Resting Soldier
  • Salvator Rosa
  • Arenello 1615 - 1673 Rome
  • Resting Soldier, circa 1655
  • Pen and brown ink, brown wash, on laid paper,
  • mounted on a page of a former album
    with handwritten numbering on the upper right: 57.
  • 84 × 113 mm
Provenance:
Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689)
Cardinal Decio Azzolini Rome
Marchese Pompeo Azzolini, Rome
Prince Livio Odescalchi, Rome
Prince Ladislao Odescalchi, Rome
Literature:
Michael Mahoney: The Drawings of Salvator Rosa,
New York and London 1977,
no. 46.19, vol. I, p. 458, ill. vol. II

When Salvator Rosa was forced to give up painting around 1670 due to an eye condition, he also relinquished a large number of drawings that he had always kept in his studio as source material. In this way, Queen Christina of Sweden, who had settled in Rome after her abdication, was able to acquire numerous sheets of many studies, up until about 1673. After 1700, these studies were clipped apart on the basis of their subject matter and pasted into several albums, probably by Prince Livio Odescalchi1.

The drawing shown here rests on one of the pages of these albums, whose intact volumes the Rosa expert M. Mahoney was still able to admire in 1960 at the Palazzo Odescalchi in Rome. He attributed the sheet to the studies of the 62nd series of the Diverse Figure (completed in 1656-57), the so-called Figurines, which depict soldiers in every possible variation and posture. The closed contour of the depictions suggests a planned duplication in engraving.

  1. Ursula Fischer Pace, Andreas Stolzenburg: Zur Provenienz der römischen Barockzeichnungen im Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, in: Salvator Rosa – Genie der Zeichnung. Studien und Skizzen aus Leipzig und Haarlem, exh. cat. Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig,
    Cologne 1999, pp. 78/79