Ruins in a Rocky Landscape (c. 1640): Art, History and Details

Ruins in a Rocky Landscape (c. 1640) 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:

In 1635, Rosa left his native Naples for Rome, the undisputed art center of the 17th century, where a new type of landscape painting was emerging, distinguished by the effects of light and atmosphere. Rosa’s fame grew quickly as a painter of landscapes that conjured the beauty and fertility of the Bay of Naples. Ruins in a Rocky Landscape incorporates classical ruins, iridescent reflections of light, and a pastoral tone evoked by the idling shepherds, exemplifying the work that earned Rosa his early fame. The dark, dramatic rocks that rise along the left foreshadow the wildness that Rosa would cultivate in his later sublime landscapes.

Object facts

• Title: Ruins in a Rocky Landscape
• Date: c. 1640
• Creator attribution: Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615–1673)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 157.5 x 189.2 x 7 cm (62 x 74 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 144 x 176.7 cm (56 11/16 x 69 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1958.472

Collection credit

Gift of Rosenberg & Stiebel, Inc.

Further reading listed by the museum

• Langdon, Helen. Salvator Rosa Paint and Performance. London: Reaktion Books, Limited, 2022. pp.42-48.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.
• Coe, Nancy. “A Landscape Painting by Salvator Rosa.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 46, no. 4 (April 1959): 62–63.

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.