Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Philosophy as Ut Pictura Rhetorica: Eloquent Gesture and the Pursuit of Artistic Decorum

This essay examines an important, overlooked aspect of Salvator Rosa’s self-referential allegory of Philosophy (National Gallery, London): the conspicuous ‘arm-sling’ gesture. Exemplary of Rosa’s broader convictions about the pictorial poetics of gesture, the pose derives from ancient corporeal codes, signaling the orator’s decorous self-control and moral-ethical respectability in speaking. It compliments the inscription in Rosa’s painting and its message concerning silence. The Philosophy is here reinterpreted as an ut pictura rhetorica, representative of Rosa’s vision of the artist as decorous, judicious and eloquent, a self-image that not only permeates his oeuvre but is sustained by his biographers, the poems of friends, and the seventeenth-century art-theoretical currents in which he engaged.