Jonas prædiker for Ninives indbyggere

Jonah, the prophet who had fled his commission, been swallowed by the great fish and been sent a second time to Nineveh, stands before the people of the Assyrian capital to warn them that their city will be overthrown — and the Ninevites, from the greatest of them to the least, fast and repent. Salvator Rosa painted the scene in 1661, on a scale — 291 × 212 cm — that lets the press of the crowd, the glow of the light and the darkness closing around it carry the drama of the moment, and he signed it plainly at the edge: S. Rosa. Rosa (1615–1673) was the most theatrical of the Italian Baroque painters and something rarer still, a painter who was also a satirist, poet and actor, and the freedom he claimed for himself is legible in the picture’s refusal of classical calm. Its own history is unusually well documented: Rosa’s letters record that this canvas and his Cadmus were sold to the king of Denmark in 1661, the year it was painted; the older inventory tradition held that it had been ordered for the chapel at Frederiksborg Castle, while later scholarship assigns the purchase to Frederik III; it is named in the Frederiksborg inventory of 1677 and came into the royal collection at Copenhagen in 1793. It hung in the museum’s 2023 exhibition Barok — ud af mørket, and it remains on view at the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).