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Toward Romanticism 39 Toward Romanticism  CHAPTER TWO The legend of Rosa’s participation in Masaniello’s revolt seems not to have found any echo in revolutionary France.1 But the words of Lévesque, quoted earlier, especially the expression “fierté sublime,” and the reference in a 1795 sales catalogue to one of Rosa’s landscapes as a Vue romantique (Blanc, Trésor de la curiosité, II, 170) show that Rosa’s work was in tune with revolutionary times. The most important influence the Revolution exerted on the French reception of Rosa was the result of the great surge of museological activity that it fostered. The years of tumult saw the nationalization of much of France’s artistic patrimony, the confiscation of the royal collection, the creation of the Musée du Louvre, and the accumulation in Paris of huge quantities of statues and paintings “liberated” by revolutionary—and later Napoleonic— armies. Despite the background of violence and upheaval, a great organizational activity proceeded apace. One consequence was the publication of a great body of art writing. One might say that Napoleon, David, and Vivant Denon replicated the work of Louis XIV, Le Brun, and Colbert, and that art critics and art historians like C. P. Landon and Henri Laurent were the counterparts of Félibien and De Piles. Rosa’s works were not a prominent part of the booty brought to Paris during the revolutionary and imperial decades. I have been able to identify only two Rosas amid the plunder: an Assumption (S 156) taken from Santa Maria della Vittoria in Milan and Madonna del Suffragio (S 158), from San Giovanni alle Case.2 Actually, Rosa’s presence in France may even have been diminished during this period: it is likely that, even if the removal of the Orléans collection to England had little or no effect, some Rosas in other 40 Salvator Rosa in French Literature collections emigrated with their owners. Lady Morgan’s catalogue (II, 308) indicates that the Marquis of Stafford’s Soothsayers (S 167) had once belonged to the Duc de Choiseul.3 It was primarily the Rosas that had been in Paris all along that benefited from the outpouring of French art writing in the early years of the nineteenth century: The Bataille héroïque sent to Louis XIV in 1664, the Saül et la Pythonisse, which he acquired by 1683, and Tobie et l’ange, whose history is unclear—C. P. Landon speaks of it as coming from the “ancienne collection .”4 The Assumption brought from Milan toward the end of Napoleon’s reign did not, however, go entirely unnoticed: C. P. Landon provided a very close description of it in his Annales. The art critics and historians who set out to describe the treasures on view in Paris thanks to the museological work of the revolutionary and imperial regimes wrote in an unprecedented manner about the pictures they saw. The way seems to have been pointed by Robillard-Péronville and Pierre Laurent5 in Le Musée français, a series published in fascicules beginning in 1803, with texts by Simon-Célestin Croze-Magnan, E. Q. Visconti, and T. B. Emeric-David. This sumptuous publication featured Rosa’s Tobie et l’ange (Tobie et Azarias) in volume I. After quoting the biblical text that inspired the painting, the writer—probably Croze-Magnan—goes on to evaluate and criticize it at length: Il est difficile de rendre plus exactement la scène dont il est ici question, que ne l’a fait Salvator Rosa dans ce joli tableau. Il a su donner à ses figures une simplicité noble et gracieuse, soit dans leurs attitudes, soit dans leurs expressions. On croit entendre parler l’ange qui instruit Tobie de ce qu’il doit faire; et l’on remarque dans la tête du jeune homme la confiance et l’attention de la candeur et de l’ingénuité. Les poses sont naturelles et agréables, et les draperies jetées avec élégance et légèreté. Mais le peintre n’a-t-il pas eu tort de donner des ailes à Azarias, qui n’était pas encore reconnu par Tobie pour être un ange, mais seulement pour son guide et son compagnon de voyage? Cette inadvertence détruit tout l’intérêt de la vérité historique, et n’est pas excusable dans Salvator, qui se piquait de la plus scrupuleuse observation des convenances et du costume. Il prononce lui-m...

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