Salvator Rosa

Helen Langdon is an art historian with a special interest in the Italian Baroque. She is author of Claude Lorrain (1989) and Caravaggio: A Life (1999) and is based in London.

"London-based art historian Langdon has been studying baroque painter Salvator Rosa (1615–73) for almost fifty years and yet maintains a critical distance from her subject, for whom at times she implies a soupçon of distaste. She intends her well-illustrated introduction to the painter, etcher, and poet – a reluctant outsider in Rome, disgruntled and boastful, a thorn in the side of Bernini, and an aspirant to intellectual status along the lines of Poussin – to appeal to an audience that includes beginners. At the same time, because of her deep and thorough engagement with the subject, scholars will not want to ignore this summary with its glinting insights . . . Recommended." - Choice"Helen Langdon takes on the intriguing figure of Salvator Rosa in this definitive account of the multi-talented – but still elusive – artist (painter and etcher), writer and actor. She is very much at home in the complex world of artistic debate in seventeenth-century Rome and deeply sympathetic to this difficult and ultimately disappointed ‘genius’, as he described himself, who aspired to be a philosopher-painter and satirist." - Christopher Brown, former director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford"Helen Langdon’s engrossing presentation of the eccentric, conceited, and phenomenally talented Salvator Rosa restores one of Baroque Italy’s most illustrious artists to his rightful place among the seventeenth century’s absolute protagonists. Rosa's phantasmagoric landscapes, home to strange animals, Etruscan priests, and weird witches, were once a must for every ambitious collector, but his most towering work of art, as Langdon suggests, may have been his own remarkable life." - Ingrid Rowland, Professor, University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway"In his passionate defence of the creative autonomy of the artist, Salvator Rosa strikes us as astoundingly modern. Helen Langdon’s superb biography, born of more than half a century of reflection on Rosa, presents the artist in all his brilliance and wit, his vaulting ambition, his potent originality as a painter and his infuriating complexity as a person." - Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, London