Aniello Falcone, the battle-painter (as he was called), blazed up in fury and bloodthirsty revenge when the Spanish soldiers killed one of his relations in a skirmish. On the spot he collected together a crowd of desperate and foolhardy young men, principally painters, provided them with arms, and styled them "the death-company"; and, in verity, this band spread abroad a full measure of the terror and alarm which its name indicated. Those young men pervaded Naples, in troop form, all day long, killing every Spaniard they came across. More than this, they stormed their way into all the sacred places of sanctuary, and there, without compunction, murdered their wretched enemies who had taken refuge there, driven by fear of death. At night they betook themselves to their chief, the mad, bloodthirsty Mas' Aniello, and they painted pictures of him by torchlight, so that in a short time hundreds of those pictures of him were spread about Naples and the surrounding neighbourhood. Now it was said that Salvator Rosa had been a member of this band, robbing and murdering all day, but painting with equal assiduity all night. What a celebrated art-critic--Taillasson, I think--said of our master is true: "His works bear the impress of a wild haughtiness and arrogance, of a bizarre energy, of the ideas and of their execution. Nature displays herself to him not in the lovely peacefulness of green meadows, flowery fields, perfumed groves, murmuring streams, but in the awfulness of mighty up-towering cliffs, or sea-coasts, and wild, inhospitable forests; the voice to which he listens is not the whispering of the evening breeze, or the rustling of the leaves, but the roar of the hurricane, the thunder of the cataract. When we look at his deserts and the people of strange, wild appearance, who, sometimes singly, sometimes in troops, prowl about them, the weirdest fancies come to us of their own accord. Here there happened a terrible murder, there the bleeding corpse was thrown hurriedly over the cliff, &c., &c."