The seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), long regarded as a harbinger of the ideals of professional independence that characterize the artists of the Romantic era, is here returned to the social circumstances of his own time. This dissertation argues that Rosa’s personal and professional identity of autonomy and his pursuit of an original, distinctive persona were facilitated by male friendship. A key component of the philosophical ideal to which Rosa and his friends subscribed, friendship is defined by a standard of egalitarianism that permits its practitioners to be at once dependent and independent. In his adoption and cultivation of the rituals and discourses of friendship – especially academic friendship – Rosa found a strategy for navigating the obligatorily socially-delineated parameters of self-fashioning in seicento Florence and Rome. Friendship permeated the most vital elements of Rosa’s career: his early theatrical practice in Rome, his private academy in Florence, and his business tactics as a painter and printmaker in Rome. This dissertation aims to open up an area of insight into Rosa as both unique among and representative of his contemporaries, and to expand upon the existing scholarly knowledge of an artist on the cusp of an important development in the history of the visual artist’s identity.

The seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), long regarded as a harbinger of the ideals of professional independence that characterize the artists of the Romantic era, is here returned to the social circumstances of his own time. This dissertation argues that Rosa’s personal and professional identity of autonomy and his pursuit of an original, distinctive persona were facilitated by male friendship. A key component of the philosophical ideal to which Rosa and his friends subscribed, friendship is defined by a standard of egalitarianism that permits its practitioners to be at once dependent and independent. In his adoption and cultivation of the rituals and discourses of friendship – especially academic friendship – Rosa found a strategy for navigating the obligatorily socially-delineated parameters of self-fashioning in seicento Florence and Rome. Friendship permeated the most vital elements of Rosa’s career: his early theatrical practice in Rome, his private academy in Florence, and his business tactics as a painter and printmaker in Rome. This dissertation aims to open up an area of insight into Rosa as both unique among and representative of his contemporaries, and to expand upon the existing scholarly knowledge of an artist on the cusp of an important development in the history of the visual artist’s identity.