Diogenes and His Cup (1662): Art, History and Details

Diogenes and His Cup (1662) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615–1673).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Diogenes was an ancient Greek philosopher who valued poverty and shunned worldly goods, to the extent that he discarded his drinking bowl when he observed a youth drinking water from cupped hands, as depicted here. The print was made by the eccentric Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa, who rejected conventional patronage in order to focus on themes that interested him. The placement of the narrative within a lush landscape is typical of Rosa’s approach, as is the emphasis on the unconventional principles of his subject, with which he identified.

Object facts

• Title: Diogenes and His Cup
• Date: 1662
• Creator attribution: Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615–1673)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1975.51

Collection credit

Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland

Further reading listed by the museum

• Langdon, Helen. Salvator Rosa Paint and Performance. London: Reaktion Books, Limited, 2022. .
• Robertson, Bruce, and Robert Dance. “Joseph Goupy and the Art of the Copy.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 10 (December 1988): 354–375.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.