Date: 16-06-2002
Owning Institution: The National Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 17th Century      

The third weekend of June has been optimistically designated a time of national silence and inward spiritual reflection by the Christian Retreat Association. To mark Annual Quiet Day, this week’s choice of picture is Salvator Rosa’s impressively taciturn Self-Portrait. Its theme might be described as the importance of knowing when to shut up. The artist stands before us, wearing the cap and gown of a man of learning, his right hand resting on a stone tablet into which has been carved a Latin epigram. “Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio” is the message which it proclaims. “Either be silent or say something better than silence.”

Silhouetted against a livid sky, dark with the threat of rain, the tight-lipped young man looks as though a storm is brewing inside him too. A challenging, almost scornful expression animates his gaunt and handsome face. His dark hair is matted and he has evidently not shaved for a few days. The suspicion lurks that he has taken some care over his tousled and stubble-chinned look. For all its apparent informality, it still comes over as a pose: the image of proud negligence, struck with a flourish. Painted in the mid-seventeenth century, Rosa’s Self-Portrait  is a notably early depiction of the artist as angry young man. His dark and urgent eyes seem to look ahead to later centuries: to the dandyish dishevelment of the Romantic poet; the insolent, anti-establishment stance of the modernist; the self-conscious sulkiness of the scowling rock star. The temptation to see him as a man ahead of his time is understandably strong.

Salvator Rosa was, in fact, one of the most intriguing and mercurial characters of the seventeenth century. He painted portraits, altarpieces, themes from classical mythology, vanitas pictures and scenes of witchcraft which led John Ruskin, in a moment of hysteria, to pronounce him infected by the “dragon breath” of evil. He founded a new  “savage” school of landscape painting and became famous for depicting unprecedentedly wild and mountainous scenery, so much so that when Horace Walpole crossed the Alps in 1739, more than half a century after Rosa’s death, the snowbound landscape immediately put him in mind of the artist’s work. “Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings – Salvator Rosa,” he jotted in his notebook.

Rosa was also a gifted actor and satirical poet. Born to a builder and his wife in a suburb of Naples in 1615, he was educated at a religious charity school where he learnt classical grammar and rhetoric. After a brief apprenticeship to an undistinguished Neapolitan painter, he left for Rome, later damning his native city forever in one of his characteristically acerbic verse satires, La Babilonia: “To her who gave me nothing I owe nothing…/ My country, slave of slaves, / Who glories / In the vile yoke which she carries dragging along, / Hateful object of my memory.” In Rome he pursued his career as a painter and also formed an acting troupe. During one performance he had the temerity to insult Gianlorenzo Bernini, the leading artist in the city, who happened to be in the audience. He also managed to make enemies of several prominent literary figures. This may explain his decision to move to Florence, where, in 1645, he painted the picture reproduced on this page.

Rosa was welcomed into the Florentine circle of humanist scholars and came to espouse the fashionable, newly revived doctrine of Stoicism – an ancient Greek philosophy of disgust with the world which seems to have suited his inherent temperamental sourness, as well as furnishing him with a readymade phlegmatic response to what he appears to have seen as the universal underestimation of his own genius. He painted several pictures illustrating episodes from the life of Diogenes, a principal Stoic, who had taught that the aim of life is the avoidance of disappointment, to be achieved through renouncing all ambitions and material goods. In his Self-portrait, it seems that Rosa meant to show himself playing the part of another Stoic thinker, Pythagoras. The phrase on the tablet in the painting is a Pythagorean dictum. In one of his letters Rosa approvingly mentions the custom among Pythagoras’s pupils of remaining absolutely silent for between three and five years.

It seems ironic that such a voluble character as Rosa should have chosen to adopt the persona of Pythagoras, “the silent philosopher”, as his alter ego. It also seems morally inconsistent of him to have impersonated a world-hating Stoic in a picture so clearly designed to enhance his own image and further his worldly ambitions. As my old teacher, the late Michael Kitson, once put it, “Rosa’s insatiable thirst for fame and his endless manoeuvres to secure it are the flaw at the heart of his adoption of Stoicism.” In his defence, I think he meant this Self-portrait as a clever plea not for himself alone but for his profession as a whole. It is perhaps significant that the end of the Latin tag to which he draws our attention contains a slight ambiguity. As well as meaning “say something better than silence,” it can also mean “say something through silence,” or “by means of silence”. This is of course what painters, using their own form of silent speech, do every day of their lives. Perhaps that points to the true moral of this particular painting. Only the artist has the power to speak volumes, without ever saying a word.