Salvator Rosa's Allegory of 'Philosophy' as 'Ut Pictura Rhetorica': Eloquent Gesture and the Pursuit of Artistic Decorum PDF

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica: Eloquent Gesture and the Pursuit of Artistic Decorum Alexandra Hoare Salvator Rosa’s allegory of Philosophy has become a signature work for the artist (plate 1). Perhaps his most well-known painting, it frequently appears as the cover ...

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica: Eloquent Gesture and the Pursuit of Artistic Decorum Alexandra Hoare

Salvator Rosa’s allegory of Philosophy has become a signature work for the artist (plate 1). Perhaps his most well-known painting, it frequently appears as the cover illustration for publications on the artist.1 Indeed, the painting encapsulates many of the concepts fundamental to Rosa’s artistic persona. The protagonist of the painting, with his toga-like mantle and cap, penetrating stare, and censorious motto ‘AVT TACE,/ AVT LOQVERE MELIORA/ SILENTIO’ (‘Either be silent or say something better than silence’), is considered to represent an identity central to Rosa’s professional ambitions: the painter-philosopher. Rosa’s classicist, moral-intellectual view of the artist informed his predilection for grand philosophical themes, first in Florence among academic circles and then with greater urgency after returning to Rome in 1649, where he would take up the role of painter-philosopher par excellence, rejecting genre scenes, battle paintings and landscapes in favour of erudite and obscure philosophical subjects that catered more to his own tastes than to the market demand. These aspects of Rosa’s professional ambitions have received ample scholarly treatment.2 The present essay re-examines the identity represented in Rosa’s Philosophy in the light of a specific, overlooked detail within the painting that suggests a further dimension of the work’s significance: the gesture adopted by the figure’s left arm. A sign of Rosa’s interest in and conviction about the value of the pictorial poetics of gesture, the pose can be understood in connection with art-theoretical currents in which Rosa engaged concerning judgment, decorum, and eloquence. It suggests a further and important dimension of meaning, the ideal of the artist-orator, be added to the current interpretation of the painting.3 Rosa and the Allegorical Self-Portrait

Detail from Francesco Albani, Portrait of Andrea Calvi, 1636 (plate 8). DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12034 Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 36 | 5 | November 2013 | pages 944-967

© Association of Art Historians 2013

Conventionally understood as a self-portrait, Rosa’s painting has been reidentified as an allegory of Philosophy on the basis of the figure’s dress, his physiognomic differences to Rosa’s more certain autonomous painted self-portraits and to Giovan Battista Bonacina’s portrait print of the artist of 1662, and a complex documentary record that suggests alternative identifications for the painting’s subject as ‘philosopher’ or ‘self-portrait’.4 The Philosophy is usually paired with another canvas of almost identical dimensions, considered its pendant: an allegorical portrait of Rosa’s partner Lucrezia Paolini as Poetry (plate 2). The earliest mention of both paintings is a record of payment from Filippo Niccolini (1586–1666), on 19 September 1641, to a goldsmith for a gilded frame to give to Rosa for ‘two half-figures’ by the artist that were then in Niccolini’s possession.5 Marchese of Ponsacco and Camugliano, Niccolini was the 945

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tutor and maestro di camera of Cardinal Gian’ Carlo de’ Medici, who in 1640 had invited Rosa to Florence to work as court painter.6 An interpretation of the Philosophy as a self-portrait remains compelling. Best understood as an allegorical self-portrait, it is (like all of Rosa’s self-portraits) Rosa in the guise of a character.7 Certain physiognomic features are congruent with Rosa’s own, but are filtered into a more abstract personification. Rosa frequently gave the subjects of philosophy and poetry a self-reflexive turn. His interest in idealized self-portrayal, a feature of his approach to portraiture more generally, is also apparent from his letters, where he compares himself to the authors or protagonists of the poetic and philosophical texts he scoured for pictorial ideas (ranging broadly from Plutarch’s Lives and Virgil’s Georgics to Giovanni Tarcagnota’s Delle historie del mondo (1562), Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and Antonio Santacroce’s La Secretaria d’Apollo (1650)).8 The persecuted and misunderstood held a particular appeal: ‘Am I not to become the Socrates, the Tasso, and the Guarino of my own time’, Rosa lamented in 1654 to his best friend Giovan Battista Ricciardi (1624–86), a poet and playwright from Pisa, amid the swirl of accusations of plagiarism levied against Rosa by members of the Roman Accademia degli Umoristi.9 In 1661,

1 Salvator Rosa, Self-Portrait (Philosophy), c. 1641. Oil on canvas, 116.3 × 94 cm. London: National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

© Association of Art Historians 2013

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2 Salvator Rosa, Lucrezia as Poetry, c. 1641. Oil on canvas, 116.2 × 94.2 cm. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Photo: © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY. 3 Salvator Rosa, The Genius of Salvator Rosa, c. 1662. Etching with drypoint, 45.5 × 27.5 cm. London: British Museum. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.

Rosa compared his unsociable nature to that of the misanthrope Timon of Athens, joking that the rarity of his public appearances prompted applause in the street.10 Allegory, too, is a prevailing theme in Rosa’s pictorial oeuvre, frequently employed to express his multi-faceted virtuosity. His autonomous self-portraits, in which he embodies the roles of painter, poet, soldier, philosopher and actor, find a collective counterpart in his etching, The Genius of Salvator Rosa (c. 1662) which depicts allegorically the constituents of his creative genio, or spirit: Sincerità, Libertà, Pittura, Equità, and Satira (plate 3).11 Like many of Rosa’s self-portraits, the London Philosophy operates simultaneously as self-image and allegory, both specific and universal, expressing a performative conception of identity that also informed his life-long love of theatre.12 The ‘Arm-Sling’ Gesture

The role Rosa performs in the Philosophy is identifiable from his costume, comportment, and props: the thick brown mantle, the stern facial expression, the placard with its disapproving inscription, and the ominous dark clouds overhead all underscore the subject as a moral invective, or vituperatio. This moral-philosophical theme is reinforced and given an addition layer of meaning by the gesture of the figure’s left arm and hand – pressed against his torso and tightly wrapped in the sling of his mantle. Scholars have interpreted the figure’s comportment and attire in connection with the quasiantique dress of the philosopher. The gesture resonates with a conception of the artist as philosopher, and its symbolic import has been interpreted alternatively as a reference to silence or brevity of speech, defensive self-containment, or sincerity of conviction.13 Wrapping oneself in a cloak can also be linked with the desire to conceal artistic secrets, as Giovan Pietro Bellori noted of Domenichino (who habitually ‘hid under his cloak to draw, swathed like a philosopher in his pallium’), and we know from Rosa and his © Association of Art Historians 2013

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Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica

4 Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Portrait of a Young Man (possibly Girolamo Casio), c. 1500. Oil on panel, 42.6 × 29.9 cm. Bakewell, Derbyshire: Chatsworth House. Photo: © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth/Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees/The Bridgeman Art Library. 5 Rembrandt van Rijn, SelfPortrait in a Velvet Cap with Plume, 1638. Intaglio etching, 13.4 × 10.3 cm. London: British Museum. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum. 6 Anonymous Roman copy after a Greek original, Aeschines, c. 79 CE. Marble, 210 cm (height). Naples: Museo Archeologico Nazionale. Photo: © Alinari/ Art Resource, NY.

biographers of his own inclinations in this regard.14 Conspicuously identifiable as the ‘arm-sling’ pose, however, the swaddled arm in Rosa’s Philosophy is one of the modes of corporeal expression adopted by ancient Greek orators. Associated, perhaps, by modern eyes with a state of physical injury, the ‘arm-sling’ pose (as it is conventionally referred to by scholars of classical art and archaeology) is in fact one of numerous variations on the theme of the restrained hand (analogous, for example, to the ‘hand-in-waistcoat’ pose15 ) (plate 4 and plate 5) that appear in portraiture from antiquity to the nineteenth century. First seen in Greek fourth-century BCE portrait statues, one arm (usually, but not always, the right) is ‘held diagonally across the chest and nestled inside the drapery as if in a sling’, a pose that also performed the practical function of holding the toga in place.16 In common use in the fi fth-century BCE, the ‘arm-sling’ pose was endorsed as a sign of ‘good bearing’, decency, modesty, and respect.17 Ancient texts locate © Association of Art Historians 2013

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it fi rst in the statues of early Greek orators and statesmen like Solon of Athens (c. 638–558 BCE), an early paragon of moral virtue, and Aeschines of Macedonia (389–331 BCE), one of the ten Attic orators who were characterized (according to Plutarch and Cicero, among others) by their ‘restraint and simplicity’.18 Aeschines, who adopts the pose in a portrait statue (plate 6),19 explained it in his speech Against Timarchus, a defence against the politician Timarchus’s accusations of treason. Chastizing Timarchus for public lewdness, Aeschines noted that Solon and the orators of his generation adopted the ‘armsling’ gesture when speaking in order to give visual expression to their decorous self-control and moral-ethical respectability (sˉ phrosynˉ) as speakers: ‘And so decorous were those public men of old – Pericles, Themistocles, and Aristeides . . . that to speak with the arm outside the cloak, as we do nowadays as a matter of course, was regarded then as an ill-mannered thing, and they carefully refrained from doing it.’20 Describing himself as a ‘quiet and modest man’, Aeschines advocated the revival of the pose, citing by way of example the statue of Solon then in the market place in Salamis, his arm slung inside his cloak.21 The Artist as Decorous Orator

The ‘arm-sling’ gesture saw a renewed popularity in early modern portraiture. Frequently used by Dutch and Flemish painters like Frans Hals (plate 7), for whom it expressed a more pervasive interest in the rhetorical potential of clothing and gesture and the all’antica fashion, and articulated a social code of masculine civility, the pose also appears in Italian paintings like Francesco Albani’s portrait of the lawyer and priest Andrea Calvi (plate 8).22 Artists, in portraits and self-portraits, frequently adopt the ‘arm-sling’ pose as a sign of their own rhetorical decorum. In Anthony Van Dyck’s Iconography (late 1620s), the gesture is adopted in a series of portrait prints of artists as an apparent point of analogy with the orator’s eloquence, virtue, wisdom and ancient pedigree.23 Here, rhetorical gestures and clothing produce portraits that operate simultaneously as individuals and ideal types.24 The figures in Van Dyck’s Iconography share certain commonalities with Rosa’s Philosophy, such as the half-length treatment and the inclusion of a descriptive Latin inscription. The portraits of Adriaen Brouwer and Orazio Gentileschi © Association of Art Historians 2013

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(plate 9 and plate 10) are especially noteworthy, both of which display the ‘arm-sling’ pose and (in the case of Gentileschi) a furrowed brow comparable to that in Rosa’s painting. As in other images of artists where the subject uses conversant hand gestures, such as Agostino Carracci’s self-portrait of the 1580s (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) or Justus Sustermans’s portrait of Giovanni Lanfranco of c. 1627 (private collection, Milan), Rosa’s Philosophy presents the artist as participant in the popular art-theoretical topos of ut pictura rhetorica.25 His is an image of the intellectual painter not merely as taciturn philosopher but decorously eloquent orator, an association of particular prestige for all artists, culminating as it did in Roger de Piles’s direct analogy in 1677 between the painter and orator: The painter is like the orator, and the sculptor like the grammarian. The grammarian is correct and exact in his words, and he explains [his thoughts] clearly and without ambiguity . . . The orator must have learned the things that the grammarian knows, and the painter those known to the sculptor . . . but the orator and the painter must go beyond them. The painter must persuade our eyes as an eloquent man must touch our hearts. 26

7 Frans Hals, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1640–41. Oil on canvas, 81 × 59 cm. Vienna: Gemäldegalerie, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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8 Francesco Albani, Portrait of Andrea Calvi, 1636. Oil on canvas, 114 × 93 cm. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales. Photo: © National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

© Association of Art Historians 2013

The association was of great personal significance for Rosa’s own moral-philosophical identity. Here it is significant to recall one of the precepts of Leon Battista Alberti’s rhetorical theory of art, in which he advocated gestural restraint in the pictorial representation of philosophers in particular (a category also newly occupied by painters), who should ‘when speaking, show modesty in every limb rather than the attitudes of a wrestler’.27 In the Lucrezia as Poetry, Rosa treats his allegorical subject according to the conventional symbolism of emblem books like Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593).28 In the Philosophy, however, the ‘arm-sling’ pose indicates Rosa’s desire to produce a novel, unifying conceit for the two distinct virtues of decorum and silence, usually represented individually and in emblematic terms.29 Familiar with Cicero’s and Quintilian’s writings on oratory, and with Plutarch’s histories of orators, Rosa would also have encountered the ‘arm-sling’ pose in early modern treatises on conduct, gesture and physiognomy that cite from rhetorical authorities like Quintilian. Rosa’s interest in these texts is attested by his broader pictorial oeuvre, replete with a rich and highly controlled vocabulary of gestures. The movements of Rosa’s figures, evidence of his conviction about the mute eloquence of physical gesture and facial expression as the key components of painted rhetoric, can be found in treatises on humorology and physiognomy like Giambattista della Porta’s widely read Fisonomia dell’huomo (1598) and texts on gestural expression like Giovanni Bonifacio’s L’arte de’ cenni (1616).30 In his allegorical self-images, Rosa used physiognomic and humorological codes to manipulate his natural facial features in order to enhance certain aspects of his character. In the Philosophy, appearance and expression are treated according to Della Porta’s principles. The figure’s halfshadowed face, furrowed brow and thin, tightly pursed lips, which have been interpreted in connection with the emblematic representation of silence, find many parallels in Della Porta’s physiognomic description of melancholy, a humor allied with the intellectual introspection of poets and philosophers.31 For Della Porta, lowering the brow also signalled annoyance, an emotion central to the censorious identity of the orator and a vital component of Rosa’s self-image as moral satirist. The facial expression of the figure in Rosa’s Philosophy has also been linked to a line in his satire Il Tirreno of 1657: ‘I jest with the thrysus, and threaten with the brow.’32 Hand gestures are especially prevalent in Rosa’s istorie, as his contemporaries also noted. Rosa’s friend, the poet Antonio Abati (c. 1600–67), for example, noted the ‘querulous’ gestures of the figures in Rosa’s landscapes.33 The gestures Rosa deploys in his pictorial works also frequently correspond to the definitions Bonifacio provides in his L’arte de’ cenni: the ‘hand raised in denial’, for example, appears in Rosa’s painting of Phryne and Xenocrates (1662–63, private collection, UK); the ‘joining of right hands’ or ‘pledge of faith’ features in The Conspiracy of Catiline (1663, Casa Martelli, Florence); and the gesture of ‘enumeration’ appears in Rosa’s Saint John the Baptist Preaching in a Landscape (late 1650s, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri).34 In Book I, Bonifacio describes the ‘hand below the mantle’ (the ‘arm-sling’ pose), a gesture also adopted by one of the 951

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9 Schelte Adams Bolswert, after Anthony van Dyck, Adriaen Brouwer, probably 1626 or 1641. Engraving, 24 × 15.8 cm. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. 10 Lucas Vorsterman, after Anthony van Dyck, Orazio Gentileschi, probably 1626 or 1641. Engraving, 24 × 15.8 cm. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

© Association of Art Historians 2013

figures, at far right, in Rosa’s painting of Diogenes Casting Away his Bowl (1651–52, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), by the protagonist in one of the prints from his series of Figurine etchings (1656–58), and by a figure, at far left, in his etching of the Academy of Plato (1662).35 Bonifacio makes special note of the gesture’s importance for Solon and Aeschines as a sign of decorous eloquence and restraint.36 This description appears shortly after two other entries on gestures related to silence, one of which refers to a verse from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in which the allegorical figure of ‘Silence’ is described as clothed in a brown mantle – a further, interesting point of connection with the iconography and theme of Rosa’s painting .37 For Della Porta, expression was not only a manipulable code, but a decidedly moral vocabulary for performing self-improvement, a tool in the exercise of corporeal self-control also essential to the orator for conveying his moral message.38 Rosa’s belief in the body as an effective carrier of not merely subjective but ethical meaning echoes the broader, classicist interpretation of the body as a text from which moral character could be read.39 His activity as an actor gave him an additional familiarity with the movements of the hands and the face, the central rhetorical components of the affetti. In their biographies of the artist, both Filippo Baldinucci and Giovanni Battista Passeri noted the vivacity of the poetry recitals Rosa hosted at his private Accademia dei Percossi in Florence, during which he dazzled his listeners with his ‘admirable expression of voice and gestures’ to such a degree that he seemed to ‘paint them with language’.40 The encomiastic poetry Rosa’s friends wrote in praise of his paintings likewise framed the efficacy of his pictorial rhetoric in theatrical terms.41 Baldinucci claims that Rosa adopted the popular practice of provare in se, or 952

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self-embodiment of one’s subject in emulation of the actor, considered essential to the painter’s skilful representation of emotion. Like the great ancient orator Demosthenes who used a mirror to refine his gestures and rhetorical delivery, Rosa purportedly kept a large mirror in his studio in order to study the movements of his own body and face in composing his painted figures.42 That Rosa may have used his own mirror reflection while painting the Philosophy also bears upon the significance of which of the artist’s hands is restrained in the ‘arm-sling’ pose. Rosa’s letters reveal that he wrote with his right hand, and his Self-Portrait as a Painter (c. 1641–43, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) also suggests he painted with his right.43 (In the presumed mirror-reflection of his Self-Portr...