Biography

Hannah Segrave is the Associate Curator of European Art to 1800 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she has been the co-curator of European Lace in Art and Fashion (2027) and Ancient Splendor: Roman Art in the Time of Trajan (2026). A specialist in early modern art, she earned her PhD from the University of Delaware and has held positions and fellowships at several museums and academic institutions, including The Ohio State University and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research often focuses on artistic self-fashioning, images of witchcraft, and issues of gender and queerness. Recent publications include essays on early modern images of the ancient Olympic Games and the English sculptor Anne Seymour Damer (1748-1828).
 

Project Summary

During the 1640s and 1650s, the notoriously audacious Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) produced a small group of shocking scenes of witches practicing magic in painting, drawing, and poetry. Experimental objects that reveal connections to literary and philosophical traditions, antiquity, witty satire, and the contemporary debates surrounding witchcraft, Rosa’s artworks also project his bespoke philosophies of picture-making. Using an object-centered methodology that weaves through issues of gender, materiality, illusionism, rivalry, and art theory, this project seeks to unpack the meaning of these artworks for Rosa’s audience and, most importantly, his own artistic persona. Rosa famously quipped that he only wanted to paint images that were “utterly and completely new, never having been treated by anyone else,” and this analysis thus grapples with how Rosa used this body of work to create a novel, hybrid genre of painting: the “grotesque poesia.” Compiling different perspectives in dialogue with new avenues of research, the goal is to shed light on Salvator Rosa, witchcraft imagery, and the ways in which art-making and magic intermingled in the Seicento – as they still do today. Moving beyond Rosa, this research also goes hand in hand with a broader curatorial project that interrogates the relationship between early modern artists across the European continent and the production of witchcraft imagery during the height of the Inquisition.