A Nightmare on Greene Street: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Scene at the morgue

By Niccolò Graffio

Sitting there in the motorman’s class, I listened intently to the instructor as he attempted to impress upon us the importance of safety in the workplace.  Picking up a soft cover book about the size of a notebook, he waved it in front of the class, trying to garner the attention of the know-it-alls who invariably find such lectures boring.

“This is a copy of New York City Transit’s code of safety rules.” he loudly announced.  “We have a saying about this book: ‘This is a book written in blood!’  When I first came on this job, this book had only four pages.  As you can see, this book is now a lot thicker.  Every time someone was killed on this job, another page was added to this book.”  Suddenly he had everyone’s attention.  His grim meaning was abundantly clear to all: the job of transit worker is not an easy one.  In fact, it’s a very dangerous one!

Sitting here in front of my computer, I realize it’s been years since I heard that lecture.  I didn’t stay with MTA New York City Transit (long, boring story).  Yet the memory of that instructor’s words still lingers in my mind.  Even though people to this day still get injured (even killed) on the job, we as Americans nonetheless have a tendency to take for granted the fact workplace safety has improved dramatically since our parents and grandparents earned a living. 

The word “sweatshop” conjures up images of a place where people work long, hard hours for little pay under unsafe working conditions.  Though sweatshops today are most often associated with Third World nations, it wasn’t that long ago the landscape of these United States was dotted with them.  In fact, despite numerous Federal, state and local laws prohibiting them, quite a number of them still exist in shadows.  Whereas today’s sweatshop worker in America is typically an illegal alien, in times past legal immigrants (and occasionally native-born Americans) were most commonly exploited.

As one can imagine, the potential for abuse and tragedy exists in such places.  This article deals with one such tragedy, and the way it helped shape workplace safety in America today.

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory was located in the Asch building on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in Manhattan. The Asch building was a ten-story structure, with the factory occupying the top three floors. The building was owned by two partners: Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. It produced women’s blouses or “shirtwaists” as they were known at the time. The factory employed almost 500 people with the vast majority of them being either Southern Italian/Sicilian immigrants from Italy or Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.  The typical employee was a female between the ages of 13 to 23.  Though Blanck and Harris owned the building, work was subcontracted out to individuals who in turn hired the girls and women.

(L-R) Bodies being laid out on the sidewalk. Inside the Triangle Shirtwaist factory after the fire. The bodies of seamstresses, who jumped from the factory floors to avoid being burned alive, outside the building. Relatives identifying bodies in the morgue.

There had been labor problems at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory prior to the fire.  The ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) had been founded only 11 years earlier to combat exploitation of skilled female employees of garment factories.  In 1909 an incident at the factory triggered a walk-out by the employees.  The ILGWU helped them stage a protest while simultaneously helping them avoid trouble with union-busting thugs and the police.  

The following year thousands of garment workers city-wide staged a general strike, forcing concessions from employers to allow workers to establish a grievance system.  Since there was little if any oversight at the time by the government, owners frequently disregarded the concessions and continued operating their factories under exploitative and unsafe conditions.  Though some of the Triangle factory’s employees by 1911 were members of the ILGWU, the place was still a non-union shop.

At 4:45 PM on Saturday, March 25, 1911 hundreds of girls and young women were finishing up their shift and preparing to go home for the day.  They had been working overtime to fill up backorders.  The floors of the factory were littered with containers of flammable liquids (used in clothing manufacture) and piles of garments.  To this day, no one is quite sure how the fire started, but start it did.  Literally within a matter of minutes it engulfed the top three floors of the Asch building.

A bookkeeper on the eighth floor was able to use a phone to warn workers on the tenth floor of the inferno.  Many of these people were able to flee to the roof.  Among these people were Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who survived the fire.  The people on the ninth floor, however, were not so lucky.  They were tipped off to the conflagration by the fire itself!  Pandemonium quickly erupted as terrified girls charged en masse towards the available exits, only to discover most of them locked!  The single exterior fire escape quickly buckled under the weight of all the workers trying to flee simultaneously, causing them to tumble headlong onto the pavement over 100 feet below.

Two heroic elevator operators, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo, are credited with saving many lives by bringing their elevators up to the ninth floor three times each.  Unfortunately, Mortillalo’s elevator soon buckled under the intense heat.  In Zito’s case, desperate workers pried the doors to the elevator open and jumped to their deaths down the shaft. The weight of all the bodies made it impossible for him to make another trip.

The workers still trapped on the ninth floor rushed to the windows hoping to be rescued by firefighters who had arrived on the scene. In a cruel twist of fate, however, they saw the ladders of the fire trucks were unable to reach the top floors of the building. Water from their fire hoses was also unable to reach the fire on the top floors. In what would become the most unforgettable scene of the Triangle factory fire, scores of workers (most of them girls!), many on fire, made the conscious decision to leap to their deaths in order to avoid being burned alive! Others, in a last, desperate hope for salvation, tried jumping into the safety nets of firefighters, which shredded due to the crush of the falling bodies. All this witnessed by hundreds of horrified onlookers!  

Future New York State Assemblyman Louis Waldman, who was a witness to the nightmare, described it thusly:

“One Saturday afternoon in March of that year — March 25, to be precise — I was sitting at one of the reading tables in the old Astor Library... It was a raw, unpleasant day and the comfortable reading room seemed a delightful place to spend the remaining few hours until the library closed. I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. By this time I was sufficiently Americanized to be fascinated by the sound of fire engines. Along with several others in the library, I ran out to see what was happening, and followed crowds of people to the scene of the fire. 

"A few blocks away, the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was ablaze. When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames. 

"Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies. 

"The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.” – Louis Waldman: Labor Lawyer, E.P. Dutton & co. pp. 32-33.

Whoever was unable to escape or did not choose to leap to their deaths was eventually overcome by smoke or fire.  In total, 146 people, most of them young women and girls, were killed that day.  In a moving scene, 25 of the dead were found huddled together in a cloakroom.  

The Bellevue Morgue was so jammed with bodies that a makeshift morgue had to be set up on an adjoining pier by the East River to allow family members to identify their lost loved ones.  Six unidentified victims were buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, a non-denominational cemetery, in Brooklyn.

Outrage quickly followed the fire.  The ILGWU proposed a day of mourning for the victims.  On April 5th approximately 500,000 people lined the streets of 5th Avenue in Manhattan to watch 75,000-100,000 people march in protest.  Many called for Max Blanck and Isaac Harris to be brought up on criminal charges, which they eventually were, in fact.

The defendants: Max Blanck and Issac Harris

Indicted for numerous counts of manslaughter, the two partners hired celebrated criminal attorney Max Steuer.  Steuer’s argument was no one could prove his clients knew the exit doors were blocked or locked.  Steuer was able to imply the testimony of one witness, fire survivor Kate Alterman, was rehearsed.  He then concocted the specious argument that since her testimony was rehearsed (which he never proved, by the way), it, and the testimony of other witnesses had to be false or perjured.  The jury bought it and acquitted his clients.  Though he would enjoy a long and effective career as a trial attorney, Steuer’s name became a term of reproach among labor activists.

In a sick injustice, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were paid $60,000 more than their reported losses by the insurance company.  Two years after the Triangle Factory fire Blanck would again be arrested for locking the factory door during working hours.  He would be forced a pay a big fat fine of $20!

Most of those who perished in the fire were Jewish, but scanning the list of the deceased I counted what looked like 43 Italian-sounding names.  Unquestionably most of those were from Il Mezzogiorno.  Their sad fate forever woven into the tapestry of our people’s experiences here in America.

The Asch building has been renamed the Brown Building of Science and is now owned by New York University.  It stands as a mute reminder of that horrifying day over a lifetime ago.

Though the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire was not the first workplace disaster in American history, the disgust the sight that so many dead girls elicited would greatly add impetus to the already burgeoning labor movement here.  The fire was invoked by labor activists and their supporters who were now able to force ever greater government oversight into the workplace to protect the rights of workers and their safety.  It would remain the greatest workplace disaster in New York City history until September 11th, 2001.

Further reading:

• http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/narrative1.html
• David von Drehle: Triangle: The Fire That Changed America; NY Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.

A Year in Review

When I launched Il Regno a year ago I knew what I wanted to do, but had little idea of what results to expect. When considering how to promote a Duosiciliano (Southern Italian) ethnic consciousness, I wanted to do something different from the mainstream Italo-American organizations and activists, something that was ours and not simply a channel for fashionable sociopolitical movements. Not only did I find other like-minded people and groups that I hadn’t known about, but also they found me.

Our blog was noticed right away. Greek-American organizations were immediately receptive to our emphasis on our Hellenic heritage and rallied to our cause. I have been invited to several of their functions and am always grateful for the opportunity to attend them.

Southern Italian organizations like the Partito del Sud soon followed and reached out to us as well. In fact, one of my personal highlights was being made an honorary PdS representative in the States and presented a Bourbon flag and autographed copy of National Secretary Antonio Ciano’s book I Savoia E IL Massacro Del Sud. I would like to especially thank Antonio Iannacco, Natale Cuccurese, Agostino Abbaticchio, Enzo Riccio and Alberto D'Arienzo for their moral support and friendship.

After receiving many inquiries about Il Regno it became obvious that I had a lot of work ahead of me, but I have help from some good people, and together we’ve made it through our first year. We couldn’t have near the amount of correspondence as some other groups, but I found this to be far more difficult to keep up with than I thought it would. Clearing out the SPAM alone is a full time job. I also discovered that the Nigerian Lottery is really easy to win, you don’t even have to buy a ticket; I win every day.

One of my readers pointed out a logo from the Italian anti-nuclear movement that is eerily similar to our own, only with a smiley face in the center. I don’t know what to make of it. It is unlikely that they got it from us and I know that we didn’t get ours from them. I was inspired by Indo-European symbolism of the sun and it’s relation to the Mezzogiorno, and of course I thought the traditional red and yellow of Southern Italy were fitting colors to use for it. Lucky for us, we didn’t even consider using a smiley face.

We had some very popular posts, and found out that you can’t always predict which ones will get the most attention. The popularity of the "Gynekokratia" post was a pleasant surprise; it was reprinted on several blogs and newspapers. “Who we are” and Niccolò Grafio’s “A Most Illustrious Corpse” were also well received, and caused several interesting discussions.

We have had a few events and plan to have more. I’m proud that we were able to raise some money for the earthquake victims in Abruzzo during our Battle of Bitonto Commemoration last May.

In addition to our events, we also have plans to publish our own bulletin, so keep your eyes opened for these and other exciting developments

Il Regno has continued to grow and evolve while maintaining its original purpose. Fighting for our cause gives me great pleasure and I hope that all of you continue to visit and make our efforts worthwhile. Thank you.

Forza e Onore,

Giovanni di Napoli

March 17th, 1861: Anniversary of Shame

By Giovanni di Napoli

On my way to work today I made a detour to the Italian Consul General’s office in NYC. In a small but symbolic gesture I unfurled the Bourbon flag of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at the front gate to display my displeasure with the Italian state's plans to celebrate, over the course of the next year, the 150th anniversary of Italian unification, which will be on March 17, 2011.

My friend and I observed a moment of silence to reflect on the tragic historical event and pay our respects to those who fought, suffered and died in defense of their homeland. In a final act of defiance, before leaving, we saluted the heroic memory of King Francis II and Queen Maria Sophia and read the proposed national anthem for the future independent Southern Italian nation, Ritornati dal passato ("Back from the past"), attributed to Riccardo Pazzaglia.

Let God save you, dear homeland
that stretches out in this ancient sea of heroes,
cradle of thought
that, born in Greece,
in this land flourished anew.
Erased from history,
we are once again flying your flags.
On the sacred towers of Gaeta
we write again the word: Dignity.
Soldier of the Volturno,
you that fell here,
no one for a hundred years
has engraved your name.
The children you never knew
will return honor to you.
Back from the past,
those who believe in us this time will win.
Go ahead, drummer,
beat like you once did:
without luck
but not without courage.
Fate that betrayed us
now reunites us.
Back from the past
those who believe in us
this time will win.

As a descendant of the Southern Italian Diaspora community in the United States I find it difficult not to feel revulsion over the planned state-sponsored festivities in honor of Italy's coming anniversary. They are a reminder of why my ancestors (and those of millions of others) left our ancestral homeland to come to America. They glorify the events and personages that caused incalculable hardships on the Mezzogiorno and the loss of our distinct ethnic identity. They reinforce the myths of Italian unification, which by nature require the wholesale vilification of Southern Italy.

Everyone knows that the victors write history, and the history of the South is no exception; it is written from the conquerors perspective. Despite the subjugation, colonization and legacy of oppression, the conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by Piedmont has been made out to be a boon, instead of a bane. With the limited space available it's impossible to recount the whole story here, but I would like to give a few examples of what I mean.

For starters, it is generally accepted that the nineteenth century political and social movement for Italian unification called the Risorgimento ("Resurgence") was fought to liberate Italy from foreign (i.e. Austrian) domination. If this was the case then why was King Francis II of the Two Sicilies considered "foreign" but his cousin, King Umberto of Savoy, was not? If, as some people claim, it was to save a backward and oppressed people from a corrupt and abusive despot than how do they explain the fact that Sardinia, a possession of Piedmont for 150 years, was actually poorer and worse off than the regions of the Two Sicilies? Considering the large numbers of Southerners killed, and many more disenfranchised and scattered by the war and subsequent occupation, it is difficult to see how the rule of Piedmont was superior to that of the Bourbons.What's also conveniently forgotten is the fact that Charles of Bourbon drove the Austrians out of Southern Italy more than a hundred years before their Northern neighbors did, therefore restoring the sovereignty of the ancient Regno, first established in 1130 by Roger II. Unlike the South, Northern Italy was never a unified nation, even after the touted battle of Legnano (1176) during the War of the Communes. Sure some towns joined forces and rebelled against Emperor Frederick I ("Barbarossa") but they never formed a nation. Also, we mustn't forget that certain towns, Lodi for example, remained loyal to the Empire.

As the Sicilian Traditionalist Baron Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola pointed out in his Men Among the Ruins:

"The League of Communes was not followed by a national unification, not even of the purely political, schismatic, and anti-aristocratic type that was first exemplified in France by Philip the Fair. The Communes were followed by the Seignories, with their suspicious figures of petty, tyrannical princes and condottieri–while in Florence we could witness the unprecedented case of the elevation of a money-lending family to the status of a princely dynasty: thus, the Medici were entrusted with the political government of the city. Generally speaking, what ensues is political chaos, struggle, and turmoil–in the name not of the nation, but rather the faction and the most extreme particularism." [Men Among the Ruins, Inner Traditions, 2002, p. 185]

The truth of the matter is the Risorgimento was a war against Tradition and religion by subversive forces consumed with false notions of progress and humanism. Much like their later communist brethren, who had no problem with murdering millions of kulaks to create their “workers paradise,” the Mazzinians, Jacobins, Carbonari, etc. had no problem with murdering thousands of so-called "brigands" (some estimates put the figure as high as one million dead) for a unified Italy.

The more we examine the Risorgimento, the less romantic it becomes, and the more it appears to be a period of bloody conquest hidden behind the facade of social progress. Like them or not, the Bourbons of the Two Sicilies were a major part of Southern Italian history. In order to get a better idea of who we are, we need to know our history.

Consider these words from a recent correspondence:

“For better or for worse, the truth is that unlike other dynasties, the Bourbons lawfully ascended to the throne by recognized rules of succession (even if we argue about international law, war and the law of noble succession) and heavily invested in the betterment of the kingdom, its infrastructure and its trade and commerce. Once the Bourbons came on the scene positive results came about. Naples was an Enlightenment city with academic ties to England and France and became the third largest economy and power after London and Paris. I can tell you that proof is in the fact that I myself have seen English and French publications of the period that praised the country for its wide access to education for all classes and the government’s willingness and ability to build and foster industrialization through both native efforts and through attracting competent foreign investors who brought new emerging technologies…The Bourbons certainly endowed more departments for research and development in the universities in Naples and Palermo than the next hundred years of governments did. Our ancestors had the first train and tracks in Italy, the first gas lights and exported more cotton, silk and wine and minted double the amount of coins than all of northern Italy combined. If you point that out today many people are shocked because they have been fed the image of our people as illiterate cafoni, cammorristi and mafiosi and they are used to images of a post 1865 underdeveloped country. What is interesting is that after the 1850’s when the geopolitics of Europe changed the anti-Naples propaganda began and British in particular began seeking to create incidents with the government and to accuse the government of corruption and excessive violence against dissidents. The Bourbons spoke Neapolitan and ate Neapolitan food. Several queens made presepio figurines and their own Christmas decorations. They had a real and visceral rapport with the people because they were born there and were linked to many ancient Southern families. This was and is maddening for their detractors because unlike other ruling families imposed from the outside they did not simply overtax the people and separate themselves from the people. For this reason the House of Bourbon remains a great symbol of a proud native Southern tradition. Since they were the last lawful rulers of an independent country, in a way a large part of our history stops with them. I guess that’s why in the 1960’s the Neoborbonici focused on them to build a consensus to reclaim a tangible identity. So for a lot of us, it is not just that we liked the dynasty itself, but we’re inspired by that entire lost world of our ancestors.”

My views concerning the Risorgimento and Italian unification may cause people to think that I despise Northern Italians, but that is untrue. Like most people, many Northerners know only what they were taught. Northerners who are honest about the past, or who have no ill will toward the South, I would be happy to befriend. As for Northerners who want to be separated from us, I can understand that, I feel the same way. The problem is with those who wish to dominate and exploit us, and they are as active today as they were in the past. Anti-Southern sentiment continues to be kept alive in modern Italy in order to falsely justify the invasion and to counter any possible claims for restitution. Today Italy is willing to spend Billions in reparations and aid to hostile nations like Lybia, but has done precious little to acknowledge its actions against Southern Italians, who are supposed to be part of the Italian nation.The culture of greed and exploitation imposed by the Risorgimento has not only oppressed the South, but has finally eaten away at the native communities of the North as well. Not satisfied with exploiting Southerners, cheap labor has been imported in such excess that foreigners have formed political blocks that compete with native Italians for resources. Concessions are given to outsiders at the expense of Italians themselves, especially the poor.

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was doing well enough before Garibaldi and the House of Savoy chose to interfere with them and didn’t need to be “rescued” by bullets or cannon balls. The egalitarian promises made by the invaders were as empty as such promises usually are, and now they have the gall to celebrate 150 years of occupation and socioeconomic failure.

I refuse to celebrate what Piedmont and their allies did to my ancestral homeland, and will not ignore the troubled legacy their false promises have left us today.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

A friend found a four-leaf clover

Today, March 17th, is the unfortunate anniversary of Italian Unification. I have a lot to say about that, and I will, but for now I want to point out that this day also celebrates something that is more positive to many Americans. It is also St. Patrick’s Day.

I’m sure that some of you will be wondering why an ethnocentric Southern Italian blog would have a post on what is generally considered by many to be “Irish Day,” but if you follow the content of this blog you will see that we also support ethnic identity throughout Europe as an extension of our own philosophy. In addition to our solidarity with other European Identitarians, the history of the Irish has some surprising similarities to the plight of Southern Italy. Ireland itself has interested many artists and intellectuals, including Salvatore Quasimodo, a celebrated poet laureate from Modica, Sicily. The following is one of his poems that was inspired by his time on the Emerald Isle.

Glendalough

Under Celtic crosses the dead

of Glendalough look out

from a mountain of clouds.

They evade Spring, listening

to the downpour and the crows

that fly with westerly words.

The dead are friends of the gorges,

companions of the sea

that a little further on bends

with storms and traps the waves

alongside the moon. Names speak

of alarm, disenchanted thunder.

Near a stream, under the sun,

neither storm nor midday sunset.

Only the one crow in the sky

calling about a woman

who died of love inside the funnel-

shaped roof of Kevin’s hideaway.

For a fascinating comparison of Ireland and Sicily, please visit Feile-Festa.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

* Glendalough was reprinted from The Night Fountain: Selected Early Poems of Salvatore Quasimodo, translated by Marco Sonzogni & Gerald Dawe, Arc Publications, 2008.

Salvator Rosa

Self portrait

By Aldo Lira

“Painter, Poet, Musician, Philosopher, and Patriot, he combined in his fine organisation the supreme elements of high art, with the noblest instincts of intellectual humanity. He worked through his great vocation with a spirit of independence that never quailed, and with unflinching resistance to the persecutions of despotism and the intrigues of professional rivalry. His moral dignity refused to pander to the licentious tastes of the profligate times in which he flourished, and, in this respect superior to many of his great predecessors, he left not one picture that,

‘_dying, he might blush to own,’ while he exhibited in his great historical compositions, "The Death of Regulus" and "The Conspiracy of Catiline," a graphic eloquence which Herodotus and Gibbon have scarcely surpassed.

The above paragraph, from the Life and Times of Salvator Rosa by Lady Sydney Morgan, published in 1824, is only one of many lofty and effusive tributes paid to Salvator Rosa during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries by the artists, intellectuals and literati of the time. Who was Salvator Rosa and what did he do to inspire such admiration more than 150 years after his death?

Early Life and Artistic Training

The Meridionale has produced more than its fair share of highly individual and idiosyncratic geniuses, and Salvator Rosa was certainly one of these. Rosa was apparently what we today would refer to as a gifted child. He exhibited many of the traits and characteristic of such a child, better known to specialist educators of today than they may have been to his parents and other adults who seem to have been exasperated by the talented and willful child. Known primarily as a painter and printmaker of the Baroque era, anyone who reads an account of the life of Salvator Rosa will come away impressed by the range of his talents and abilities, which included gifts as a poet, a writer of satirical works, an actor and public speaker, and as a composer of music. He was also stubborn, self-willed and impatient with many people.

Salvator Rosa was born in Arenella in the outskirts of Naples in 1615. His birthday is variously given as June 20th or the 21st of July. His grandfather Salvator da Rosa was an artisan builder who worked in the area of residential development (where there was always steady work in this era of ever-expanding population in Naples), and who built the house in Arenella where his son Vito Antonio de Rosa lived. Vito Antonio was also a master builder a land surveyor by profession. Salvator Rosa’s parents wanted him to enter the priesthood or legal profession, and entered him into a school run by the Somaschi fathers.

However he did not stay with the Somaschi for long. The boy had felt a desire to become an artist from an early age, and had family relations who were professional artists. It is said that he received early training in secret from his uncle Paolo Greco. Following this he studied with his brother-in-law Francesco Francanzano, a pupil of Jusepe Ribera. It is believed that Rosa himself may have studied with Ribera and then with Aniello Falcone. It is recorded by early biographers that his brother-in-law Francesco provided him with art materials and would give him “assignments” to paint. Rosa would spend the day painting landscapes, seascapes and street scenes in Naples, and his brother-in-law would critique these in the evenings. Francanzano’s praise of Salvator’s work grew as each painting surpassed the previous one, and the boy soon progressed to painting on increasingly larger canvases.

Rome, Naples and Rome again

Rosa continued to work in the studio of Falcone and assist on commissions there, primarily battle pieces. He continued to paint landscapes and seascapes, and genre scenes of workers and the poor. It is related that he came to the attention of Giovanni Lanfranco soon after the artist’s arrival in Naples in 1634. Lanfranco was said to have been riding through Naples when a picture by Rosa caught his eye. He stopped to purchase it, and continued to purchase any of Rosa’s subsequent works that he came across. This caused Rosa’s art dealers to raise the price on Rosa’s work, and he accordingly began to ask for a higher price for himself.

On the advice of Lanfranco, Rosa decided to venture to Rome in late 1634 or 1635. He stayed in Rome this first time until 1636, in the household of Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, a fellow Neapolitan. While in Rome, Salvator met and befriended members of the Bamboccianti school of painters. The genre scenes he painted there were sold through Roman dealers. Rosa fell ill in 1636 and decided to return home to Naples to fully recover.

After returning to Naples in 1636, Rosa continued to paint landscapes and genre scenes although at a higher level of skill. These continued to be sold through private dealers and provided a source of income. Salvator Rosa decided to return to Rome in 1638.

Bandits on a Rocky Coast

There are a number of speculations as to why he left Naples and returned to Rome. The most straightforward seems to be that he felt an inclination toward landscapes and the prevailing taste in Naples was for large-scale religious works, especially scenes from the lives of the Christian martyrs.

Rosa stayed in Rome until 1639. Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio of Naples had been made bishop of the diocese of Viterbo, about 50 miles outside of Rome, and Salvator at first went there to live again as part of his household. Then, deciding that he wanted independence and fame, Salvator moved into a house in the artist’s quarter of Rome. Here he attempted to advertise his works by hanging several landscapes and a genre scene outside of his house. In addition to painting, during this time Rosa’s natural gifts for satire began to find an outlet in writing verse and theatrical satires. His theatrical works seem to have gotten their start because Rosa was initially interested in street performances during the carnevale season as a kind of public relations stunt to help sell paintings. These activities developed and soon he was writing works that he had performed in public. These works often ridiculed well-known figures of the time in Rome, including powerful artists and patrons of the arts. Among these were the spectacularly talented and highly influential sculptor Bernini. Bernini had directed a number of farcical comedies in the Trastevere and these were inveighed against by Rosa. Eventually Rosa’s satires created a great deal of resentment against him, and Bernini along with others began to use their influential contacts to make life in Rome difficult for Rosa.

This ultimately led to Rosa’s decision to leave the city in 1639.

Florence, Naples and Return to Rome

In late 1639, Rosa went to Florence. He was to remain there for eight years. He arrived there under the patronage of Cardinal Giancarlo de Medici.

Florence no longer held the preeminent position in the plastic arts that it had during the 1500s, having been eclipsed by Rome, although many great works of art were still to be seen in the city. Rosa had been invited to the city by the cardinal, and was given a monthly allowance and lodgings, in return for which he was expected to produce paintings for the cardinal’s picture gallery. Characteristically, Rosa settled for less than the prevailing monthly rate for artists in order to retain greater independence. While in Florence, Rosa formed a society of painters and authors known as the Accademia dei Percossi, or the "Academy of the Stricken."

There was no other landscape artist of note in Florence at the time and Rosa continued to develop his style of atmospheric and, for the time, highly idiosyncratic landscapes. These works were apparently not widely appreciated in the Florentine environment, although his financial situation was initially better in Florence than it had been in Rome. He received some commissions there and painted a number of seascape and port scenes. He also began to compose paintings with Classical or other learned themes, such as his Diogenes and Alexander. He received advice on themes and on the iconographic aspects of these works from his friend Ricciardi, who was to remain his friend until the end of his life.

While in Florence Rosa met Lucrezia, the woman whom he eventually married and who bore him several children.

Florence was a provincial capital at the time, however, and the commissions, fame and fortune that Rosa desired would not be forthcoming there.

Naples, the Return to Rome and Rosa’s Final Years

In late 1646 or 1647 Rosa returned to Naples. He was reputed to have taken part in the Masaniello uprising of 1647. Some dispute this, although Rosa painted a portrait of Masaniello and may have been acquainted with him. He remained in contact with his early mentor, Aniello Falcone.

Finally, Rosa returned to Rome to stay in 1649. Despite the rather widespread enmity against him that still existed there he persisted in the Roman environment and began to achieve success. His etchings gained a wide and appreciative audience over time. He began to receive commissions for large paintings from important patrons, including a series of battle paintings.

The Dream of Aeneas

In examining the course of his life and career, it seems that some of the traits that stood Rosa in good stead in forging ahead with his professional life were also detrimental to his success. These include his stubbornness and his self-willed nature. Although his genius was widely acknowledged, Rosa himself was perhaps the guiltiest in ignoring where his true genius lay. Despite the popularity of his highly original landscapes and the easier monetary rewards that accompanied them, Rosa later tended to disregard them and instead placed greater importance on attempting to gain artistic status and prestige through his histories, large figurative works with themes drawn from literature, mythology, ancient history and the Bible, which never sold as well nor were as well regarded critically. For example it is related that Rosa and his work were well known to French visitors on tour in Rome, who were invariably eager to visit the artist’s studio and make a purchase of one of his paintings. They were primarily interested in his “wild and gloomy” landscapes, however. On one occasion, he was visited in his studio by a very rich cardinal who, after looking through all of the paintings in the studio including several of the large histories, expressed an interest in several of the smaller landscapes. When he asked the price of one in particular, Rosa was said to have burst out that “they always, always, always” wanted the small landscapes, and told the cardinal that the price was one million. This promptly brought the visit to an end. Rosa’s contemporaries have related many such accounts.

Rosa painted over 60 of these large-scale histories, which were said by him to have been hard work. The landscapes came much easier to him.

Salvator also wrote four more satires during this last Roman period. Not all of his satires were intended to ridicule people out of a sense of malice, however. Rosa had a sense of social justice, and in one satire he points out that the Bamboccianti, whom he had been associated with in his early years, were merely fulfilling a sentimental need on the part of the wealthy collectors who bought their works:

And so the living beggars, bare and piched,

Cannot extract a penny from those

Who spend their cash on pictures of the poor…

For what they shun in life they love in art.

Finally, in 1669, he achieved his dream of winning a large-scale public commission, for a painting of the Martyrdom of St. Cosmas and St. Damian, intended as an altarpiece for the church of San Giovanni de’Fiorentini. The painting remains in the church to this day.

Salvator Rosa completed one more major painting in May 1670. In 1672, Rosa fell ill with a fever. He had long suffered from various health complaints and had perhaps been weakened by these and by the strain of overwork. Following his recovery from the fever he developed a stomach complaint that was diagnosed as dropsy. After several treatments failed to produce results the attending physician pronounced the case incurable, and Rosa was advised to put his affairs in order. After two days of silent contemplation of his state, Rosa seemed to accept it and prepared for the end.

Rosa died in Rome on March 15th, 1673. He was buried in the Chiesa degli Angeli, where a portrait of him exists. By the time of his death Salvator Rosa had reputedly earned a tidy sum of money, in contrast to the struggle and poverty of his youth.

Legacy

As noted in the opening of this article, Rosa’s influence continued long after his death, and in fact increased during the late 1700s and well into the 1800s.This influence has been attributed in part to stories about Rosa that were embroidered upon by tour guides of the Grand Tour of the late 1700s, in order to titillate their clients. These stories consisted of Rosa’s having supposedly spent time with bandits in the hills of the Abruzzo, experiences which were believed to have led him to create his numerous landscape paintings that were in fact set in wild mountainous landscapes peopled by bandits.

While there may be some truth to this, inasmuch as people in general will tend to feed on sensationalism, a stronger reason for the fascination he held for artists, writers and composers of the Romantic Era was his personality, especially the artistic persona he created. The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica described this aspect of Rosa in these words:

“In a time when artists where often highly constrained by patrons, Rosa had a plucky streak of independence, which celebrated the special role of the artist. Our wealth must consist in things of the spirit, and in contenting ourselves with sipping, while others gorge themselves in prosperity. He refused to paint on commission or to agree on a price beforehand, and he chose his own subjects. He painted in order to be carried away by the transports of enthusiasm and use my brushes only when I feel myself rapt. This tempestuous spirit became the darling of British Romantics.”

While it is a fact that there are more works by Salvator Rosa in the United Kingdom than in Italy or any other country, the influence of his life and work was extraordinarily widespread and was felt by artists and intellectuals from all over Europe and America in the 18th and 19th Century Romantic movement. A (very) partial list of those who were influenced by him includes the painters Henry Fuseli and William Turner, Thomas Cole (along with most of the other painters identified with the American Hudson River school of painting, who gave the works of Rosa an important place in their artistic pilgrimages to Rome), Gaspar Dughet, and Claude-Joseph Vernet and Horace Vernet, among many others. We find him continuing as an inspiration for painters well into the Victorian Era with the apocryphal biographical scene of Rosa painted by the then-popular but now largely forgotten painter Thomas Jones Barker.

Landscape with Mercury and Argus

The authors Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Theophile Gautier, Stendhal, E.T.A. Hoffman, Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe were all directly influenced by Rosa’s life and his works of art, as were the composers Cesare Pugni, Antonio Carlos Gomes, and Franz Liszt. Some of these writers and composers created biographical if somewhat fictionalized works on the life of Salvator Rosa.

One of the most interesting tributes to Salvator Rosa was made by the explorer Meriwether Lewis in his diaries of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Frustrated by his inability to describe in words what he was seeing, Lewis wrote:

“I wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa …that I might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man.”

Historical side-note

Clark’s last few words are somewhat misleading because we know that the De Soto expedition of 1539-1542 preceded the Lewis and Clark enterprise by over 250 years, and not only covered much of the same ground but is estimated by some historians to have covered four times the territory. Interestingly, this earlier expedition may well have included some of Salvator Rosa’s fellow Napoletani. It would have been typical of military expeditions of this time under the Spanish Hapsburgs to have included at least some, if not quite a few, soldiers and sailors from Naples.

We do know that the chronicler of the expedition, Oviedo (Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes), who had served under King Fadrique of the Royal House of Naples before the Kingdom of Naples was annexed by the Hapsburgs, retained a love of the city and region. He dedicated his first book to King Fadrique who was then in exile, and his chronicle of the De Soto expedition is studded with admiring references to Italian military science, poetry, and art.

The sights experienced by these truly first Europeans in this part of the New World must have been awe-inspiring, and it is fascinating to speculate what comparisons the learned Southern Italophile Oviedo would have made if he had lived to see the works of Salvator Rosa.

Further Reading:

1) Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times, Jonathan Scott, 1996 Yale University Press

2) The Art of Salvator Rosa, Helen Langdon, Xavier F. Salomon and Caterina Volpi, 2010 Paul Holberton Publishing (forthcoming: September 2010)

Photos by New York Scugnizzo