Salvator Rosa was a great favourite of the Romantics, popularized in Britain by the Dilettanti club founded by Dashwood and Sandwich. Rosa's paintings are perhaps the best illustration of the the sensibility of the Sublime as elaborated by Burke, which had a profound influence on the physical settings of the gothic novel.

The artfully posed tableaux of the early novels were easily translated into dramatic productions and many of the early gothics were either staged as plays or were written for the theatre, among them, Walpole's Mysterious Mother, Maturin's Bertram, Lewis' The Castle Spectre, Byron's Manfred, and Shelley's The Cenci.

Rosa was a friend of the enigmatic painter Poussin whose encrypted painting Les Bergers d'Arcadie plays a major rôle in the complex Rennes le Chateau mystery which involves everything from Templar treasure, Merovingian bloodlines, Louis XIV's secrets, and the history of early Christianity.Caroline Lamb's aunt possessed an early version of this painting (also called Et in Arcadia Ego).