In 1656 when Salvator Rosa captured in paint L’Umana Fragilità [Human Fragility], infusing the canvas with personal meaning were the deaths from the plague in Naples of his son, brother, and sister’s children. A commissioned work, it nonetheless must have also resonated with the memory of his father’s death from illness when the artist was six, which plunged the family into poverty and permanently separated the boy from his mother. A melancholy mood permeates much of Rosa’s work, not unusual for an adult who suffered the loss of a parent in childhood.

Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, one of Rosa’s teachers, witnessed his mother’s death when he, too, was only six, and a few years later, watched as his stepmother, friends and neighbors disappeared during the 1600 plague in Xàtiva. As an adult, he poured onto sheets of paper images of slow, torturous death and developed a reputation for skillfully painted gruesome images.

Caravaggio, perhaps more famous for his violence-ridden life than his dark paintings, lost father, grandfather and uncle to the plague at an equally young age. These artists manifested in their work a preoccupation with death, which along with depression and proneness to physical illness in adulthood, has been linked to early parental loss.

Looking at the artwork of these artists through the lens of trauma, understanding from a neurodevelopmental perspective how exposure to life threatening events permanently changes the young brain, provides the art historian with a useful tool for comprehending the more perplexing aspects of an artist’s oeuvre.