Scenes of Witchcraft: Morning
Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615–1673)
c. 1645–49
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 76.2 x 9.6 cm (30 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 54.5 cm (21 7/16 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Rosa's first scene depicts a young witch who plunges her knife into a writhing amphibian at dawn. The dark clouds of daybreak and anthropomorphic crags provide a gloomy atmosphere, while malevolent birds with piercing beaks hover around the central stabbing, focusing the viewer's attention on the witch's vicious act. The only beautiful enchantress Rosa ever painted, her elegance and ability to transform men into animals evokes the goddess Circe. But Rosa wasn't interested in classical imagery; he inverted expectations by transforming Circe into an explicitly violent sorceress. Her calm expression makes the terrifying gesture of upraised human hands among the birds even more disturbing.
