Desolate Landscape with Two Figures

Two small figures inhabit a desolate landscape of extraordinary bleakness in this 1662 painting at the National Galleries of Scotland. Rosa"s most austere landscapes reduce human presence to a minimum, the figures serving only to establish scale and emphasize the landscape"s overwhelming power. The National Galleries of Scotland hold several Italian Baroque paintings acquired through the taste of Scottish Grand Tourists and later collectors. Rosa's mountain and wilderness landscapes established the vocabulary of the sublime that Romantic painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would claim as their own.

The landscape"s extreme austerity—sparse vegetation, bare rocks, empty sky—creates an atmosphere of desolation that is among the most extreme in Rosa"s output. The two figures are tiny within the vast space, their warm tones the only relief in a palette of cool grays and muted greens. Rosa"s brushwork is particularly bold in this composition, with the simplified landscape allowing broad, sweeping strokes that emphasize the terrain"s emptiness.