Misplaced Pages

Salvator Rosa (frame)

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Salvator Rosa, Saint George kills the dragon, Florenze, private collection. The frame used for this painting is the salvadora typology.

The Salvator Rosa frame, also called salvadora or salvatora, is a typology of frame used for artworks, one fo the best known framing-style from Italy. Originated during the 17th century, it takes the name of the artist that started using it. Designed to fit paintings of various sizes and hanging methods, Rosa was strongly convinced that the aesthetic reception, and thus monetary value, of a painting was given also with its own frame. The salvadora was then adopted by many other late-baroque artists, in particular by Carlo Maratta who used it in so many occasion that, for a brief period in the 18th century, the framing.style adopted also his name. It sostituited the Sansovino frame, popular during the Italian renaissance, and continued to be popular until the nineteenth-century.

It’s use outside Italy started during the Grand Tour, used particularly for paintings purchased by British visitors, many of those created before the historical period which Rosa lived.

Carlo Maratta, The abduction of Europa, 1680-85 ca, National Gallery of Ireland. The frame used for this painting is another case of Salvator Rosa style.

This frame is composed by a simple wooden frame gilded with a gold leaf, or like in other cases, a silver leaf painted with warm-colored varnish to imitate golden shadow, and a single intaglio line. Is Filippo Baldinucci the first that cites the attention which Salvator Rosa gave to the conservation of his works, but the one that prove the framing-style invention to its namesake is Bernardo De Dominici. Neither Baldinucci nor De Dominici explain the exact reasons that pushed Rosa to create the frame, but in a letter to his friend Giovan Battista Ricciardi the neapolitan artist underscored the importance of a simple yet dignified frame to isolate the artwork for the external context, as opposite to the spanish framing-style popular those years in his native city.

References

  1. J. Newbery, Timothy (2007). Frames (1st ed.). Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. xi–xii.
  2. Karraker, D. Gene (2009). Looking at European Frames. A Guide to Terms, Styles, and Techniques (1st ed.). J. Paul Getty Museum. pp. 26–27. ISBN 978-0892369812.
  3. Simon, Jacob (1996). The Art of the Picture Frame. Artists, Patrons and the Framing of Portraits in Britain (National Portrait Gallery ed.). University of Michigan (published 2009). pp. 64–65. ISBN 978-1855141711.
  4. Amendola, Adriano (2010). "«Questa signor mio è la ruffiana delle pitture»: Salvator Rosa e l'invenzione di un nuovo modello di cornice" (PDF). Roma Campisano Editore: 255–265. ISBN 978-8888168609.
Categories:
Salvator Rosa (frame) Add topic