Members' Research Report Archive

My research this year has focused on completing a book on the Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), to be published in 2014, which detaches Rosa’s well-known achievement of freedom from his romantic legacy and locates it instead in the rituals and discourses of early modern friendship. The book also includes the first English translation and critical edition of a selection of Rosa’s letters. In a forthcoming article (Art History, December 2013), entitled “Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica: Eloquent Gesture and the Pursuit of Artistic Decorum,” I offer a new interpretation of Rosa’s allegorical self-portrait in the National Gallery, London. Other projects under way include studies of autonomy and novelty in early modern artistic practice.