Salvator Rosa

This large drawing by Salvator Rosa, depicting Mercury as the Roman god of eloquence, is a design for the frontispiece to Francisco Serra’s Synonymorum apparatus, a dictionary of Latin synonyms published in Venice in 1654 and reprinted in 1672. Engraved by the French printmaker François de Poilly (1622-1673), the frontispiece is captioned 'Salva Rosa inv.' and 'F. Poilly sculp.' The Synonymorum apparatus bore a dedication to Cardinal Carlo Barberini, and the engraved frontispiece includes three bees – the Barberini family emblem - below the feet of Mercury, although these are not found in this preparatory drawing. 

Rosa may have been inspired by a somewhat similar figure of Mercury that appears in the frontispiece to the 17th century German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher’s Obeliscus Pamphilus, published in Rome in 16503. (Indeed, the artist is known to have met Kircher in Rome.) The imagery of both the present sheet and the related print anticipates that of Rosa’s painting of an Allegory of Fortune of 1659, in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, in which the female figure also bears a cornucopia. In stylistic terms, the present sheet may be compared with a number of Rosa’s preparatory studies for his celebrated Figurine series of etchings of soldiers, peasants and other figures, datable to c.1656-1657.

The English portrait painter, author and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson Senior (1667-1745), whose collector’s mark is found at the lower right corner of the sheet, owned a remarkable collection of nearly five thousand drawings. Richardson’s extensive collection, comprised mainly of Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, was assembled over a period of about fifty years, and was organized by school and date. The drawings were further classified with a complex system of shelfmarks, such as those found on the reverse of the mount of this drawing.

The present sheet also bears the inscription applied to drawings belonging to the 18th century Dutch-born painter and engraver Jan van Rymsdyk (1719-1790), who lived and worked in England, mainly as a medical illustrator, from around 1750 until his death. Van Rymsdyk (sometimes Riemsdyk or Rijmsdijk) organized his small but choice collection of drawings – mainly by Italian and Netherlandish artists – on similar lines to that of Richardson, and indeed acquired several drawings formerly owned by him. Rymsdyk purchased his drawings, which included several sheets by Rembrandt, on a modest budget, although, as Frits Lugt has noted, ‘He seems to have had an important collection of drawings; the inscription ‘Rymsdyk’s Museum’…is often found on beautiful sheets.’

The largest surviving group of drawings from Rymsdyk’s collection, amounting to eleven sheets, is today in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, while seven more are in the British Museum in London and five are in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Other drawings with a Rymsdyk provenance are in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, The Courtauld Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Nasjonalgaleriet in Oslo, the Louvre and the Fondation Custodia in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere.