GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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41. Salvator Rosa The Dream of Aeneas, ca. 1663-66 Oil on canvas, 77 !4 x 47 ?4 in. x (196.9 120.7 cm) Rogers Fund, 1965 (65.118) 44
42. Salvator Rosa The Dream of Aeneas, ca. 1663-64 Etching with drypoint, sheet 13 lA x 9 Me in. (34.9x23 cm) Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917(1750.17.-85) for Rosa was himself a poet, as well as an actor and philosopher. Notoriously proud and com bative, and dismissive of the normal process of patronage that governed the lives of artists, he had a keen sense of his own genius and of the place inspiration plays in creativity. His person ality comes through clearly in a remarkable letter he wrote in 1666 to Don Antonio Ruffb? the Sicilian collector for whom, as we have seen, Rembrandt, Guercino, and Mattia Preti had worked (as had Artemisia Gentileschi, among others). Rosa had promised to work for Ruffb, but he alerted the nobleman that "I do not paint to enrich myself, but purely for my own satisfaction, [so that] it is necessary to allow me to be carried away by the transports of enthu siasm and use my brushes only when I feel myself rapt." The Dream of Aeneas suggests that a probable catalyst for this creative spirit was provided by the reading of poetry. It is not possible in this publication to discuss all of the paintings in the collection. One a high point?taking very different tack on the issue of creativity and inspiration?is Andrea Sacchi's astonishing portrait of the male soprano Marcantonio Pasqualini (fig. 43). Sacchi is highly unlikely to win a popularity contest in today's world, when prose imitates colloquial speech, poetry has abandoned the structure of verse and rhyme, and angst or a political agenda rather than poetic theory is deemed the mainspring of art. In seventeenth-century terms this picture, which dates from 1641, is an unqualified masterpiece. Bellori described it as "not a simple portrait but a most beautiful conceit, [Sacchi] having shown [Pasqualini] in the costume of a shepherd with Apollo, who crowns him. He places his hands on a spinet... and 45*
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Page 3 and 4: We Like What We Know IN 1786, the t
Page 5 and 6: course, like Goethe, he was already
Page 7 and 8: (Fry, raised a Quaker, should perha
Page 9 and 10: 4? (opposite) Jusepe de Ribera (Spa
Page 11 and 12: ?#\ i % ' **& :#"* > ^ / V* V? 13?
Page 13 and 14: 10. Giulio Cesare Procaccini (Itali
Page 15 and 16: Setting the Scene Let us start with
Page 17 and 18: We happen to know that the person f
Page 19 and 20: l6. (opposite) Sofonisba Anguissola
Page 21 and 22: 19 Ludovico Carracci The Lamentatio
Page 23 and 24: 22. Federico Head Looking (study me
Page 25 and 26: 24. Annibale Carracci The Coronatio
Page 27 and 28: irony and clever wordplay. For exam
Page 29 and 30: 31'
Page 31 and 32: 28. Caravaggio The Entombment, 1602
Page 33 and 34: 30. Helmet Venetian, late 15th cent
Page 35 and 36: 33 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Bar
Page 37 and 38: 36. Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (D
Page 39 and 40: 38. (opposite) Mattia Preti (Italia
Page 41: incredible care, and are made to be
Page 46: and it also establishes an Olympian

GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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