Uffizi acquire Salvator Rosa Witch
January 7 2025

Picture: Nicholas Hall
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The New York dealer Nicholas Hall has announced on Instagram that the Uffizi Galleries in Florence have acquired Salvator Rosa's La Strega (The Witch).
To quote part of their catalogue note written for the picture:
In the twenty-first century Western imagination, the word ‘witch’ conjures a variety of figures, from the Puritans of Salem, to Snow White’s transforming evil stepmother, to the seductive temptresses of 1970s B-films. For the early modern European, the idea of a witch was similarly varied—corroborated by the numerous and diverging pictures and descriptions that crop up in demonological texts, mythological narratives, court documents and images of artistic fantasy. In this milieu, the notoriously audacious Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), famed for his sublime landscapes and esoteric philosophical subjects, fashioned a specific stereotype of witches in his paintings of black magic. Made during the 1640s and 1650s between Florence and Rome, Rosa’s pictures drew on a wide variety of sources, including popular superstitions, literary characters, demonological treatises and the rich visual tradition crafted by Renaissance artists.
No picture captures the qualities of the ‘Rosian witch’ as explicitly as the painting La Strega. Towering over two meters tall, it features a naked witch thrashing alone in the middle of a shadowy, cavernous space. While the painting is atypical of Rosa’s approach to depicting witchcraft (in that it is both structurally simple and physically large), it nevertheless foregrounds Rosa’s paradigmatic witch. This ‘hideous hag’ is an explicitly old, naked woman—a grotesque character. I purposefully employ the term ‘grotesque’ in order to lay bare the inherent misogynistic intentions behind creating this character and in her reception by an early modern audience, as well as to relate this witch directly to the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body—open, excessive and tangibly debased.[1] But rather than dismissing Rosa’s witch as simply stereotypical or sexist, investigating her attributes and sources reveals how Rosa created a terrifying, electrifying and ambitious character. In so doing, he cemented stereotypes of the witch that share a direct line to the ideas of witches—and women—today.