In his lifetime he was among the most famous painters,[1] known for his flamboyant personality, and regarded as an accomplished poet, satirist, actor, musician, and printmaker, as well.

He was active in Naples, Rome, and Florence, where on occasion he was compelled to move between cities, as his caustic satire earned him enemies in the artistic and intellectual circles of the day.

[2] As a history painter, he often selected obscure and esoteric subjects from the Bible, mythology, and the lives of philosophers, that were seldom addressed by other artists.

Yet Salvator showed a preference for the arts and secretly worked with his maternal uncle Paolo Greco to learn about painting.

Returning to Naples, he began painting haunting landscapes, overgrown with vegetation, or jagged beaches, mountains, and caves.

Records show at least four more children were born and placed with foundling hospitals between 1641 and 1657, giving some indication of their poor financial condition in those years.

In 1656, feeling pressure in Rome from the poet Agostino Favoriti and his close ally Fabio Chigi, recently elected Pope Alexander VII, Rosa sent Lucrezia and their son Rosalvo to stay in Naples with his family.

Soon after she arrived, a severe outbreak of the plague hit Naples, and Rosalvo, Salvator's brother, sister, brother-in-law and their children all died in the epidemic.

[4]: 23, 34, 44, 106, 120–121 p. While Rosa had a facile genius at painting, he pursued a wide variety of arts: music, poetry, writing, etching, and acting.

He was well acquainted also with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and was housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting, and War.

[11] Although these activities cannot be conveniently dovetailed into known dates of his career, in 1846 a famous romantic ballet about this story titled Catarina was produced in London by the choreographer Jules Perrot and composer Cesare Pugni.

This last work raised a storm of controversy among religious and civil authorities who perceived in it a satire directed at them.

Rosa, endeavouring at conciliation, published a text in which he provided anodyne explanations for the painting's imagery; nonetheless he was nearly arrested.

[13] During Rosa's lifetime his work inspired followers such as Giovanni Ghisolfi, but his most lasting influence was on the later development of romantic and sublime landscape traditions within painting.

[11] Eighteenth-century artists influenced by Rosa include Alessandro Magnasco, Andrea Locatelli, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Marco Ricci.

[11] As Wittkower states, it is in his landscapes, not his grand historical or religious dramas, that Rosa truly expresses his innovative abilities most graphically.

He generally avoided the idyllic and pastoral calm country-sides of Claude Lorrain and Paul Bril in his landscapes, and created brooding, melancholic fantasies, awash in ruins and brigands.

A 1748 poem by James Thompson, "The Castle of Indolence", illustrated this: "Whate'er Lorraine light touched with softening hue/ Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew".

Horace Walpole, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote highly of his paintings.

[19][20][21] Salvator Rosa was the subject of an opera by Antônio Carlos Gomes, a ballet Catarina or La Fille du Bandit, and Franz Liszt included an arrangement of a song by Giovanni Bononcini, in his suite Annees de pelerinage, Deuxieme annee: Italie, (S.161) No.

Rosa and his tempestuous spirit became the darling of British Romantics such as Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and Alexander Runciman.

[18]: 6 p. Rosa's reputation and influence waned in the nineteenth century; when his Monks Fishing was displayed in Dulwich in 1843 it was criticized by John Ruskin as telling "unmitigated falsehoods" and containing "laws of nature set at open defiance".

Poetry dwells on the pedantry, imitativeness, adulation, affectation and indecency of poets—also their poverty, and the neglect with which they were treated; and there is a very vigorous sortie against oppressive governors and aristocrats.

In Babylon, Rosa represents himself as a fisherman, Tirreno, constantly unlucky in his net-hauls on the Euphrates; he converses with a native of the country, Ergasto.