'Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori'
I first saw this piece when I was about 20 years old, and I remember I admired its obvious dark qualities but very little else. I think it was for a creative writing project, and it may have been seen on a glossy page in some text book or catalogue. I barely even bothered to decipher its symbols or translate the Latin inscription – but it obviously touched me in some deep way because when I saw it again years later in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge I was reminded and drawn back in.
At the time of my second viewing I had grown older, had children, had lost my Father and was increasingly identifying with Eliot’s “Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Philip Larkin’s “Toads” as contemplations of ageing and the wasting of one’s precious and too brief time alive on working for, or pleasing, others. So on the second occasion I sat in front of the painting for several pensive and ponderous minutes and just…thought.
The painting, which I have returned to on several occasions subsequently, between meetings, after appointments, before seminars, is so obviously a product of personal tragedy for the artist Rosa who lost many of his family to plague the year before it was completed in 1656 - but it reflects most poignantly of all the fact that he lost his son, Rosalvo. It is the imagination of the moment of this loss that is captured in the scene, and yet, at the same time, it is as if all grief and futility is encapsulated within it.
The title means “Human Frailty” and the painting shows the mocking, leering angel of death sealing a contract for the life and soul of young Rosalvo who is portrayed as too young even to form letters on a page with a pen. You can almost trace a demonic Christian cross of light from the angel’s wings through the child’s arms. He sits, oblivious, on the lap of his mother, and on the page is written in Latin “Conception is Sin, Birth is Pain, Life is Toil, Death a Necessity” giving the most lucid understanding of Salvator Rosa’s state of mind. I read that he wrote to a close friend in a letter “This time Heaven has struck me in such a way that all human remedies are useless and the least pain I feel is when I tell you that I weep as I write”.
The moment your children are born you live with the almost constant terror of losing them. In the same way that their birth completes your life's purpose, their premature death must surely destroy it. I am certain that the grieving Salvator shed many tears onto this canvas and I still find it awe-inspiring that he found the courage to create it.
Objectively, the main reason I really love this painting is that it combines that raw, visceral emotion with perfect artistic precision in structure and imagery. There are several symbols of death scattered around the scene – a knife, a death mask, a bursting bubble, the Roman God of death Terminus. The light is used to great effect. The faces of the characters are haunting and memorable. Every detail rewards study and contains profound references and explanations. Most of the allusions I got from subsequent study, but the image is so strong it really does not require much interpretation. It is quite simply what art should be – a means of communicating something tangible, or intangible, about what it means to be human - a glimpse of the numinous that transcends faith or belief.
Whenever I take life a bit too seriously, I often think of that cold bony hand gripping the young child’s wrist. Death too early was an ironic fact of life in 1656 of course, the artist himself died at just 57, and most life was nasty, brutish and short - but I manage to believe that the message of gloom contained within this work can be turned into a hopeful optimism, even if just by my vowing to make a little bit more of every extra day I am granted and finding precious moments of human interactivity that prove the inscription, albeit occasionally and too briefly, to be over stated.
