Salvator Rosa’s Influence on Emily Brontë

Abstract

Emily Brontë was a landscape artist in two media: text and image. Her aesthetic was shaped by the work of the seventeenth-century Italian artist Salvator Rosa, whose ‘spiritual landscapes’ of the dark, rocky and mountainous Abruzzi wilderness captured the imagination of earlier English collectors before being dismissed as old-fashioned by Victorian art critics. Contemporary reviewers of Wuthering Heights recognized the affinity of visual sensibility between the two, while the novel employs a landscape iconography derived from Rosa. The most notable example is the motif of the twisted fir tree, which figures prominently in the novel and inspired her to make her own pencil drawing study. Emily Brontë infuses the Salvatorian sublime into her descriptions of landscape while also channelling Rosa’s fascination with outlaws in the wilderness in the characters in her Gondal poems. A study of Rosa’s influence on Emily Brontë’s work reveals her to be a sophisticated aesthetic archaist.