Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615-1673)
The Baptism of the Eunuch, c. 1660
Oil on canvas, 79 x 48 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

Neapolitan by birth, Rosa arrived in Rome in 1635 and achieved his first fame there as a painter of landscapes and coastal views. These dark and threatening vistas beset with storms and battles belong to a category of Baroque landscape painting known as the "picturesque." His work had an immense influence on later Italian landscapists such as Magnasco (whose Landscape with Monks is at right) and was rediscovered with great enthusiasm by English artists and collectors during the Romantic era.

Rosa eventually resolved to transcend his earlier reputation as a "mere" landscapist and around 1650 began to paint a series of larger, more ambitious figurative scenes drawn from the Bible and classical antiquity. Among the most famous of these mature "history" paintings is the Chrysler's dramatic Baptism of the Eunuch. Rosa painted it and a pendant Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness around 1660 for Monsignor Giovanni Battista Costaguti, a member of the papal court. The Bible story of St. Philip's baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-39) tells how Philip was instructed by an angel to travel southward into the desert along the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. On the way, he encountered an Ethiopian eunuch who was treasurer to the Ethiopian queen Candace. Philip converted the heathen eunuch with his preaching and baptized him into the Christian faith with water. The newly converted eunuch then "went on his way rejoicing."

In the painting Philip, clothed in white and pointing dramatically heavenward, baptizes the kneeling eunuch as his companions respond with confusion and surprise. The scene unfolds in a barren, rock-bound landscape, a gloomy and forbidding setting typical of Rosa. The painting's theme of evangelism - the spreading of the faith through the preaching of the gospel - harmonized perfectly with the newly evangelical spirit of the 17th century Catholic Church


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