SALVATOR ROSA (Arenella 1615-1673 Rome)

Following the artist's major commission for a battle scene from Monsignor Neri Corsini, the new Papal ambassador to Louis XIV in 1652, for which he charged the sum of vast 600 scudi, Rosa was only willing to paint battle scenes for the most important purchasers. When Giovanni Battista Ricciardi asked on behalf of a friend if he would paint a battle, he was told 'I think you know how repugnant I find this sort of painting, even though it is my home ground for beating any painter that wants to attack me..He should know that I've more or less vowed not to paint this sort of picture unless I'm paid the price of a Raphael or a Titian' (J. Scott, op. cit., p. 100).

Ironically, despite Rosa's obvious apathy towards such paintings coupled with his considerable dissatisfaction with the papacy of Alexander VII (the recently elevated Fabio Chigi), which was to culminate in the infamous allegory of Fortuna (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), the present painting appears to be a direct result of Chigi patronage. The Pope's nephews, Flavio and Agostino had moved to Rome in 1656 and commissioned several paintings directly from the artist, such as the Mercury, Argus and Io, now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City. Two years later, Don Agostino married Maria Virginia Borghese, for which occasion an inventory of his possessions was drawn up, which includes the present painting.

Salerno (loc. cit, 1963) advances a date of 1656 for the execution of the painting, on the basis that Agostino Chigi had just arrived in Rome and stylistically it is extremely close to the aforementioned Corsini painting, now in the Musée de Louvre, Paris. Both have a frieze of figures in vaguely classical armor and use the rounded forms of gray horses as grounding blocks among the chaos of writhing limbs. The individual characters are slightly exaggerated in their violent struggles and a rocky mountain, although more dominant in the Louvre painting, provides a frame for the continuation of the battle seen in the distant plains. Both paintings are grander and more orderly than the melées which Rosa had painted for the Medici a few years earlier.

In the 19th century the painting was purchased by James Jackson Jarves (1818-1888), who was descended from a family of French Huguenots who moved first to England and later emigrated to America. During his travels around the world, he amassed a large number of paintings, making him the only serious rival to Thomas Jefferson Bryan as a collector of Old Master paintings in America. In 1863 Jarves exhibited 145 Italian paintings from the 14th and 15th centuries at the New York Historical Society, at the same time that Bryan's collection was entering the institution, with the hope that a museum, preferably in Boston, would buy his collection en bloc, making it 'the nucleus for the study in America of Italian art'. However Jarves's venture met with little success, and the collection was deposited at Yale University in 1868 as collateral for a loan of $20,000, which was forfeited three years later. The university decided to keep the paintings and Jarves negotiated a second loan with which he purchased a second group of paintings - 54 in total, including the present painting - which he sold en bloc in 1884 to Mrs. Liberty E. Holden, one of the original founders of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

We are grateful to Ms. Carol Togneri of the Getty Provenance Index for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.