1647
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Scenes of Witchcraft: Morning is a 1647 unspecified by Salvator Rosa, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A young witch stabs a squirming toad at dawn. The sky is bruised purple, rocks look like faces, and sharp-beaked birds circle above her. Rosa painted witches only once, and this one is different—she’s elegant, almost beautiful. Most artists showed witches as ugly hags, but here she’s calm, powerful. The toad might be a man she’s turned into an animal, a quiet nod to old myths. If you like this eerie mood, look up *chiaroscuro*—the way dark and light crash together to make things feel dramatic.
Rosa's first scene depicts a young witch who plunges her knife into a writhing amphibian at dawn. The dark clouds of daybreak and anthropomorphic crags provide a gloomy atmosphere, while malevolent birds with piercing beaks hover around the central stabbing, focusing the viewer's attention on the witch's vicious act. The only beautiful enchantress Rosa ever painted, her elegance and ability to transform men into animals evokes the goddess Circe. But Rosa wasn't interested in classical imagery; he inverted expectations by transforming Circe into an explicitly violent sorceress. Her calm…
The artist chose the painting's shape to reference the foundational role of the circle in practicing magic.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Salvator Rosa (1615 – 15 March 1673) is best known today as an Italian Baroque painter, whose romanticised landscapes and history paintings, often set in dark and untamed nature, exerted considerable influence from the 17th century into the early 19th century.
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