Mattia Preti

Mattia Preti left Calabria for Rome around 1630 where he discovered the work of the great Caravaggio followers, Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622), Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632) and Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652). Their influence is particularly apparent in his early Caravaggesque works characterised by the master’s naturalism and chiaroscuro. Preti painted genre scenes in the fashionable style of Manfredi, producing numerous paintings of merriment in taverns, such as The Concert (1630/35) in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid and The Game of Draughts (ca. 1635) at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Unlike Manfredi, however, Preti understood that Caravaggio’s bravi have an inner life which he introduced into his own protagonists.

In the 1640s he most likely travelled to Venice, where he would have seen the works of Tintoretto (1518–1594) and Veronese (1528–1588). This led to experimentations with a lighter palette and more theatrical staging, in which the scene is often viewed from a dramatic angle, endowing his work with a cinematographic effect avant la lettre. This is particularly manifest in his mature work of the 1650s and 1660s such as his fresco of the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew (ca. 1651) in Rome’s Sant’Andrea della Valle. He moved to Naples from 1653 to 1660 where his work returns to the more tenebrist Caravaggism perpetuated by Ribera (1591–1652), whose dramatic realism Preti appropriated in his Martyrdom of Saint Paul (1656/59) now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Preti’s Neapolitan years were negatively affected by his competition with Luca Giordano (1634–1705), who was popular with the Spanish-oriented ruling class.

Preti moved to Malta in 1661 where he became the official painter for the Maltese Order of Saint John. He was granted one of the highest honors in the Order, Knight of Justice, hence his epithet ‘Il Cavalier’. This period was a particularly prolific one for Preti whose workshop was commissioned to produce paintings and frescoes for local churches as well as for export to Germany, Italy and Spain. His Maltese style witnessed a playful confluence of late Caravaggism with Venetian painting and an almost Rubensian Baroque. With age, he turned to an increasingly monochrome palette, visible in one of his last masterpieces, painted age seventy-six, the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (1689) in the Church of San Lorenzo in Birgu, Malta.