Italian Baroque painter, poet, draughtsman, etcher and printmaker. His father urged him to become a lawyer or a priest, and entered him into the convent of the Somaschi fathers. Yet he showed a preference for the arts, and secretly worked with his maternal uncle Paolo Greco to learn about painting. He soon transferred himself to the tutelage of his brother-in-law Francesco Francanzano, a pupil of Ribera, and afterwards to either Aniello Falcone, a contemporary of Domenico Gargiulo, or Ribera himself. At the age of seventeen he lost his father; his mother was destitute with at least five children, and he found himself without financial support. He continued apprenticeship with Falcone, and then went to Rome in 1638-39, where he was housed by Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, bishop of Viterbo. For the Chiesa Santa Maria della Morte in Viterbo, Rosa painted his first and one of his few altarpieces with an Incredulity of Thomas. He then pursued a wide variety of arts: music, poetry, writing, etching, and acting. In Rome, he befriended Pietro Testa and Claude Lorraine. During a Roman carnival play he wrote and acted in a masque, in which his character bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and more particularly of the mind. In 1639 he relocate to Florence, where he stayed for 8 years, invited by Cardinal Giancarlo de Medici. Once there, he sponsored a combination of studio and salon of poets, playwrights, and painters—the so called Accademia dei Percossi ("Academy of the Stricken"). He was also well acquainted with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting and War. About the same time he painted his own portrait, now in the National Gallery, London. His most lasting influence was on the later development of romantic and picturesque traditions within painting. An exhibition of Rosa's work, held at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2010, emphasised the strangeness of Rosa's painting and themes, showing his enthusiasm for 'bandits, wilderness and magic'.