Grotto with Cascades
Oil painting by Salvatore Rosa (1615-1673)
Pitti Gallery, Florence, Italy

he first adjective that sprang to Lewis's mind when he beheld the Great Falls of the Missouri was…sublime. He "hurryed down the hill…to gaze on this sublimely grand specticle." Sublimity was not a quality that inhered in the scene before him, but rather was the experience of his mind, a self-conscious awareness of the wildness before him. It was inevitable that he should proceed to summarize his feelings by invoking a name that by the middle of the eighteenth century had become a synonym for the sublime, Salvatore Rosa (1615-1673).¹

Rosa was an Italian artist whose landscapes and seascapes made him famous during his lifetime, and his etchings — or those by his imitators and counterfeitors — reproduced in magazines, newspapers and books throughout Europe and civilized North America, held him in the popular affection long after his death.² At the mere mention of Rosa's name, Lewis's readers, from Jefferson on down, could have summoned before their minds' eyes their own perfect pictures of the Great Falls of the Missouri River.

Rosa's Grotto with Cascades (above) is a catalog of the basic elements of sublimity in nature. The hour is mid-morning or mid-afternoon. In the hot sun, two visitors drawn to the dizzying brink of an amphitheater by the rumble and splash of falling water stand awestruck by its terrible majesty. Far below, three common people (we can tell by their dress) converse contentedly, oblivious to the grandeur behind them. They are at ease in the dank mossy shade beside a dead and decaying tree trunk and a ruined stone wall, the latter a mute suggestion that a long-dead resident once embellished the place with some sort of an "improvement." Indeed, the human figures, taken together, provide the measure of the scene's proportions and meanings.

Even as Lewis was thinking of Rosa, painters of his own generation — Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) in France, and J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) in England — were beginning to establish the foundations of the Romantic era, with more impassioned and less homocentric views of wild nature in which humans, if present, are victims. In the 1820s and '30s a host of young traveling and immigrant artists would march across the American West with their pencils and brushes, drawn by the romance of Indian culture, but occasionally painting vast panoramic scenes. They included Titian Peale, Samuel Seymour, George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, John Mix Stanley, Paul Kane, Seth Eastman, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Gustavus Sohon.

Today Salvatore Rosa's name is, inexplicably, absent from most books on the history of art.

--Joseph Mussulman

1. The best discussion of the concept of the sublime, and of the roles of Salvatore Rosa and James Thomson in its history, is in Albert Furtwangler's Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), Chapter Two, "The American Sublime.

2. Etching is a method of drawing images on a metal plate — usually copper — by coating it with an acid-resistant "etching ground" consisting of beeswax, bitumen and resin, through which the design is drawn with a sharp tool. The plate is then painted with nitric acid, which eats away the surface of the plate where the etching ground has been removed. After the acid is washed away and the rest of the etching ground dissolved, ink is applied to the plate and wiped off, leaving ink in the etched grooves. When moist paper is pressed on the plate, the inked design is impressed on the paper. The first great master of the medium was Rosa's slightly older contemporary, Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-69).