Il Foglio is a Italian centre-right daily newspaper, with circulation of about 13,000 copies per day. It was founded in 1996 by the Italian journalist and politician Giuliano Ferrara, after he left as editor of the magazine Panorama

Characteristics[link]

The main editorial policy of Il Foglio (meaning in Italian - "The Sheet", i.e., formed from a single sheet of paper, as used in 19th century newspapers) is a summary of the most important news of the day with comment and analysis on them. Recently the size of the paper has increased, with insert and extra pages incorporated especially on Saturday.

Politics[link]

Anglo-American conservatism can roughly be considered its closest political position, especially the policies of the Bush administration. It strongly backed the American intervention against Taliban in 2001 and the war in Iraq in 2003. In Italy it promulgates a neo-conservative line. It features editorials inspired by American newspapers, especially the Wall Street Journal.

In the last five years Il Foglio has strongly supported the Catholic Church and especially Pope Benedict XVI on topics like bioethics and the battle against relativism. It has a pro-Israeli stance.

Il Foglio can also be considered pro-free market in Economics.

External links[link]

• Il Foglio Quotidiano Official website (Italian)
• Il Foglio Quotidiano on Twitter

Ownership[link]

As of April 23, 2006, Giuliano Ferrara declared to the Report Italian news television show (within the episode "Il finanziamento quotidiano" di Bernardo Iovene), that the newspaper ownership was shared by:

• Veronica Lario (Berlusconi's ex wife), 38%
• Sergio Zuncheddu (Sardinian builder and owner of the largest daily newspaper of Sardinia, l'Unione Sarda, and of some regional television broadcasting companies, Videolina and Tele Costa Smeralda), 20% to 25%
• Denis Verdini (National coordinator of the PDL), 15%
• Giuliano Ferrara, 10%
• Luca Colasanto, 10%

Notes[link]

Cesare Siepi (February 10, 1923 – July 5, 2010^[1]) was an Italian opera singer, generally considered to have been one of the finest basses of the post-war period. His voice was characterised by a deep, warm timbre, a full, resonant, wide-ranging lower register with relaxed vibrato, and a ringing, vibrant upper register. On stage, his tall, striking presence and elegance of phrasing made him a natural Don Giovanni, while remaining a Verdi bass par excellence. He can be seen in that role on video from Salzburg, under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler, among his many other roles.

Early career[link]

Born in Milan (his year of birth is debated between 1919 and 1923, though 1923 is given as official), he began singing as a member of a madrigal group. He often claimed to have been largely self-taught, having attended the music conservatory in his home city for just a short time. His operatic career was interrupted by World War II. After his debut in 1941 (in Schio, near Venice, as Sparafucile in Rigoletto), Siepi, an opponent of the fascist regime, fled to Switzerland.

After the end of the war his career immediately took off. Success as Zaccaria in Nabucco at La Fenice in Venice was followed by the first of many engagements at La Scala, Milan. His early engagements there were in the Verdi bass roles, the title role in Boito's Mefistofele under Arturo Toscanini, as Colline in La bohème, and in La Gioconda, La favorite, and I puritani.

International success[link]

His international reputation was established in 1950, when Sir Rudolf Bing brought him to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to open the 1950 season as King Philip II in Don Carlo. He was to remain principal bass at the Met until 1974, adding roles such as Boris Godunov (in English) and Gurnemanz in Parsifal (in German), and singing all the major roles of the bass repertoire.

His debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was in 1950, and he appeared there regularly until the mid 1970s.

In 1953, Siepi debuted at the Salzburg Festival with a legendary production of Don Giovanni conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, staged by Herbert Graf, and designed by Clemens Holzmeister. He made an immediate impact in the title role of Don Giovanni which became perhaps his best known role, as it had been for the most famous Italian bass of the generation before, Ezio Pinza. This performance has been released on CD, and a 1954 mounting of this production was filmed in color and released in 1955.

Siepi was a frequent guest at the Vienna State Opera. In 43 performances he sang Don Giovanni, more often than any other singer in modern times except for Eberhard Wächter. In 1967 Siepi was Don Giovanni in a controversially received production staged by Otto Schenk and designed by Luciano Damiani that showed Mozart's masterpiece in the light of the commedia dell'arte, emphasizing the comic and ironic elements of this opera (conductor Josef Krips strongly opposed this production's concept). In Vienna he also sang Basilio (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Colline (La bohème), Fiesco (Simon Boccanegra), Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Padre Guardiano (La forza del destino 1974 in a new production conducted by Riccardo Muti), Gurnemanz (Parsifal), Méphistophélès (Faust), Filippo II (Don Carlos), and Ramphis (Aida). His final performance at Vienna was in Norma (Oroveso) at the Austria Center Vienna in 1994.

He was a particularly fine recital artist, especially in Community Concerts under Columbia Artist Management, and a sensitive interpreter of German Lieder. He married Met ballerina Luellen Sibley and they had two children.

Siepi enjoyed a long career, and performed regularly until the 1980s, including lead roles in the ill-fated Broadway musicals Bravo Giovanni and Carmelina. In addition to his studio recordings, there are also many live recordings of performances of his major roles.

Siepi's formal farewell to the operatic stage occurred at the Teatro Carani in Sassuolo on 21 April 1989. Indeed, Capon's List shows live recordings made as late as 1988.

Siepi's last studio recording was as the old King Archibaldo in RCA's 1976 taping of Italo Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre re, with Anna Moffo and Plácido Domingo in the cast.

Siepi died at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia on July 5, 2010 after suffering a stroke more than a week earlier.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Discography of opera recordings (Capon's Lists of Opera Recordings)

Videography[link]

• Mozart: Don Giovanni (Grümmer, della Casa, Berger, Dermota, Edelmann; Furtwängler, Graf, 1954) VAI
• "Six Great Basses" [aria from Don Carlos, 1970] Bel Canto Society

Salvator Rosa
Salvator Rosa, Philosophy, 1640. The Latin inscription is "Keep silent unless what you are going to say is more important than silence". National Gallery, London
Born	1615 Arenella
Died	1673
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting, printmaking, poetry
Movement	Baroque

Salvator Rosa (1615 – March 15, 1673) was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel"^[1] proto-Romantic.

Early life[link]

He was born in Arenella, in the outskirts of Naples, on either June 20 or July 21, 1615. His father, Vito Antonio de Rosa, a land surveyor, urged his son to become a lawyer or a priest, and entered him into the convent of the Somaschi Fathers. Yet Salvator showed a preference for the arts, and secretly worked with his maternal uncle Paolo Greco to learn about painting. He soon transferred himself to the tutelage of his brother-in-law Francesco Francanzano, a pupil of Ribera, and afterwards to either Aniello Falcone,^[1] a contemporary of Domenico Gargiulo,^[2] or Ribera himself. Some sources claim he spent time living with roving bandits.^[3] At the age of seventeen he lost his father; his mother was destitute with at least five children, and Salvator found himself without financial support.

Life[link]

Apparition of the spirit of Samuel to Saul, 1668, Louvre

He continued apprenticeship with Falcone, helping him complete his battlepiece canvases. In that studio, it is said that Lanfranco took notice of his work, and advised him to relocate to Rome, where he stayed from 1634–36.

Returning to Naples, he began painting haunting landscapes, overgrown with vegetation, or jagged beaches, mountains, and caves. Rosa was among the first to paint "romantic" landscapes, with a special turn for scenes of picturesque often turbulent and rugged scenes peopled with shepherds, brigands, seamen, soldiers. These early landscapes were sold cheaply through private dealers.

He returned to Rome in 1638–39, where he was housed by Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, bishop of Viterbo. For the Chiesa Santa Maria della Morte in Viterbo, Rosa painted his first and one of his few altarpieces with an Incredulity of Thomas.

While Rosa had a facile genius at painting, he pursued a wide variety of arts: music, poetry, writing, etching, and acting. In Rome, he befriended Pietro Testa and Claude Lorrain. During a Roman carnival play he wrote and acted in a masque, in which his character bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and more particularly of the mind. In costume, he inveighed against the farcical comedies acted in the Trastevere under the direction of Bernini.

Self-portrait, circa 1645 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg)

While his plays were successful, this also gained him powerful enemies among patrons and artists, including Bernini himself, in Rome. By late 1639, he had to relocate to Florence, where he stayed for 8 years. He had been in part, invited by a Cardinal Giancarlo de Medici.^{[clarification needed]} Once there, Rosa sponsored a combination of studio and salon of poets, playwrights, and painters—the so called Accademia dei Percossi (Academy of the Stricken). To the rigid art milieu of Florence, he introduced his canvases of wild landscapes; while influential, he gathered few true pupils. Another painter poet, Lorenzo Lippi, shared with Rosa the hospitality of the cardinal and the same circle of friends. Lippi encouraged him to proceed with the poem Il Malmantile Racquistato. He was well acquainted also with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting and War. About the same time he painted his own portrait, now in the National Gallery, London.

Landscape with Tobit and the Angel, circa 1670 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg)

In 1646 he returned to Naples, and appears to have sympathized with the 1648 insurrection of Masaniello, as a passage in one of his satires suggests. His actual participation in the revolt is dubious. It is alleged that Rosa, along with other painters—Coppola, Paolo Porpora, Domenico Gargiulo, Pietro del Po, Marzio Masturzo, the two Vaccari and Cadogna^{[clarification needed]}—all under the captaincy of Aniello Falcone, formed the Compagnia della Morte, whose mission it was to hunt down Spaniards in the streets, not sparing even those who had sought religious asylum. He painted a portrait of Masaniello—probably from reminiscence rather than life. On the approach of Don Juan de Austria, the blood-stained Compagnia dispersed.

Other tales recount that from there he escaped and joined with brigands in the Abruzzi. Although this incident cannot be conveniently dove-tailed into known dates of his career, in 1846 a famous romantic ballet about this story titled Catarina was produced in London by the choreographer Jules Perrot and composer Cesare Pugni).

He returned to stay in Rome in 1649. Here he increasingly focused on large scale paintings, tackling themes and stories unusual for seventeenth-century painters. These included Democritus amid the Tombs, The Death of Socrates, Regulus in the Spiked Cask (these two are now in England), Justice Quitting the Earth and the Wheel of Fortune. This last work, with its implication that too often foolish artists received rewards that did not match their talent, raised a storm of controversy. Rosa, endeavouring at conciliation, published a description of its meaning (probably softened down not a little from the real facts); nonetheless he was nearly arrested. It was about this time that Rosa wrote his satire named Babylon.

Tomb of Rosa

His criticisms of Roman art culture won him several enemies. An allegation arose that his published satires were not his own, but stolen. Rosa indignantly denied the charges, but one must admit that the satires deal so extensively and with such ready manipulation of classical names, allusions and anecdotes, that one is rather at a loss to fix upon the period of his busy career at which Rosa could possibly have imbued his mind with such a multitude of semi-erudite details. It may perhaps be legitimate to assume literary friends in Florence and Volterra coached him about the topic of his satires, the compositions of which remained nonetheless his own. To confute his detractors he now wrote the last of the series, entitled Envy.

Among the pictures of his last years were the admired Battlepiece and Saul and the Witch of Endor (latter perhaps his final work) now in the Musée du Louvre, painted in 40 days, full of longdrawn carnage, with ships burning in the offing; Pythagoras and the Fishermen; and the Oath of Catiline (Palazzo Pitti).

While occupied with a series of satirical portraits, to be closed by one of himself, Rosa was assailed by dropsy. He died a half year later. In his last moments he married a Florentine named Lucrezia, who had borne him two sons, one of them surviving him, and he died in a contrite frame of mind. His tomb is in Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, where a portrait of him has been set up. Salvator Rosa, after struggles of his early youth, had successfully earned a handsome fortune.

He was a significant etcher, with a highly popular and influential series of small prints of soldiers, and a number of larger and very ambitious subjects.

Legacy[link]

Rosa's most lasting influence was on the later development of romantic and picturesque traditions within painting. As Wittkower states, it is in his landscapes, not his grand historical or religious dramas, that Rosa truly expresses his innovative abilities most graphically. Rosa himself may have dismissed them as frivolous cappricci in comparison to his other themes, but these academically conventional canvases often restrained his rebellious streak. In general, in landscapes he avoided the idyllic and pastoral calm countrysides of Claude Lorrain and Paul Brill, and created brooding, melancholic fantasies, awash in ruins and brigands. By the eighteenth century, the contrasts between Rosa and artists such as Claude was much remarked upon. A 1748 poem by James Thompson, "The Castle of Indolence", illustrated this: "Whate'er Lorraine light touched with softening hue/ Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew".^[4] He influenced Gaspard Dughet's landscape style.

Self-portrait

A recent exhibit of Turner's work, at the Prado museum in Madrid, notes the influence Rosa had on Turner, in his landscapes. In fact it is reported that Turner consciously wanted to be associated with the work of Rosa.^{[citation needed]} Another exhibition of Rosa's work, held at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2010, emphasised the strangeness of Rosa's painting and themes, showing his enthusiasm for 'bandits, wilderness and magic'.^[5]

In a time when artists where often highly constrained by patrons, Rosa had a plucky streak of independence, which celebrated the special role of the artist. "Our wealth must consist in things of the spirit, and in contenting ourselves with sipping, while others gorge themselves in prosperity". He refused to paint on commission or to agree on a price beforehand, and he chose his own subjects. In his own words, he painted "...purely for my own satisfaction. I need to be transported by enthusiasm and I can only employ my brushes when I am in ecstasy." ^[6] This tempestuous spirit became the darling of British Romantics.

Satires[link]

Alexander the Great in the studio of Apelles, etching, c. 1662

The satires of Salvator Rosa deserve more attention than they have generally received. There are, however, two recent books taking account of them—by Cesareo, 1892, and Cartelli, 1899. The satires, though considerably spread abroad during his lifetime, were not published until 1719. They are all in terza rima, written without much literary correctness, but remarkably spirited, pointed and even brilliant. They are slashingly denunciatory, and from this point of view too monotonous in treatment. Rosa here appears as a very severe castigator of all ranks and conditions of men, not sparing the highest, and as a champion of the poor and down-trodden, and of moral virtue and Catholic faith. It seems odd that a man who took so free a part in the pleasures and diversions of life should be so ruthless to the ministers of these.

The satire on Music exposes the insolence and profligacy of musicians, and the shame of courts and churches in encouraging them. Poetry dwells on the pedantry, imitativeness, adulation, affectation a and indecency of poets—also their poverty, and the neglect with which they were treated; and there is a very vigorous sortie against oppressive governors and aristocrats. Tasso's glory is upheld; Dante is spoken of as obsolete, and Ariosto as corrupting.

Painting inveighs against the pictorial treatment of squalid subjects, such as beggars (though Rosa must surely himself have been partly responsible for this misdirection of the art), against the ignorance and lewdness of painters, and their tricks of trade, and the gross indecorum of painting sprawling half-naked saints of both sexes. War (which contains a eulogy of Masaniello) derides the folly of mercenary soldiers, who fight and perish while kings stay at home; the vile morals of kings and lords, their heresy and unbelief.

In Babylon ofrece, Rosa represents himself as a fisherman, Tirreno, constantly unlucky in his net-hauls on the Euphrates; he converses with a native of the country, Ergasto. Babylon (Rome) is very severely treated, and Naples much the same.

Envy (the last of the satires, and generally accounted the best, although without strong apparent reason) represents Rosa dreaming that, as he is about to inscribe in all modesty his name upon the threshold of the temple of glory, the goddess or fiend of Envy obstructs him, and a long interchange of reciprocal objurgations ensues. Here occurs the highly charged portrait of the chief Roman detractor of Salvator (we are not aware that he has ever been identified by name); and the painter protests that he would never condescend to do any of the lascivious work in painting so shamefully in vogue.

Works around Rosa[link]

A number of biographies and fictionalizations of the life of Rosa exist:

• Domenico Passeri speaks of him in Vite de Pittori
• Salvini, Satire e Vita di Salvator Rosa
• Bernardo de' Dominici, Vita di Rosa (1742, Naples)
• In England, Lady Morgan in The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, and Albert Cotton in A Company of Death romanticized his life.
• Rosa is the fictional hero of the novella Signor Formica, 1819, also known simply as Salvator Rosa, by E. T. A. Hoffmann.
• Salvatore Rosa is a 19th century Italian opera by Antônio Carlos Gomes, with libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, after the novel Masaniello by Eugene Mirecourt.
• The 1846 ballet Catarina by the choreographer Jules Perrot and the composer Cesare Pugni was produced in London at Her Majesty's Theatre, and was inspired by the alleged story of Rosa's dealings with Brigands of the Abruzzi.
• One of the pieces included in the piano collection Années de pèlerinage by Franz Liszt is entitled "Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa".

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Salvator Rosa

• Notes on etchings titled The genius of Salvator Rosa.
• Artcyclopedia entry on Salvator Rosa online.
• Exhibition 2011, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
• Free scores by Salvator Rosa at the International Music Score Library Project