(b Arenella, nr. Naples, 21 July [or less likely 20 June] 1615; d Rome, 15 Mar. 1673). Italian painter and etcher, a fiery and flamboyant character who was a poet and actor as well as an artist. After training in Naples, he spent most of his career in Rome, except for the 1640s, when he lived mainly in Florence; his decision to move there was probably connected with the scandal he caused by publicly satirizing the great Bernini. Rosa was a prolific artist and painted various subjects (including spirited battle pieces in which he surpassed his teacher Falcone), but he is best known for the creation of a new type of wild and savage landscape (River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl, c.1650–60, Wallace Coll., London). His craggy cliffs, jagged, moss-laden trees, and rough bravura handling create a dank and desolate air that contrasts sharply with the serenity of Claude or the classical grandeur of Poussin (a situation summed up in the famous lines from James Thomson's The Castle of Indolence (1748): ‘Whate'er Lorraine light-touched with softening hue, ǀ Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew’).