Cleveland Museum of Art

Ruins in a Rocky Landscape

Salvator Rosa

Date

c. 1640

Medium

oil on canvas

Culture

Italy, 17th century

Department

European Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

In 1635, Rosa left his native Naples for Rome, the undisputed art center of the 17th century, where a new type of landscape painting was emerging, distinguished by the effects of light and atmosphere. Rosa’s fame grew quickly as a painter of landscapes that conjured the beauty and fertility of the Bay of Naples. Ruins in a Rocky Landscape incorporates classical ruins, iridescent reflections of light, and a pastoral tone evoked by the idling shepherds, exemplifying the work that earned Rosa his early fame. The dark, dramatic rocks that rise along the left foreshadow the wildness that Rosa would cultivate in his later sublime landscapes.

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