Through Ribera, Caravaggio’s influence passes to the Neapolitan, Salvator[89] Rosa (1615–1673). With greater vivacity and better color Salvator repeats the character studies and tavern scenes, also bringing the proletarian mood into mythology. He painted battle pieces of real ferocity. He was an irascible, vain and capricious person, proud of being so; a scorner of his own patrons and of the bourgeois generally; a maker of epigrams, and a writer of satires. His specialty is the sinister and picturesque, and he practices it with gusto and ability, Figure 313. Salvator is the real discoverer of the picturesque, the first enthusiast for the savage aspects of nature. Likewise he was one of the first artists to study effects—sunsets, storms, mists, and whirling clouds. He excursioned in the Abruzzo, equally savoring its crags, torrents, and forests, and its ferocious banditti. His letters on these wanderings are among the first and most important documents of the modern cult of nature. He writes: “You have saddened me by giving me the news of your having been in Garfagna, and having rejoiced in the savagery of that country so congenial to my nature.... To be merely reminded of it brings the tears to my eyes.” Again he writes from the Adriatic Apennines: “I have been two weeks in continual travel and the trip is much more strange and picturesque than that of Florence, beyond comparison so, since there is such an extravagant mixture of the rough and cultivated, of the level and precipitous that nothing more could be desired for the satisfaction of the eye.”... “At Terni, four miles off the road I saw the famous falls of the Velino, a thing to haunt and possess the most insatiable mind because of its horrid beauty. To see a river that plunges straight down a mountain for half a mile, and sends up its foam as high!” Much of the stormy and energetic character of such scenes is transcribed in the best landscapes of Salvator, Figure 314. In their age they evoked little following. But these forests, cascades, evening seaports, and ruined sites were freely bought by the English, greatly admired and had their part in producing the literary enthusiasm for wild nature in the eighteenth century. [Illustration: FIG. 313. Salvator Rosa. Landscape with figures.—_Pitti._ ] Salvator avows his “extravagant genius,” is driven by the lust for novelty, is a modern and romantic spirit. Withal he was a man of capacity and taste with an open-minded understanding of quite alien merit. “Here, we esteem M. Poussin,” he writes in October, 1665, “more than any one else in the world.” Poussin could never have returned the compliment. His approbation was for Raphael, the Carracci and Domenichino. Indeed a chief glory of the Bolognese Eclectics was that their critical method sufficed to nurture so classic a spirit as Poussin’s and so to establish the academic tradition for Northern Europe. [Illustration: FIG. 314. Salvator Rosa. Landscape.—_Pitti._ ]