Mattia Preti

Preti was an Italian Baroque artist, active also in Malta; he was sometimes called Il Cavalier Calabrese (the Knight of Calabria) for the town of his birth. He was deeply influenced by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), through his teacher Battistello (1570 – 1637) who followed Caravaggio closely.

Before 1630, Preti joined his brother Gregorio (also a painter), in Rome, where he became familiar with the techniques of Caravaggio and his school as well as with the work of Guercino, Rubens, Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco and Paolo Veronese. In Rome, he painted fresco cycles in Sant'Andrea della Valle and San Carlo ai Catinari. Between 1640 and 1646, he also spent time in Venice, returning to Rome several times. He painted frescoes for the church of San Biago at Modena (c. 1653-1656) and participated in the fresco decoration of the Palazzo Pamphilj in Valmontone (c. 1658-1659), where he worked along Pier Francesco Mola, Gaspar Dughet, Francesco Cozza, Giovanni Battista Tassi, and Guglielmo Cortese.

During most of the late 1650s, he worked in Naples, where he was influenced by the other major Neapolitan painter of his era, Luca Giordano (1634 – 1705). One of Preti's masterpieces were a series of large frescoes, ex-votos of the plague (which were painted on seven city gates, but have since been lost to the ravages of time), depicting the Virgin or saints delivering people from the plague. Two sketches are in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. The bozzeto of the Virgin with the baby Jesus looming over the dying and their burial parties envisions a Last Judgment presided over by a woman. Preti also won a commission to supervise the construction, carving, and gilding for the nave and transept of San Pietro a Maiella.

Having been made a Knight of Grace in the Order of St. John, he visited the order’s headquarters in Malta in 1659 and spent most of the remainder of his life there. Preti transformed the interior of St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, with a huge series of paintings on the life and martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, between 1661 and 1666. His increased reputation led to an expanded circle of patrons, and he received commissions from all over Europe.

Preti was fortunate to enjoy a long career and have a considerable artistic output. His paintings, representative of the exuberant late Baroque style, are held by many great museums, including important collections in Naples, Valletta, and in his hometown of Taverna. In the Uffizi Gallery is his allegorical piece, Vanity.

(This text is taken from the www.wikipedia.org entry on Mattia Preti, available under the GNU Free Documentation License.)