Perhaps the most unconventional artists active in seventeenth-century Italy, Salvator Rosa was mainly a painter of variously picturesque and atmospheric landscapes, but his oeuvre also included portraits and poetic allegories, and macabre scenes of witchcraft, influenced by Northern prints. Trained in Naples, Rosa worked chiefly in Florence and its environs, as well as Rome. Thanks to his often eccentric and his own resolute individuality, Rosa was embraced as a hero by painters of the Romantic movement in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enamoured of the expressive and emotional power of his windswept landscapes, and the dark and brooding intensity of his figures.