Mattia Preti

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Mattia Preti Biography

(b. 1613, Taverna Calabria, d. 1699, La Valleta)

Mattia Preti (also called Il Cavaliere Calabrese) was an Italian Baroque painter. Mattia Preti came from Taverna in Calabria (hence his nickname) and his prolific career took him to many different parts of Italy (and according to an early biographer to Spain and Flanders). Mattia Preti left Calabria to join his brother Gregorio, also a painter, in Rome. Mattia Preti met with such outstanding success that within a short time Preti Mattia had become one of the most authoritative southern artists of the second half of the seventeenth century.

The early Mattia Preti works includes groups of musicians and card-players, strongly Caravaggesque in style, but later Mattia Preti excelled mainly in frescos on religious subjects. In this field his main model was Lanfranco, whom Mattia Preti succeeded in the decoration of S. Andrea della Valle in Rome (1650-51).

In 1661 Mattia Preti went to Malta where he stayed until his death. Mattia Preti alternated between painting altarpieces and frescos for the island's churches, including the cathedral of Valletta. From time to time he paid visits to his home town which, over the years, became almost a gallery of Mattia Preti artwork.

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. Mattia Preti 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 Mattia Preti became familiar with the techniques of Caravaggio and his school as well as with the painting of Guercino, Rubens, Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco and Paolo Veronese. In Rome, Preti Mattia painted fresco cycles in Sant'Andrea della Valle and San Carlo ai Catinari. Between 1640 and 1646, Mattia Preti also spent time in Venice, returning to Rome several times.

During most of the late 1650s, Mattia Preti 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. Mattia 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, Mattia Preti 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 Mattia Preti 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 Mattia Preti received commissions from all over Europe.

Preti was fortunate to enjoy a long career and have a considerable artistic output. Mattia Preti 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.