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Crossing the Alps 7 Crossing the Alps  CHAPTER ONE Near the midpoint of his century and of his career, Salvator Rosa’s reputation began to take on an international dimension. While still in Florence, Rosa had earned a brief but flattering entry in the third volume of Pierre Guillebaud’s Trésor chronologique et historique (1647), in a list of more or less contemporary painters: “En Italie, particulièrement à Florence, le sieur Salvator Rose Napolitain, la fleur des Peintres de cette ville, et mesme des Poëtes, car il fait fort bien une Comedie.”1 Guillebaud’s book is largely forgotten , and his survey of painting in his time is, in Jacques Thuillier’s view, “assez déconcertant” (p. 130), that is, eccentric. But, as the earliest published reference to Rosa in French that I have located, this passage is precious evidence that Rosa’s fame had transcended the Italian cities—Naples, Rome, and Florence—in which he had worked by the time Guillebaud was writing and had crossed the Alps. Alongside those of several lesser, even obscure artists, appear the names of Rubens, Pietro da Cortona, Poussin, La Hyre, and Vouet. More evidence of Rosa’s growing reputation can be found a few years later in the efforts made by European rulers outside Italy to attach him to their courts. In 1650 he declined an invitation to go to the court of the Austrian emperor (Salerno 1963, p. 94) and in 1652 treated an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden similarly (p. 95). In the latter year, Neri Corsini, newly appointed papal nuncio to France, commissioned Rosa to do a battle picture intended as a gift to the young Louis XIV. It seems unlikely the fourteen-year-old monarch had personally expressed an interest in Rosa’s work or knew anything about it—it is much more likely that Corsini’s choice of Rosa was his own and reflected the artist’s growing fame in his native country and, specifically, his reputation as a painter of battle pictures; 8 Salvator Rosa in French Literature Rosa’s letters for 1652 (August 27 and October 19) show no evidence of contacts with France. By the mid-1660s the situation is quite different. In 1664 the battle picture commissioned by Corsini reached Versailles with Cardinal Flavio Chigi as donor. At the same time, the Cardinal bestowed on the French king Rosa’s Democritus and Protagoras (S 184), also known as The Call of Protagoras to Philosophy, now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg . Nothing more is heard of this picture until its appearance in the Walpole collection in the mid-eighteenth century; how it came to leave the French royal collection is unclear.2 The following year, in 1665, presumably impressed by Rosa’s work, Louis XIV invited Rosa to his court; this royal summons was declined like its predecessors. But the Bataille had entered the royal collection and eventually worked its way to the Louvre. Meanwhile, stealing a march on Rosa’s battle scene, Rosa’s Apollo and the Sibyl of Cumae (S 128) had arrived in France, the first of his works to appear there. Its owner was, however, not the king but his chief minister Mazarin. This event must have occurred between 1653 and 1661: the inventory of Mazarin’s collections made in the former year lists no such picture, or any other by Rosa, while the inventory made shortly after his death in early 1661 contains the following entry: 1240—Un autre faict par Salvator Rosa sur toile, représentant un Grand Paysage où est Apollon assis et appuyé sur la lyre avecq une femme près de luy et deux aultres plus loing, hault de cinq pieds quatre pouces et large de huict piedz, garny de sa bordure de bois couleur gris clair avecq un fillet d’or, prisé, la somme de sept cent cinquante livres, cy.3 Presumably Mazarin’s Italian origins and ecclesiastical position put him in touch with the Roman art world and account for his interest in Rosa. Or it may be that the picture was an unsolicited gift from somebody in Rome seeking to please the all-powerful cardinal, an avid collector.4 Despite the glittering context provided by Mazarin and his heirs, this picture does not seem to have won a place in the French wing of the musée imaginaire devoted to Rosa’s work, probably because it left France before the peak of the pre-romantic vogue for Rosa...

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