Diana de Rosa, called Annella di Massimo (1602-1643), Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, Oil on canvas, 127.5 x 99.7 cm, Sotheby’s Old Master and 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction, London, 2 July 2025
This Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, previously unknown to scholars, belongs to a body of work that has spent most of the last four centuries in near-total obscurity. Its author, Diana De Rosa (1602–1643), was born in Naples to Caterina de Mauro and the painter Tommaso de Rosa. Her father died in 1610, and her mother remarried in 1612, to the Caravaggist painter Filippo Vitale (1585–1650), a figure whose dark, naturalistic manner owed a clear debt to Caravaggio’s Neapolitan period and whose household functioned as a working studio. The relationship between De Rosa and Pacecco de Rosa (1607–1656), properly Giovanni Francesco de Rosa, remains unresolved in the literature: some sources identify Pacecco as an uncle from whom she received early instruction in drawing, while others argue, more convincingly, that he was her brother, and that both siblings trained under Vitale’s direction. What is not disputed is that the De Rosa-Vitale household constituted one of the most productive artistic dynasties in viceregal Naples, a family in which paint was, quite literally, the family business.
By around 1621, De Rosa had entered the workshop of Gaspare del Popolo, where she met the painter Agostino Beltrano (c.1607–1656), whom she married in 1626. Her abilities, however, had already attracted the attention of Massimo Stanzione (1585–1656), the Cavaliere who ran the busiest and most prestigious studio in Naples at the time, rivalled in stature only by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652). Stanzione took her into his own workshop, where she produced paintings from his designs, which he then retouched before delivery to clients. It was this working arrangement, a recognised and contractual dependency rather than a casual association, that gave rise to her designation as ‘Annella di Massimo’ : Annella, the diminutive; di Massimo, possession. Her name, in other words, was absorbed into his.
The principal biographical source for De Rosa’s life is Bernardo de Dominici (1683–1759), the self-appointed Vasari of Naples, whose three-volume Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani [Lives of the Neapolitan Painters, Sculptors and Architects], published between 1742 and 1745, remains the only extended contemporary account of her career. De Dominici claims she maintained an active professional practice while raising seven children, and that Stanzione kept her on the workshop payroll during periods of absence for childbearing. Archival evidence confirms at least part of the domestic picture: baptismal records from the parish of Santa Maria della Carità show that two of her children, Nicola Tomaso and Agnese Chiara, were baptised on 21 December 1638 and 19 July 1640 respectively. But the details of De Dominici’s broader narrative have not been independently verified, and his testimony elsewhere has been shown to be unreliable. A 2017 study by Andrea Zezza posed the question directly in its title: Geniale imbroglione o conoscitore rigoroso? [Ingenious fraud or rigorous connoisseur?]. The answer, as with most things concerning De Dominici, is probably both.
De Rosa is credited with ceiling paintings depicting scenes from the Life of the Virgin for the church of Santa Maria della Pietà dei Turchini in Naples, though these were destroyed when the roof collapsed in 1638. Three further scenes from the Life of the Virgin, executed for the church of San Giovanni Maggiore, survive in part: two are now held by the Museo Diocesano di Napoli. For the Royal Church of Monte Oliveto she painted a Madonna nursing the infant Christ; for the sacristy of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Pizzofalcone, a young Saint John the Baptist with a lamb. Neither work survives. A posthumous inventory records a bequest of twelve ducats from Diana di Rosa to the Theatine house of Santa Maria degli Angeli, suggesting she maintained ties with religious communities as patron as well as painter. What remains, in sum, is fragmentary: a few surviving canvases, a handful of attributions supported by stylistic comparison, and a documentary record that is rich in anecdote but thin on certainties.
The date of De Rosa’s death in 1643 is not in dispute. The manner of it is. De Dominici claimed she was murdered by her husband Beltrano, driven by jealousy after a servant girl falsely reported that she was conducting an affair with Stanzione. The story has an unmistakably literary shape to it (a virtuous wife, a jealous husband, a lying maid, a wrongful death) and it entered popular culture readily enough. By the late nineteenth century, the Neapolitan painter Giuseppe Tramontano (dates unknown) had produced a canvas depicting De Rosa and Stanzione being spied upon by the treacherous servant, a painting now in the Intesa Sanpaolo collection. Current scholarship regards the murder narrative as unfounded. De Dominici himself noted, somewhat undermining his own account, that the painter Paolo de Matteis (1662–1728) disputed the story. The more probable cause of death is illness. She died affluent, and she was forty-one.
The Salome appeared at Sotheby’s London on 2 July 2025 as property from an Italian private collection, estimated at £60,000–80,000. It sold for £317,500, more than quadrupling the high estimate. This is, at the very least, a market corrective. Until Giuseppe Porzio’s monograph of 2023, the first dedicated study of her work, De Rosa had no sustained modern treatment. Riccardo Lattuada has been instrumental in attributing several canvases to her over the last decade, working from direct examination and stylistic comparison to the core group of paintings assembled around her name. Her subjects, predominantly female (Lucretia, Sophonisba, Salome, various saints), share a physical type and a psychological register that are distinct from those of her master Stanzione, and that bear a meaningful relationship to the work of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656), who was active in Naples during the same years.
The Gallerie d’Italia in Naples staged the first exhibition to address De Rosa’s context directly: Donne nella Napoli spagnola: Un altro Seicento [Women in Spanish Naples: Another Seventeenth Century], running from 20 November 2025 to 22 March 2026, co-curated by Porzio alongside Antonio Ernesto Denunzio, Raffaella Morselli and Eve Straussman-Pflanzer. The show brought together sixty-nine works and positioned De Rosa as the essential counterpart to Gentileschi within the Neapolitan milieu, a figure no less significant for having been, until very recently, all but invisible. How many more paintings are in private collections, unrecognised or misattributed, is a question that only further research can answer. The Salome, previously unknown to scholars, suggests the answer may be: rather more than we thought.
Postscript. In March 2026, following the Gallerie d’Italia exhibition, the Ordine degli Architetti di Napoli replaced a street plaque in the Vomero quarter that had read only “Annella di Massimo”. The new plaque gives her full name. Residents had petitioned to remove the original in the 1950s, on the grounds that the woman it honoured had probably never existed.
References
Dabbs, J.K. (2020) ‘Bernardo de Dominici (1683–1759 Naples) and the Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani (1742–45)’, in Dabbs, J.K., Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800. London: Routledge. Available at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315091815-21 (Accessed: 2 July 2022).
Denunzio, A.E., Morselli, R., Porzio, G. and Straussman-Pflanzer, E. (eds.) (2025) Donne nella Napoli spagnola: Un altro Seicento [Women in Spanish Naples: Another Seventeenth Century]. Exhibition catalogue, Gallerie d’Italia, Naples, 20 November 2025 – 22 March 2026. Naples: Gallerie d’Italia
Porzio, G. (2012) ‘Ordine teatino e contesto artistico napoletano nel Seicento: Francesco Maria Caselli, Gaspare Del Popolo e una nota su Diana Di Rosa’, in D’Alessandro, D.A. (ed.) Sant’Andrea Avellino e i Teatini nella Napoli del Viceregno spagnolo: Arte, Religione, Società. Vol. II. Naples: M. D’Auria. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/8218479/Ordine_teatino_e_contesto_artistico_napoletano_nel_Seicento_Francesco_Maria_Caselli_Gaspare_Del_Popolo_e_una_nota_su_Diana_Di_Rosa (Accessed: 2 July 2025).
Porzio, G. (2023) Diana Di Rosa: ‘Bellissima, onestissima, virtuosa dipintrice’ nella Napoli del Seicento [‘An Exceedingly Beautiful, Honest and Skilful Painter’ in Seventeenth-Century Naples]. Naples: Porcini
Willette, T. (1986) ‘Bernardo De Dominici e le Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani: Contributo alla riabilitazione di una fonte’, Ricerche sul ‘600 napoletano, pp. 255–273. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/678548/Bernardo_De_Dominici_e_le_Vite_depittori_scultori_ed_architetti_napoletani_Contributo_alla_riabilitazione_di_una_fonte (Accessed: 2 July 2025).
Zezza, A. (2017) Bernardo De Dominici e le vite degli artisti napoletani: Geniale imbroglione o conoscitore rigoroso? [Bernardo De Dominici and the Lives of the Neapolitan Artists: Ingenious Fraud or Rigorous Connoisseur?]. Rome: Officina Libraria. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/33843108/Bernardo_De_Dominici_e_le_vite_degli_artisti_napoletani_prime_pagine_ (Accessed: 2 July 2025).
Later correcions.
Il Mondo di Suk (2026) ‘Vomero/ Nuova targa per la pittrice Diana De Rosa: l’ordine degli architetti di Napoli le restituisce identità e rispetto’, Il Mondo di Suk, 27 March. Available at: https://www.ilmondodisuk.com/vomero-nuova-targa-per-la-pittrice-diana-de-rosa-lordine-degli-architetti-di-napoli-le-restituisce-identita-e-rispetto-non-e-piu-solo-annella-di-massimo/ (Accessed: 2 April 2026).