Earlier this semester, I got the opportunity to hear Hannah Segrave, an Art History PhD Candidate and experienced Museum Curator, talk about her obsession: Salvator Rosa. Her main focus in the Art History department is 17th century paintings, specifically related to Salvator Rosa's paintings of witches.
She particularly talked about Rosa's quad of circular paintings, showing scenes of witches in the morning, day, evening, and night. What was particularly interesting about this series of paintings, as Segrave pointed out in her talk, was that Rosa depicted these witches, not just at nighttime, as one might imagine they exist at exclusively, but in the middle of the day. They are just as ugly and terrifying in the daytime as in the nighttime, and Rosa's quad of paintings shows the haggard, hook-nosed faces of these witches in broad daylight. The painting of "Scenes with Witches- Morning" shows a similar sight, of a witch gathering ingredients, presumably for whatever the night entails. Rosa has clearly brought a lot of thought about how witches spend their time and what incantations and spells require in order to paint this series.
Segrave showed off these paintings in an exhibition back in 2015, called, "The Novel and the Bizarre: Salvator Rosa's Scenes of Witchcraft". This was an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art that displayed lots of Rosa's works, but with his quad of Witch Scenes clearly brought to the forefront of the audience's attention. I was particularly interested in her ideas of symbology and how the Classics inspired Rosa. After taking a course at University College of Dublin in the Fall of 2017 which was titled, "Magic in the Ancient World", I found many commonalities between the classical sources' descriptions of witches that I read and the details within Rosa's paintings. This was a wonderful artist talk, and was interesting as a person who adores Neo-Classical art in the 17th century, like Hannah Segrave.
