Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditi is an 1860 oil painting on canvas by Thomas Moran hosted at Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

[2] Of the various legends that started to appear after his shadow, a common one recounts that he was part of a group of bandits (banditi) that ravaged central and southern Italy.

[3] Although this story is not historically supported, it inspired many authors like Lady Morgan, who made its as a subject to her 1824 novel The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,[4] and E.T.A.

[5] He travelled across the Peninsula, united six years before in the newly Kingdom of Italy with the posthumous annexation of the Veneto and Friuli after the Third Italian War of Independence (1866).

During a quick visit at the Brera Gallery in Milan, he had the opportunity to see many sketches of Leonardo da Vinci and Salvatro Rosa, that he copied as practice, but considering the date of the painting is more probable that Moran was inspired by another American artist, Thomas Cole, who already described the same subject decades before in the 1830s.