La Strega (The Witch)

No picture captures the qualities of the ‘Rosian witch’ as explicitly as the painting La Strega. Towering over two meters tall, it features a naked witch thrashing alone in the middle of a shadowy, cavernous space. While the painting is atypical of Rosa’s approach to depicting witchcraft (in that it is both structurally simple and physically large), it nevertheless foregrounds Rosa’s paradigmatic witch. This ‘hideous hag’ is an explicitly old, naked woman—a grotesque character. I purposefully employ the term ‘grotesque’ in order to lay bare the inherent misogynistic intentions behind creating this character and in her reception by an early modern audience, as well as to relate this witch directly to the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body—open, excessive and tangibly debased.[1] But rather than dismissing Rosa’s witch as simply stereotypical or sexist, investigating her attributes and sources reveals how Rosa created a terrifying, electrifying and ambitious character. In so doing, he cemented stereotypes of the witch that share a direct line to the ideas of witches—and women—today.

Filling up the center of a dark and ambiguous space, a solitary witch shrieks as she brandishes a flaming branch in her proper right hand. With her left hand, she clutches an orb-shaped vial, on top of which emerges a demon-sprite, a personification of the evil spirits invoked by the witch’s rites. An array of still-life objects that were common to both witchcraft and vanitas imagery surround the writhing hag: a glass jug, coins, a mirror, bones, a skull, and a sheet with esoteric, alchemical symbols (on which Salvator Rosa characteristically signed his monograph ‘SR’). But the most gruesome detail of her malevolent ritual is the infant engulfed in shadow behind her; swaddled tightly, lying on the floor, the child appears dead—or at least will be soon. The notion that witches tapped babies for their blood to create satanic unguents was popularized in early modern demonology and literature, including the misogynist treatise Malleaus Maleficarum[2] and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s La Strega, ovvero, degli inganni de’demoni[3]. Rosa had alluded to this disturbing practice in other paintings, such as the Witches at their Incantations (fig. 1) where an infant is offered to a skeletal demon by a topless hag; but La Strega’s bleak atmosphere and foreground torment turn the bordering-burlesque qualities of the London painting into a terrifying nightmare.

Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the visual culture of witchcraft flourished throughout Europe, along with the witch hunts themselves. Pamphlets, broadsheets, treatises, and prints from Northern Europe proliferated, and artists from Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung to Jacques de Gheyn circulated images that cemented stereotypes of grotesque witches upending the rational world. In Italy, however, paintings of black magic were uncommon, if not dangerous: in Naples, just before Rosa was born, the Dutch artist Jacob van Swanenburg was brought before the Inquisition for his pictures of witches’ Sabbaths. The few seicento artists who did paint witches often depicted beguiling beauties, such as the Circes of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (fig. 2) or ornately dressed sorceresses by Angelo Caroselli.

Rosa’s witches, on the other hand, take on the characteristics of Invidia, the personification of envy: half-naked with wild hair, a crooked nose, and sagging breasts. Even more so than his other depictions, the present figure is shockingly naked, her genitals barely covered by the few leaves of a dark green ivy garland. Ivy, a symbol of Bacchus and the desires he could incite, mockingly reminds the viewer that witches were envious of the passions and fertility of youth. Rosa—like his teacher Jusepe de Ribera—seems to take pleasure in painting the desiccated flesh of the hoary wild woman, describing the folds of her skin in long, quavering brushstrokes. The grotesqueness of the torso juxtaposes against her taut and muscled arms, creating an androgyny that underscores the witch as a failed or unnatural female.

Rosa’s few paintings, drawings, and a poem of witchcraft constitute a small but important thematic group of artworks. Born and trained in Naples, Rosa spent the majority of his career in Rome, early on earning praise for his proto-Romanic landscapes and battle scenes—a reputation that followed him throughout the subsequent centuries. Rosa, however, considered himself a noble history painter, a painter-poet-philosopher, and fought to establish a correspondingly grand reputation. The majority of Rosa’s witchcraft paintings were made during his period in Florence (1640-49), where he was free to explore his artistic fantasia in the climate of artistic and intellectual tolerance created by the Medici. Rosa also founded the Accademia dei Percossi where he surrounded himself with people who pushed his experimental and intellectual ambitions. Giovanni Battista Ricciardi, a lecturer of moral philosophy and Rosa’s closest friend and confidant, shared demonological literature with Rosa, while Lorenzo Lippi, a Florentine artist with similar painter-poet ambitions to Rosa, wrote the mock-epic Il Malmantile Racquistato (a parody of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata), which tellingly included the witch Martinazza and a character modelled after Rosa himself. Moreover, magic, new sciences, alchemy, and philosophies were not so disparate in early modern thought. What makes Rosa’s group of witchcraft paintings so extraordinary is the way that he collated the visual culture of contemporary witchcraft with learned references to these blurred boundaries of intellectual, artistic, and literary knowledge.

La Strega is unique compared to Rosa’s other compositions. Rosa’s witches in general draw upon Invidia (fig. 3), early modern imagery, and descriptions of witches from classical writers like Horace or Apuleius; but the forceful witch portrayed here seems closest to Erichtho, the infamous Thessalian horror witch of Lucan’s Pharsalia (61-65 CE). Most of Rosa’s paintings are small scenes populated by groups of witches (both female and male), often performing rituals of love magic (as Rosa himself described in his poem from ca. 1645, La Strega). Highly polished and painted in a style that shows the influence of the bambocciante (who he lived and worked around in Rome in the 1630s), art historians have related these pictures to the culture of wunderkammer and vanitas imagery[4] or to Rosa’s activities as a satirist[5]. Towering over two meters tall—by far the largest of Rosa’s witchcraft paintings—La Strega, on the other hand, represents a single, explicitly violent witch, confronting the viewer with surprisingly monumental proportions, highlighting Rosa’s theatrical tendencies.

In relation to Rosa’s oeuvre more broadly, the witch’s pose and expression are related to motifs found in several of Rosa’s witchcraft paintings and drawings. While some have been tempted to read Rosa’s loss of his child into the similarities between La Strega and L’Umana Fragilità (fig. 4), the stylistic affinities more convincingly suggest the ambitiousness of La Strega rather than a biographical interpretation. The most striking comparison to La Strega, instead, is Rosa’s famous Corsini Prometheus (fig. 5). Like the Prometheus, La Strega too presents a single figure who encompasses the majority of the canvas, emphasizing the extreme contortions of the body. Both the titan and witch demonstrate Rosa’s absorption of Roman art, particularly the influence of Bernini, and Rosa’s interest in physiognomy. The looser handling of the surface and narrative ambiguity distinguish the indocile Strega, whose exaggerated expression even more directly appeals to—or perhaps was a paragone to—Bernini’s influential sculptural bust Anima Dannata.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the painting is its unusually large dimensions. The canvas is a size typically reserved for philosophical, allegorical, or history subjects, which draws attention to how seriously Rosa considered his witchcraft paintings. Despite its grand size and nature, La Strega was likely not commissioned. Rosa often eschewed typical patronage structures, famously quipping that ‘to painters of my standing an extravagant genius’ the only thing a patron could dictate are the measurements of the canvas[6]. Instead, Rosa’s witchcraft paintings typically went to his close circle of friends from Florence, such as the Florentine marchese Filippo Niccolini, who owned the four tondi now in Cleveland, or the Roman banker Carlo de’Rossi, who owned several of Rosa’s witchcraft paintings. La Strega is just the type of painting that collectors prized to surprise their visitors, perhaps hidden behind a curtain to ramp up its shock value (as de’Rossi did with Witches at their Incantations). The scale, strong chiaroscuro (a lasting influence of Neapolitan painting), and experimental qualities of the composition suggest dating La Strega to the end of Rosa’s Florentine period, around 1647-49, when he was spending the majority of his time throughout Tuscany, in the company of his learned friends—the types who bought Rosa’s witchcraft paintings.

Hannah Segrave

Updated November 2024

Notes