Salvator Rosa was a pupil of the Neapolitan painters Francesco Fracanzano and Aniello Falcone. Fracanzano would become his brother-in-law, and the three painters ultimately worked together in the same workshop. In 1635 Rosa left for his first sojourn in Rome, but by 1638 he had returned to Naples. In 1639 he came into conflict with the artist and papal favorite Gian Bernini, after attacking him in a literary satire. In 1640 he was summoned to the court of the Medici in Florence, where he soon found himself in the center of a group of painters, poets, and musicians called the Accademia dei Percossi (Academy of the Stricken). In 1649 he returned to Rome, where he would remain, with only brief interruptions, until his death. Rosa's health slowly declined, and beginning in 1664 he was often unable to work. The subjects of his painting had gradually shifted toward complicated, abstruse scenes from mythology, the Bible, literature, and history, frequently with a touch of the macabre. With these multifigured narrative paintings and allegories he hoped to attain greater recognition than gained by his landscapes and battle scenes—genres with which he had become particularly successful. In his landscapes Rosa loved romantic, moody evocations of the sea and mountains, in contrast to the classically calm, sublime landscapes of Claude Lorrain, for example. Accordingly, he is considered a precursor and exemplar for Romantic-era Anglo-Saxon landscape painting in the late 18th and 19th centuries. He was also an important painter of portraits.