece and 51–2.
5 Riccardo Spinelli, ‘Mecenatismo mediceo e mecenatismo privato: il
caso Niccolini’, in Firenze milleseicentoquaranta, 276. Two inscriptions on
the backs of the Philosophy and Lucrezia as Poetry attest to their Niccolini
provenance: Roworth, ‘The consolations of friendship: Salvator Rosa’s
self-portrait for Giovanni Battista Ricciardi’, Metropolitan Museum Journal,
23, 1988, 106–9, and igs 6 and 7.
6 See Passeri, Vite, 423; Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 448 and 450; and Volpi,
‘Filosofo nel dipingere: Salvator Rosa tra Roma e Firenze (1639-1659)’,
in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 30, and 43 note 22.
7 See Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 109, and Roworth, ‘Self-portraits’, 118.
8 See Gian Giotto Borrelli, ed., Salvator Rosa: Lettere, Naples, 2003, letters
51, 114, 119, 134, 176, 177 and 241. On Rosa’s portraiture, see Daprà
in, Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 58–65; and Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa,
102–5.
9 Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letter 176: ‘non son io divenuto il Socrate, il Tasso
et il Guarino de’ tempi miei’. On Rosa and the Umoristi see Uberto
Limentani, ‘La Satira dell’Invidia di Salvator Rosa e una polemica
letteraria del Seicento’, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 134, 1957,
570–85.
10 Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letter 241.
11 On the print, see Richard Wallace, ‘The genius of Salvator Rosa’, Art
Bulletin, 47, 1965, 471–80, and Roworth, Pictor Succensor, 69–93.
12 On Rosa as an actor, see Isabella Molinari, ‘Il teatro di Salvator Rosa’,
Biblioteca Teatrale, 49/51, 1999, 195–248; Natalia Gozzano, ‘Salvator
Rosa, i Colonna e la Commedia dell’arte: il mondo del teatro dipinto
e recitato nella Roma del Seicento’, in Sybille Ebert-Schifferer et al.,
eds, Salvator Rosa e il suo tempo 1615–1673, Rome, 2010, 103–22; Hoare,
‘Salvator Rosa as “amico vero”: the role of friendship in the making
of a free artist’, PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010, 40–75;
and Nicola Michelassi, ‘Il Teatro a Firenze negli anni quaranta del
seicento’, in Firenze milleseicentoquaranta, 133–49.
13 See Langdon, ‘Salvator Rosa in Florence’, Apollo, 100: 151, 1974,
190; Roworth, ‘Self-portraits’, 137; Jon R. Snyder, ‘Sincerity in
© Association of Art Historians 2013
seventeenth-Century Italy’, Rinascimento, 43, 2003, 273–5; Joanna
Woodall and Jephta Dullaart, ‘Salvator Rosa (1615 -73)’, in Anthony
Bond and Joanna Woodall, eds, Self-Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary,
London, 2005, 120, cat. 18; Ernst Rebel and Norbert Wolf, eds, Self-
Portraits, Los Angeles, CA, 2008, 42; Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 108; and
Flemming, ‘Giochi di ruolo’, 307–8.
14 Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed.
Evalina Borea, Turin, 1976, 329. On Rosa’s secrecy, see Baldinucci,
Notizie, 5: 438 and 487, and Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letter 86.
15 Arline Meyer, ‘Re-dressing Classical statuary: The eighteenth-century
“hand-in-waistcoat” portrait’, Art Bulletin, 77: 1, 1995, esp. 49, 53 and
57.
16 On the ‘arm-sling’ pose, see Theodore Reinach, ‘Poet or law-giver?’,
Journal of Hellenic Studies, 42: 1, 1922, 59; G. M. A. Richter, The Portraits of
the Greeks, London, 1965, I: 84, II: 212–15; Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates:
The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, Berkeley, CA, 1996, 43–50; and
Sheila Dillon, Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture, Cambridge, 2006, 74.
17 Reinach, ‘Poet or law-giver?’, 59; and Zanker, Mask of Socrates, 49–50.
18 Plutarch, Lives (Life of Solon), III.3–4, 411; Cicero, Orator, viii.26–9.
19 Richter, Portraits, II: 213, no. 6, and ig. 1369, and Dillon, Ancient Greek
Portrait Sculpture, 5, 26 (n. 8) and 61.
20 Aeschines, Speeches, ‘Against Timarchus’, 25–6.
21 Aeschines, Speeches, ‘Against Timarchus’, 1, 4 and 25. On Solon’s statue,
see Dillon, Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture, 61.
22 See Diana De Marly, ‘The establishment of Roman dress in
seventeenth-century portraiture’, Burlington Magazine, 117: 868, 1975,
esp. 443; and Meyer, ‘Re-dressing Classical statuary’, 49, 53. For Hals,
see Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, New York, 1989, 277
(cat. 45), 278 (cat. 53), 280 (cat. 71), 282 (cat. 87), 283 (cat. 95), 284
(cats. 97, 99, 101), 285 (cats. 106, 107), 286 (cat. 118), and 287 (cat.
124). On Albani, see Catherine Puglisi, Francesco Albani, New Haven,
1999, 169 (cat. 81).
23 See Marie Mauquoy-Hendrickx, L’Iconographie d’Antoine Van Dyck: Catalogue
raisonné, Brussels, 1991, 1: 103–4, 120–1, 132–3, 154, and 2: Pl. 3 (2
II), Pl. 19 (21 IV), Pl. 31 (42 II), Pl. 53 (83 II); and Rita Göke, Studien zum
Künstlerbildnis des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in England, Münster, 2000, 111–13.
24 On the ‘artist as orator’ in Netherlandish painting, see Hans-Joachim
Raupp, Untersuchengen zu Künstlerbildnis und Künstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden
im 17. Jahrhundert, Hildesheim, 1984, 87–8, 96–114 and 263–6.
25 For Agostino’s self-portrait, see Evalina Borea, ed., Pittori bolognesi del
Seicento nelle gallerie di Firenze, Florence, 1975, 36–8 (cat. 26) and plate
96. For Sustermans’ painting, see Flavio Caroli, ed., L’Anima e il Volto:
ritratto e isiognomica da Leonardo a Bacon, Milan, 1998, 199. On the rhetorical
theory of painting, see in particular: R. G. Austin, ‘Quintilian on
painting and statuary’, The Classical Quarterly, 38: 1/2, 1944, 17–26;
John R. Spencer, ‘Ut Rhetorica Pictura: A study in Quattrocento theory
of painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20: 1/2, 1957,
26–44; and Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of
Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450, Oxford,
1971, 19, 110, 117–18 and 138.
26 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in
the French Classical Age, Berkeley, CA, 1993, 159; De Piles, ‘Seconde
conversation sur la peinture’, 90–1: ‘Le peintre est comme l’Orateur,
& le Sculpteur comme le Grammerien. Le Grammerien est correct &
juste dans ses mots, il s’explique nettement & sans ambiguité dans
ses discours . . . L’Orateur doit ester instruit des choses que sçait le
Grammerien, & le Peintre de celles que sçait le Sculpteur . . . mais &
l’Orateur, & le Peintre, sont obligez de passer outre. Le Peintre doit
persuader les yeux comme un home Eloquent doit toucher le coeur.’
27 Alberti, On Painting, ed. Cecil Grayson, London, 2004, Book II, 73.
28 On the Lucrezia as Poetry, which displays the attributes of Cesare Ripa’s
‘Furor Poetico’, see Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 108–9; and Ripa,
Iconologia, ed. Piero Buscaroli, Milan, 1992, 154–5.
29 For conventional representations of prudence, decorum and
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Alexandra Hoare
judgment, see Liana Cheney, ‘Giorgio Vasari’s Prudence: A
personiication of good judgment’, in Giorgio Vasari’s Teachers: Sacred and
Profane Art, New York, 2007, esp. 183–4; and Claire Pace and Janis Bell,
‘The allegorical engravings in Bellori’s lives’, in Janis Bell and Thomas
Willette, eds, Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in
Seventeenth-Century Rome, Cambridge, 2002, 211. On Florentine images
of silence, see Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 170–1, and Novella Barbolani di
Montauto, ‘Giovanni da San Giovanni nella villa La Quiete’, in Mina
Gregori, ed., Fasto di Corte. La decorazione murale nelle residenze dei Medici e dei
Lorena. Da Ferdinando I alle Reggenti (1587–1628), Florence, 2005, 1: 119–21.
30 On Rosa’s interest in Della Porta, see Fitz Darby 1962, 304; Salerno
1963, 43; Horak, in Naples 2008, 138, cat 25; Rak, in Naples 2008, 89;
and Langdon, in Naples 2008, 54. On Rosa’s interest in Della Porta,
see Delphine Fitz Darby, ‘Ribera and the Wise men’, Art Bulletin, 44,
1962, 304; Luigi Salerno, Salvator Rosa, Milan, 1963, 43; Marco Horak,
‘Filosofo in meditazione’, in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 138, cat. 25;
Michele Rak, ‘Cade il mondo. Icone, magia, saperi e devozione nelle
satire di Salvator Rosa’, in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 89; and Langdon,
‘Salvator Rosa, gli ultimi anni (1660-73)’, in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia,
54.
31 Giambattista della Porta, Della isonomia dell’huomo . . . libri sei, Vicenza,
1615, Book II, chapter III ‘Delle sopraciglia’, 49. The themes of
melancholia, silence and prudence are echoed in Rosa’s drawing of
an Allegory of Mortality (1640s, Teylers Museum, Haarlem): Michael
Mahoney, The Drawings of Salvator Rosa, New York, 1977, 1: 223–4,
no. 13.3; and Roworth, Pictor Succensor, 117–18 and 138. On Rosa’s
melancholic humor, see Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letters 132, 158, 174, 178,
221, 276, 285 and 288.
32 Il Tirreno, v. 108 (Romei, ed., Satire, 199): ‘Scherzai col Tirso, e minaccai
col ciglio’. See Volpi, in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 35, 44 n. 70.
33 For Abati, see Giovanni Alfredo Cesareo, Poesie e lettere di Salvator Rosa,
Naples, 1892, 2: 149–55. For Vendramin, see Caterina Volpi, ‘Salvator
Rosa, nuovi documenti e rilessioni sul primo periodo romano e su
quello iorentino’, Storia dell’arte, 120, 2008, 91–2. On Rosa’s academy,
see Volpi, ‘The great theatre of the world: Salvator Rosa and the
academies’, in Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 51–73; and Hoare, ‘Salvator
Rosa and the Accademia dei Percossi’, in Salvator Rosa e il suo tempo,
33–42.
34 Bonifacio, L’arte de’ cenni, Book I, 304, 290–2 and 330–1. For the
paintings see Langdon, in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 144, cat. 28;
Wanda Romano, in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 146, cat. 29; Salomon, in
Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 226–7, cat. 38.
35 Richard Wallace, The Etchings of Salvator Rosa, Princeton, NJ, 1979, 211,
cat. 74; Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 84 and ig. 48; and Wallace, Etchings,
273–4, cat. 109.
36 Bonifacio, L’arte de’ cenni, Book I, 306–7: ‘. . . così nel voler far
commotione negli animi de gli auditori bisogna cavar fuori le mani,
e con i gesti di quelle non meno che con le parole esprimer quelle
cose che hanno alcuna contradittione. Ma sicome il pallio era proprio
de’ Greci, e la toga de Romani: così questi parlando teneano le mani
scoperte, e quelli bene spesso sotto il mantello le coprivano, non
essendo il pallio così commodo al gestire, come la toga: onde Eschine
Oratore Greco parlando contra Timarcho lo biasima che troppo
spesso inter dicendum manus extra pallium haberet. Et in Salamina
era la statua di Solone, che fu tra Greci eloquentissimo, la quale
havea le mani sotto il mantello.’ John Bulwer’s illustrated Chirologia and
Chironomia, 1644 (ed. James W. Cleary, Carbondale and Edwardsville,
1974, 175), also cites Aeschines and Solon in reference to the ‘arm-
sling’ pose.
37 Bonifacio, L’arte de’ cenni, 302 and 306; Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, Canto
XIV, xciv. On Ariosto’s mantel bruno and Rosa’s Philosophy see Michael
Levey, The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Schools, London, 1971,
200; and Kristine Patz, ‘Selbstbildnis, um 1641’, in Ulrich Pisterer and
Valeska von Rosen, eds, Der Künstler als Kunstwerk. Selbstporträts vom Mittelalter
bis zur Gegwart, Stuttgart, 2005, 82.
38 Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, Cambridge, 2001,
65 and 73; and Katherine MacDonald, ‘Humanistic self-representation
in Giovan Battista Della Porta’s Della Fisonomia Dell’uomo: Antecedents and
innovation’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 36: 2, 2005, 409–10.
39 See Anna Bryson, ‘The rhetoric of status’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel
Llewellyn, eds, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
1540–1660, London, 1990, 144 and 148.
40 Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 496–7; and Passeri, Vite, 427–8.
41 On these poems, see Hoare, ‘Salvator Rosa as “Amico Vero”’, 195–213;
and Floriana Conte, ‘Fortuna di Salvator Rosa nella letteratura del
tempo’, in Salvator Rosa e il suo tempo, 57–66.
42 Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 582. On Demosthenes, see Plutarch, Lives (Life of
Demosthenes), xi.2. On ‘provare in se’, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria,
VI.ii.26; and Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of
Painting, New York, 1967, 23–32.
43 For the painting, see Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 29, Fig. 13.
44 On Dürer’s altarpiece, painted for a chapel in the Zwölfbrüderhaus,
Nuremberg, see Karl Schütz, Albrecht Dürer im Kunsthistorischen Museum,
Milan, 1994, 78, cat. no. 5.
45 See Barbara T. Ross, ‘Prints depicting Albrecht Dürer’, Record of the
Art Museum, Princeton University, 30: 2, 1971, 65–75; and Andrea
S. Bubenik, ‘The reception of Albrecht Dürer in Central Europe,
1528–1700: Aspects of art, science and collecting’, PhD Dissertation,
Queen’s University, Kingston, 2007.
46 See Hans Rupprich, ed., Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, Berlin, 1956–69, 1:
55 (Nr. 8), 57 (Nr. 9), and 152 (diary entry 5 August 1520).
47 André Chastel, ‘Zu vier Selbstbildnissen Albrecht Dürers aus den
Jahren 1506 bis 1511’, in Ernst Ullmann, ed., Albrecht Dürer. Kunst im
Aufbruch, Leipzig, 1972, 37; and Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-
portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, IL, 1993, 112.
48 On the ‘Dürer cult’, see Keith Andrews, ‘Dürer’s posthumous fame’, in
Charles R. Dodwell, ed., Essays on Dürer, Manchester, 1973, 83–7; Henry
Ley, ‘Dürer and the seventeenth century’, in Dodwell, ed., Essays on
Dürer, esp. 104–5 and 112–13; Giovanni Maria Fara, ‘Il collezionismo
delle opere di Albrecht Dürer in Italia fra Rinascimento e Barocco’, in
Dürer e l’Italia, Milan, 2007, 92; and Kristina Herrmann Fiore, ‘Rilessi
di Dürer nell’arte italiana del Seicento’, in Dürer e l’Italia, Milan, 2007,
321–2. For Dürer’s inluence on Rosa, see Wallace, Etchings, 63, 65, 88
and 104; Langdon, ‘Salvator Rosa in Florence’, 193–5; and Roworth,
Pictor Succensor, 248, 273, 276 and 356.
49 Fiore, ‘Rilessi di Dürer’, 324; for Dürer’s painting see Rudolf J.
Heinemann, ed., The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Castagnola, 1969, I:
101–4, cat. 90, and II: plate 26. Rosa’s treatment of the same subject
(early 1660s, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples; Aurora Spinosa, in
Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 232, cat. 78) suggests a knowledge of Dürer’s
precedent, formerly owned by the Barberini in Rome.
50 Rupprich, ed., Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1: 55 (Nr. 8). The igure in
the 1504 Melencolia I, for example, holds the scales of Rhetoric. On
Dürer and decorum, see Hans Joachim Dethlefs, ‘“Wohlstand” and
“Decorum” in sixteenth-century German art theory’, Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 70, 2007, 143.
51 Ley, ‘Dürer and the seventeenth century’, 104 and 112; and Herrmann
Fiore, ‘Rilessi di Dürer’, 322.
52 See Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, Princeton, NJ, 1943, 1: 127–9;
and Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 112–14. On the paintings by
Lautensack and an anonymous artist, see Matthias Mende, ed., Albrecht
Dürer – ein Künstler in seiner Stadt, Nürnberg, 2000, 157 and 434.
53 See Hugo Kehrer, Dürers Selbstbildnisse und die Dürer-Bildnisse, Berlin, 1934,
73; Ross, ‘Prints depicting Albrecht Dürer’, 70, cat. 5; and Andrews,
‘Dürer’s posthumous fame’, 88–9. A number of painted copies
were made after Dürer’s Adoration altarpiece in its entirety: Schütz,
Albrecht Dürer im Kunsthistorischen Museum, 225 and 55; and Bubenik, ‘The
reception of Albrecht Dürer’, 227. There is at least one (undated) print
that reproduces the whole altarpiece: Weschler’s, Washington, DC, lot
751, 25 September 2010. For the Heller Altar, see Doris Kutschbach,
Albrecht Dürer: die Altäre, Stuttgart, 1995, 71–96.
54 Ross, ‘Prints depicting Albrecht Dürer’, 70, cat. 5.
55 On Dürer’s self-portrait as ‘visionary’, see Panofsky, Albrecht
Dürer, 1: 126–30; Frederike Klauner, ‘Gedanken zu Dürers
Allerheiligenbildern’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, 75,
1979, esp. 84–91; Carolyn M. Carty, ‘Albrecht Dürer’s Adoration of the
Trinity: A reinterpretation’, Art Bulletin, 67: 1, 1985, 146–53; Koerner,
Moment of Self-Portraiture, 112–14; and Manfred Krüger, Albrecht Dürer:
Mystik, Selbsterkenntnis, Christussuche, Stuttgart, 2009, 87–8. Rosa had
employed a similar conceit with the ‘witness’ self-portrait in his Battle
between the Christians and the Turks (1642, Palazzo Pitti, Florence), where he
included the word ‘SARÒ’ on the shield in his hands: a conlation of
965
Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica
the irst two letters of his given name and surname, and the Italian ‘I
will be there’.
56 See Schütz, Albrecht Dürer im Kunsthistorischen Museum, 26.
57 Dürer’s 1508 self-portrait in the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand
(Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) also expresses this conceit,
and in gestural terms. It recalls Luca Signorelli’s self-portrait in The
Deeds of the Antichrist (1499–1502, Orvieto Cathedral), which cites the
interlocking hands of Demosthenes – another gesture of rhetorical
restraint: Klauner, ‘Gedanken zu Dürers Allerheiligenbildern’,
62–4. See also Mila Horky, Der Künstler ist im Bild. Selbstdarstellungen in der
italienischen Malerei des 14. Und 15. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 2003, 98; Richter,
Portraits, II: 219, no. 32, igs. 1399–1400; and Dillon, Ancient Greek Portrait
Sculpture, 75–6, n. 124.
58 Borelli, ed., Lettere, letter 389: ‘vi giuro che mi trovo a sofrir giornate
cosi tetre che da me a un taverlino non ci conosceresti nessuna
diferenza a segno tale che se venisse una legge che gli huomini non
havessero più a parlare io sareil il primo ad abracciarla, e predicarla
per sensualità.’
59 On ‘vox sola deest’, see Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 51. On ‘double
presence’, see Louis Marin, Philippe de Champaigne, ou la Présence Cachée,
Paris, 1995, 262–9.
60 See David Carrier, ‘Poussin’s self-portraits’, Word and Image, 7: 2, 1991,
127–48.
61 John Pope-Hennessy, ‘Zacchia il Vecchio and Lorenzo Zacchia’,
Burlington Magazine, 72, 1938, 217. See also Giorgio de Chirico’s
self-portraits of 1920 (Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich) and
1922–23 (private collection, Italy), in Gerd Roos, ‘Nulla sine tragœdia
Gloria. L’autoritratto con Euripide (1922–23) di Giorgio de Chirico’,
in Jose de Sanna, ed., De Chirico. Metaisica del Mediterraneo, Milan, 1998,
51–8.
62 See Roworth, Pictor Succensor, 249; and Woodall and Dullaart, Self-
Portrait, 120. On Solon’s tablets, see: Plutarch, Lives (Life of Solon) XXIV.
1–2, 473; Aristotle, Athenian Constitution, vii.1–2, and n. a (on the tablets
as ‘boards’); Demosthenes, Against Aristogeiton, II.23 (‘framed laws’
or ‘square tablets’); Ronald S. Stroud, The Axones and Kyrbeis of Drakon and
Solon, Berkeley and LA, 1979; P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian
Athenaion Politeia, Oxford, 1981, 131-5; and Noel Robertson, ‘Solon’s
Axones and Kyrbeis, and the Sixth-Century Background’, Historia, 35,
1986, 147-9 and 156.
63 David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton, NJ, 1981,
43; and Lichtenstein, Eloquence of Color, 32, 91.
64 Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients in Three Bookes, Farnborough,
1972, 54, as cited in Elizabeth Cropper, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa’s
Düsseldorf Notebook, Princeton, NJ, 1984, 171.
65 Aristotle, Poetics, vi.22–3; xix.2–6.
66 Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe,
Cambridge, 2007, 7, 60.
67 I am grateful to Marc Fumaroli for bringing this rhetorical igure
to my attention. On aposiopesis, see Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of
Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance, New Haven, 1976, 20.
68 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, IX.ii.54. On these tropes, see Catherine
Dalimier, ‘Timides rélexions sur le sens du silence: L’aposiôpese selon
Quintilien et quelques échos au XVIIIe siècle’, in Rhétoriques et Discours
Critiques: actes du colloque tenu à l’E. N. S., Paris, 1989, 27–32.
69 Eckhard Leuschner, ‘The Pythagorean inscription on Rosa’s London
“Self-Portrait”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57, 1994,
278–9; Stobeaus, Anthologia (or Florilegium) iii.34.7 and iii.34.1.
70 Note by Gabriele Finaldi, in the National Gallery’s conservation iles
(NG 4680); Dionysius the Elder, Fragments, frag. 6.
71 Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 109.
72 See Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letters 95, 100, 146, 147, 174, 175, 203,
216, 272, 277, 281, 290, 293, 303, 331, 365, 367 and 369. For Rosa’s
ignorance of Greek, see letter 117.
73 See Karla Langedijk, ‘Silentium’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 15,
1964, 12; Roworth, Pictor Succensor, 250; Leuschner, ‘Pythagorean
inscription’, 282; and Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 109. Rosa referred
to Pythagoras’s silence in a letter (Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letter 112), and
in 1662 painted two large canvases of Pythagoras (Staatliche Museen,
Berlin, and Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth). Rosa’s Il Teatro della
politica contains maxims on the virtues of silence: see Giorgio Baroni,
ed., Il Teatro della politica, Bologna, 1991, 98, no. 822; 41, no. 337; 42, no.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
339; 42, no. 340; 6, no. 36.
74 See Magne Malmanger, ‘Ut Poesis Pictura – ?’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, 66,
1997, 128; and Rosa’s satire La Pittura, vv. 169–74 (Romei, ed., Satire,
101). The Philosophy and its pendant Poetry could also be understood as
the artist and his muse (which Lucrezia was for Rosa), an ancient topos:
Dillon, Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture, 41–2.
75 See Bellori, Vite, 25; and Sohm, Style in Art Theory, 45–6. ‘Speechlessness’
before a painting could also express its illegibility (and lack of
aesthetic decorum): Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, 2: 16–17.
76 Roworth, ‘Self-portraits’, 140. On silence as restraint, see Quintilian,
Institutio Oratoria, VI.v.5. On silence as the space of invention and
meditation, see Fumaroli, ‘Muta eloquentia: la representation de
l’éloquence dans l’oeuvre de Nicolas Poussin’, Bulletin de la Société de
l’Histoire de l’Art Française, 1982, 32.
77 Roworth, ‘Self-portraits’, 141.
78 See Nicholas Turner, ‘Four Academy discourses by Giovanni Battista
Passeri’, Storia dell’arte, 19, 1973, 233–4 and (for the comment on the
orator, in a discourse attributed to Passeri, entitled ‘La Fisonomia
overo del aria naturale delle teste . . .’) 237.
79 Kristine Patz, ‘Sub Rosa. Verschwiegene Beredsamkeit im Londoner
Selbsporträt von Salvator Rosa’, in Christine Göttler and Ulrike Müller
Hofstede, eds, Diletto e Maraviglia. Ausdruck und Wirkung in der Kunst von der
Renaissance bis zum Barock; Rudolf Preimesberger zum 60. Geburstag, Emsdetten,
1998, 64. Patz also notes the resonance of the rose (‘Rosa’) with
silence.
80 Langedijk, ‘Silentium’, 13, n. 28. Rosa admonished Ricciardi for
attempting to talk about painting: Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letters 104, 137,
138, 144 and 303. For the Alexander print see Wallace, Etchings, 79–92.
81 See Roworth, ‘Self-portraits’, 141. The painting is known from a poem
by Antonio Abati: Cesareo, Poesie e lettere, 2: 149–55.
82 Roworth, Pictor Succensor, 250.
83 On veridicentia and benedicentia, see Charles Edward Trinkaus, ‘The
Question of Truth in Renaissance Rhetoric and Anthropology’, in
James D. Murphy, Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of
Renaissance Rhetoric, Berkeley, CA, 1983, 218. On giudizio, see Summers,
Michelangelo, 354; citing Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.iii.1 (1139b15),
and Aristotle, De anima, III.iii (427b).
84 On the orator’s virtue, see Cicero, De Oratore, II.lxxxv.345. On prudence
in artistic practice, see Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 32–4; and Wesley Trimpi,
‘Horace’s “Ut Pictura Poesis”: The argument for stylistic decorum’,
Traditio, 34, 1978, 29–73.
85 See Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style, Glückstadt,
1977, 56–7; Robert Klein, ‘Judgment and taste in Cinquecento
art theory’, in Form and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art,
Princeton, NJ, 1970, 161–9; and Summers, The Judgment of Sense:
Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics, Cambridge, 1987, 21–2, 75,
100–1, 117–18, 120, 230–2, 266–8 and 296–7.
86 Cicero, De Oratore, II.xix.79; Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, I.ii.3, and III.
viii.15; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, III.iii.1–2 and VIII.Pr.19–22; and
Summers, Michelangelo, 65, 137 and 223.
87 On Poussin’s derivations from Tasso’s ‘prudent election’, see Sohm,
Style in Art Theory, 116, and 126. See also Cropper, Ideal of Painting, 153–6;
Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin, Dialectics of Painting, London, 1990,
16–20, 112; and Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting:
Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge, 2006, esp. 13–20.
88 See Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 479; and Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letter 144.
89 See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago, IL, 1966, 9–11;
Summers, Judgment of Sense, 126; Martin Gosman, ‘Princely culture:
Friendship or patronage?’, in Princes and Princely Culture, 1450–1650,
Leiden, 2003, 1: 17–19, 27–9; and Andrew Pigler, ‘The importance of
iconographical exactitude’, Art Bulletin, 21: 3, 1939, 229.
90 La Pittura, vv. 288–91 (Romei, ed., Satire, 104). See Eva Struhal, “‘La
semplice imitazione”: Lorenzo Lippi’s poetics of naturalism in
seventeenth-century Florence’, PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, MD, 2007, 298.
91 Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letter 330: ‘Del Pindaro non trovo in Plutarco
questa distinzione di barba o senza, e quando a ciò m’havesse
oblighato il rigore del testo, mi sarei presa licenza d’alterarlo per
coonestare l’offesa del buon costume e della modestia. . . . A me
premea rappresentarlo più Amante della Poesia che delle sue bel-
lezze, per non cascare nell’errore ch’io condanno negli altri nella
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satira della Pittura. È ben vero che non ci ho fatta molta barba.’ For
the Pan and Pindar (1666), see Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 90, ig. 53. For
Rosa’s discussion of decorum in La Pittura, see v. 682ff (Romei, ed.,
Satire, 115), and his critique of Annibale Carracci’s transgressions
in particular, at vv. 703–705 (Romei, 116). See also L’Invidia, v. 539ff
(Romei, 154): ‘Ma più tosto che far pitture oscene, / schiavo e
oscuro starei nel lido euboico. / Dipingo ciò che all’onestà conviene;
/ Ché con opere sordide non merca / A sé stesso gli applausi un
uom da bene.’ On Rosa’s concern for the historical accuracy of his
iconography, see also Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letters 291, 305, 328 and
369. For further observations on Rosa’s principles of decorum, see
Cesareo, Poesie e lettere, 1:113–16.
92 Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 487–9.
93 See Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 489–90 and 497; Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letters
272, 290, 291, 293, 328, 359, 363 and 369; Struhal, ‘La semplice
imitazione’, 144 and 298–301; and Hoare, ‘Salvator Rosa as “amico
vero”’, 2–8, 12–13, 26–7, 416–29 and 441–6.
94 See Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 16–17; and Maria Loh, ‘Originals,
reproductions, and a “particular taste” for pastiche in the 17th-
century republic of painting’, in Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van
Miegroet, eds, Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe 1450–1750, Turnhout,
2006, 239–41. For Poussin on invention and novelty, see Bellori, Vite,
453 and 481.
95 On style see Sohm, Style in Art Theory, 23, 126 and 128; and Brian
Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, Oxford, 1988, 43, 282–83.
96 See La Poesia (1642), v. 60; La Musica (1641), v. 415; and La Pittura, v.
367–78 and 403–5; Romei, ed., Satire, 72, 62, and 107–8.
97 Passeri, Vite, 438–9.
98 Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 477–8, 494, and 489: ‘Tu lodi molto questo
quadro; o pensa quello che tu averesti fatto, se tu l’avessi guardato
cogli occhi di Salvator Rosa.’
99 Passeri, Vite, 420. Roworth, ‘Self-portraits’, 142, also linked
Simonelli’s poem with the Philosophy’s rhetorical content. Jonathan
Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times, New Haven, 1995, 11, suggested
that the poem’s title referred to Rosa’s iconographic ‘eloquence’.
100 On Simonelli, see Luigi Spezzaferro, ‘Pier Francesco Mola e il
mercato artistico romano: atteggiamenti e valutazioni’, in Pier Francesco
Mola 1612–1666, Milan, 1989, esp. 43–9; and Giovanna Capitelli,
‘“Connoisseurship” al Lavoro: la carriera di Nicolò Simonelli
(1611–1671)’, Quaderni storici, 116: 39: 2, 2004, 375–401.
101 See Passeri, Vite, 420.
102 On the debate, see Xavier Salomon, ‘“Ho fatto spiritar Roma”: Salvator
Rosa and seventeenth-century exhibitions’, in Langdon, ed., Salvator
Rosa, 80–2, and 96, n. 50. On the exhibition, see Helena Waga, ‘Vita
nota e ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon: notizie d’archivio’, L’Urbe, 30:
5, 1967, 11–13, n. 54. On Gregori’s etching, see Martina Ingendaay,
‘Salvator Rosa a Firenze: precisazioni sui dipinti nella collezione
Gerini’, Arte Cristiana, 97, 2009, 193–4.
103 Cicero, Brutus, viii. 35; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, X.i.76.
104 See Charles Darwin Adams, Demosthenes and his Inluence, New York, 1927,
122.
105 Borrelli, ed., Lettere, letters 146 and 198.
106 Austin, ‘Quintilian on painting and statuary’, 17.
107 See Anthony Colantuono, Guido Reni’s Abduction of Helen, Cambridge,
1997, 202, 218 and 197. For comparisons of humanists to
Demosthenes, see Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 1–3; and Hannah H.
Gray, ‘Renaissance humanism: The pursuit of eloquence’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 24: 4, 1963, 500.
108 Colantuono, Guido Reni’s Abduction of Helen, 211. On Rosa as Nature’s rival,
see Hoare, ‘Salvator Rosa as “amico vero”’, 201, 207, 444–5 and 482.
109 Eva Struhal, ‘Friendly disagreements: Salvator Rosa and Lorenzo Lippi
in seventeenth-century Florence’, in Salvator Rosa e il suo tempo, 44–6,
51–3, 55, n. 22, compares Rosa’s Prometheus with Parrhasius’s painting
of the same subject, discussed by Rosa’s friend Carlo Roberto Dati in
his Notizie de’ Pittori Antichi, Florence, 1677, 53–7.
110 ‘Voi avete espresso Prometheo in atto si iero perché le vostre oficine
sieno Teatri, le vostre Tele siano vene, i vostri colori siano accidenti,
le vostre igure sieno spettacoli a purgare con una morale imitatione
l’affetti a gli spettatori . . . Possi ben dunque dire che la mano, che l’ha
formato, docta loqui digitis.’ See Volpi, ‘Salvator Rosa, nuovi documenti’,
91–2.
© Association of Art Historians 2013
111 Baldinucci, Notizie, 5: 446–7, and 495–6. For the Allegory of Fortune, see
Langdon and Salomon, in Langdon, ed., Salvator Rosa, 224, cat. 37.
112 See Adams, Demosthenes, 3, 57 and 147; and Alfred P. Dorjahn, ‘On
Demosthenes’ ability to speak extemporaneously’, Transactions of the
American Philological Association, 78, 1947, 69–76. On Demosthenes’s early
modern reputation, see Wayne A. Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric,
Ithaca, NY, 1999, 139, 167 and 258.
113 See Daniel Tangri, ‘Demosthenes in the Renaissance’, Viator, 37, 2006,
574.
114 Nancy Worman, ‘Insult and oral excess in the Disputes between
Aeschines and Demosthenes’, American Journal of Philology, 125, 2004, 2.
115 Demosthenes, On the False Embassy, 255.
116 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI.iii.138 and 146–7.
117 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI.iii.79–82, 183–4; XI.iii.131 and 141.
118 ‘Aeschines’. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic
Edition. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 8 May 2012. http://
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/7407/Aeschines>.
119 Passeri, Vite, 418.
120 Scott, Salvator Rosa, 21; Passeri, Vite, 421–22: ‘Non boglio già, che
facimmo Commedie come cierti, che tagliano li panni aduosso a
chisto, o a chillo; perche co lo tiempo se fa vedere chiù veloce lo
taglio de no rasuolo, che la penna de no Poeta; e ne manco boglio, che
facimmo venire nella scena porta citazioni acquavitari e crapari, e ste
schifenze, che songo spropositi da Aseno.’
121 Passeri, Vite, 422: ‘. . . per dar naturalezza all’opera faceva comparire
Acquavitari, Cursori, e Caprari per la Città, cose tutte contra le regole,
che non permettono nessun personaggio, che non sia intrecciato
nel gruppo della favola.’ For Bernini’s play, see Molinari, ‘Il teatro di
Salvator Rosa’, 219.
122 See Paul Carter, ‘A Roman comedy’, Art and Artists, 12: 9, 1978, 37–9;
Jackson I. Cope, ‘Bernini and Roman Commedie Ridicolose’, Publications of
the Modern Language Association, 102: 2, 1987, 181–4; and Hoare, ‘Salvator
Rosa as “amico vero”’, 70–2.
123 Passeri, Vite, 423.
124 See Roworth, Pictor Succensor, 115, 124, 156 and 351; Olivier Bonfait,
Roma 1630: Il Trionfo del Pennello, Milan, 1994, 243–4; and Ann Sutherland
Harris, Andrea Sacchi, Princeton, NJ, 1977, 33–5.
125 Barry Wind, ‘Naturalism, decorum and Bel Idea in seventeenth-century
Spain and Italy’, Marsyas, 13, 1967, 11; Rosa, La Pittura, vv. 235–45
(Romei, ed., Satire, 103): ‘V’è poi talun che col pennel trascorse/
a dipinger faldoni e guitterie/ e facchini e monelli e tagliaborse,/
vignate, carri, calcare, osterie, / stuolo d’imbriaconi e genti ghiotte, /
zingari, tabaccari e barberie,/ niregnacche, bracon, trentapagnotte:/
chi si cerca i pidocchi e chi si gratta . . . / un che piscia, un che caca,
un ch’à la gatta / vende la trippa . . .’.
126 Roworth, ‘A date for Salvator Rosa’s satire on painting and the
Bamboccianti in Rome’, Art Bulletin, 63: 4, 1981, 613–15; and Struhal,
‘Friendly disagreements’, 49 and n. 34.
127 See Angela Negro, in Salvator Rosa tra Mito e Magia, 115; La Musica, v. 94,
and La Poesia, v. 283; Romei, ed., Satire, 53 and 78; and Roworth, Pictor
Succensor, 57, 115, 118–23, 200–3, 208–9, 371.
128 For Testa, see Cropper, The Ideal of Painting, 25, 55, 59, 64, 68, 109 and
114. For Sacchi and Albani, see Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, 2: 267–9.
For Lippi’s critique of the Bamboccianti, see Struhal, ‘La semplice
imitazione’, 288–90.
129 Giovanni Battista Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting,
ed. Edward J. Olszewski, New York, 1977, 210; Charles Alphonse
Dufresnoy, De Arte Graphica, ed. Christopher Allen, Geneva, 2005, 183,
203 and 343.
130 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation, ed.
Daniel Javitch, New York, 2002, I. 27.
131 Cicero, De oratore, II.xvi.70; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, I.Pr.9–10. See
also Dillon, Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture, 61, 104 and 106; and John F.
Tinkler, ‘Renaissance humanism and the genera eloquentiae’, Rhetorica,
5: 3, 1987, 304.
132 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, X.ii.19, in Jeffrey Muller, ‘Rubens’s theory
and practice of the imitation of art’, Art Bulletin, 44, 1982, 231.
133 Plato, Phaedrus, 275d-276a, in George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its
Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, Chapel Hill, NC
and London, 1999, 73.
134 Cicero, De Oratore, III.lvi.213, in Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 348.
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