PRETI, Mattia (taller de) (Taverna, 1613 – Valletta, 1699)
According to De Dominici’s biography, Mattia Preti reached Rome from his native Calabria around 1630 together with his older brother Gregorio, who was also a painter. In Rome, Preti was strongly influenced by the almost extinct Caravaggesque tendency, producing concert scenes and his card players that were notably influenced by the work of Manfredi (such as those in the Town Hall of Alba, the Fondazione Longhi in Florence, the Accademia Albertina, Turin, and the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome). Other works commonly attributed to the artist’s youth (above all the Triumph of Silenus, Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts) reflect a fascination with the Neo-Venetian trend that was very active in Rome in the 1630s, and to which Poussin, Mola (from Ticino) and Testa (from Lucca) all belonged. Preti’s earliest known public Roman painting is his fresco of the Charity of Saint Charles in San Carlo ai Catinari in Rome, of 1642, which recalls Sacchi’s classicising approach. In the same year, thanks to the good offices of Olimpia Aldobrandini, Preti was enobled Knight of the Hierosolymitans Order while he was accepted in the “virtuosi” of the Pantheon in 1650. However, little is know of the key decade of the 1640s. De Dominici fills it with trips to Spain and Flanders, where he has Preti even meeting Rubens (who died in 1642). Modern art historians have limited his travels to Northern Italy where he could have seen Emilian painting (Ludovico Carracci, Domenichino, Lanfranco, and above all, Guercino), although Guercino’s works were on view for all to study in Rome. He also seems to have studied Venetian art (with Veronese clearly becoming an idol). Between 1650 and 1651, he painted the Episodes from the Life of Saint Andrew in the apse of Sant’Andrea della Valle (Rome) in a distinctly Emilian figurative mode, deliberately onto panels previously painted by Domenichino. In Modena he frescoed the dome and the apse of the church of San Biagio (currently being restored). In 1656 Preti reached Naples where he frescoed the gates of the city with votive pictures dedicated to the recently ended plague. These are now lost, although two large preparatory sketches survive in the Capodimonte Gallery in Naples. With most of the leading artists of the previous generation dead from the plague, Preti now undertook a nostalgic evocation of Ribera and Battistello, to which he added a Veronesian monumentality in which noble, golden, glowing forms emerge from the dark backgrounds derived from the naturalists (Return of the Prodigal Son, Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, Herod’s Banquet, Ohio, the Toledo Museum of Art, to mention just two of many examples). The canvases that decorate the ceiling of the nave of the church of San Pietro a Maiella (Episodes of the Life of Saint Celestino and of Saint Catherine of Alexandria), documented to 1657–1659, with their strong lighting, are masterpieces of Preti’s Neapolitan period. Between 1660 and 1661 Preti replaced Mola as painter of the ceiling frescoes of allegories in the Palazzo Pamphilj in Valmontone near Rome, but in 1661 Preti’s career took a decisive turn, and he moved to Malta definitively for the almost four decades that remained of his life. His most notable work from this voluntary exile dates to the earlier part and relates to the cycle in oil on plaster of Episodes from the Life of the Baptist and Illustrious Personages of the Order of the Knights of Malta painted on the vault and in the apse of the Cathedral of Saint John at Valletta (1661–1666). Preti produced huge quantities of serialised work in Malta that are too numerous to be summarised here. In 1672, following the death of his brother Gregorio, the artist briefly returned to Taverna, while Calabria also benefited considerably from the work of its great son. Siena was the beneficiary of one of his greatest, mature works, The Sermon of Saint Bernard of 1674 (now in San Domenico).
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