Human Frailty (c.1656)
Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
L'Umana fragilità (Human Frailty), c1656
oil on canvas
199 cm × 134 cm
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
I recently spent a day in Cambridge, so naturally the Fitzwilliam was on my list. It’s worth a visit just to experience the opulent entrance of the original 1848 neo-classical building. Once inside you’ll have an incredibly extensive collection to choose from. Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, Asian and Islamic art, medieval illuminated manuscripts, pottery, porcelain, textiles, furniture, coins, arms and armour and, of course, paintings, drawings and prints. There are over half a million things to see, and I was bored out of my skull.
Now to be fair to the Fitzwilliam, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s a fantastic museum, but it’s just not my art. I prefer contemporary, though I frequently visit a wide range of museums because they educate and inform my art history and artistic opinions. And, occasionally, they have something that completely blows my mind.
In Room 6, an upstairs gallery that bridges the original building with the modern extension, you’ll find Human Frailty, painted by Salvator Rosa around 1656. It’s a very large painting, just over six feet tall, and it’s hung quite high, with the base of the gilded frame located about eye-level for the average adult. What initially caught my attention was the giant winged skeleton, forcefully grabbing the arm of an infant, guiding its hand as it writes. That skeleton doesn’t just float over the scene, it looms over the entire room.
The 367-year-old Baroque painting is dark and fading and somewhat hard to see through the glare from the bright lights, but it’s still an incredibly imposing work. It’s not often you see a winged skeleton, and at first I assumed it to depict a pact with Satan, instigated by a poor mother who saw no other way to provide for her child. I’d learn later that the child was being manipulated to write "Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori” or “Conception is a sin, Birth is pain, Life is toil, Death a necessity”. The Fitzwilliam wisely omits that from the wall text.
I absolutely adore how the mother’s expression depicts her handling the situation like it’s the most natural thing in the world. If this were a social media post it would be captioned: “Bathed the cherubs… Put rose bouquet in hair… Penmanship class with winged skeleton of death… FML, LOL!” The reality is actually much darker. The woman is Lucrezia, Salvator's mistress and the mother of his son, Rosalvo. Both died in the plague that swept Naples in 1655.
I didn’t get much time to spend studying this work, but it’s filled with randomly placed things you wouldn’t expect to find idly laying about your house. Viewers in the 1600’s would have understood their meaning, because visual allegories were the memes of that era. The cherub blowing bubbles is an allusion to the vitality of life, and the old man in the upper right corner is a statue of Terminus, a Roman god of death. The little ‘dog’ on the left is supposed to be a hippo, which makes you wonder if Salvator Rosa ever actually saw a hippo or just got lazy with the dimly lit bits of his work. It represents 'the violence and discord with which man ends his days'.
I learned those facts long after I’d left the museum, and with all due respect to Mr. Rosa, I’m not sure they matter much today. They heavily influenced the composition, but their omission from the wall text is telling. When a work is visually powerful enough, people will put in the legwork to learn about the details later. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter what you write next to it because they’ll have already moved on to the next work. But this one’s stuck with me. I even went to the gift shop and bought the postcard, although I still don’t know what all the visual metaphors mean.
If I ever get back to the Fitzwilliam I’ll be making a beeline for Gallery No. 6 so I can study this one some more. And on my way out I’ll be sure to keep my eyes open for any other surprises that may be in store. There’s some amazing art in this world, and sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone to find the pieces that really please.
That’s why I like it.
It pays to keep an open mind.
Additional reading:
This page has a much more detailed image of the work
How to read a painting: Human Frailty (YouTube, 3 min)
Previously, on Why I Like It:
Apr — Stacked Sill (2022), Harriet Mena Hill
Mar — Black Square (2003), Gillian Carnegie
Feb — Mattresses (2013-2014), Kaari Upson