1656
oil
canvas
From the collection of Fitzwilliam Museum
Dominant colour
L'Umana Fragilità is a 1656 oil by Salvator Rosa, a Early Baroque Italian work, held at Fitzwilliam Museum.
This painting shows a woman sitting with a baby on her lap. She's wearing a long, flowing robe and a crown of flowers. The baby is naked, holding a piece of paper. To the left, a small boy is playing with a bow and arrow. There's a skeleton in the background, holding a scythe. The whole scene is dark, with only some light on the figures. The woman and the baby are the main focus, with the boy and the skeleton adding to the mood. The dark colors and the skeleton give the painting a sense of sadness and danger. The painting uses chiaroscuro, a technique that uses strong contrasts between light and dark to create a sense of volume in modeling three-dimensional objects and figures.
Human Fragility is an oil-on-canvas painting of 1656 by the Italian artist Salvator Rosa. It was painted during a plague in Naples; many of Rosa's relatives, including his son, brother, and sister, died. The painting is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The work depicts figures enacting an allegory: the seated woman is said to be Lucrezia, Rosa's mistress, and the young boy his son, wrist clenched by Death. The angel of death is manipulating the boy's hand to write "Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori – 'Conception is a sin, Birth is a punishment, Life is toil, Death a necessity." The canvas is adorned with many foreboding indicia and memento mori(s) that remind the viewer that to be human is to be mortal. The ring of pale roses around the mother's head is probably an allusion to the family name. Salvator's own initials…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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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