Cadmus and the dragon

Salvator Rosa
1660-1669 ca

This painting was exhibited for the first time in Naples in 2008, on the occasion of the publication of a monograph on Rosa, as part of an exhibition featuring the painter’s later years, which can be partially reconstructed from details provided in the catalogue of an auction held in London in 1988. The painting’s subject is derived from the classical story of Ovid's Metamorphoses and shows Cadmus (of Thebes) confronting the dragon (guardian of the Ismenian spring) who killed his comrades for their violation of the sacred spring. This is the seed of the founding myth of the capital of Boeotia.

The dramatic tension of the scene, including the horrific detail of the screaming youth trapped in the reptile’s coils, is a reinterpretation of the pathos to be found in the Vatican’s Laocoön statue group. It’s immediately obvious that there are close links between this invention and other works by the Neapolitan master whereby the picture’s composition and subject focus on conflict between humans and monsters, thus betraying the painter’s fascination with the occult and nature’s prodigies that was perhaps most articulately expressed in the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s inquiry into “the underworld” in mid-17th century Rome.