A Brush with Passion Mattia Preti (1613-1699) : Paintings from North American Collections in Honor of the 400th Anniversary of His Birth

A Brush with Passion: Mattia Preti (1613-1699) is the first major exhibition of his art held in the United States and one of three international venues recognized by the Preti Quadricentennial Committee in Italy, of which our own Dr John T Spike is a member. Taverna, the artist’s birthplace in Calabria, and Valletta, Malta, where Preti lived for forty years as painter to the Knights of Malta, will also host exhibitions with works from their respective countries. Mattia Preti is celebrated as the last and most enduring proponent of the passionate, contrasted style of the painter, Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1571-1610). In many ways, Preti’s life followed in Caravaggio’s footsteps, although with a happier ending. As a young man, Preti made his way up the Italian peninsula to study painting in Rome, arriving around 1630. He quickly fell under the spell of Caravaggio, similarly seeking emotional intensity and wrapping his canvases in pervasive darkness that evokes the impenetrable nights of those candle-lit times and the hidden depths of the human soul. Preti’s paintings underwent a significant development in the mid-1640s, when he immersed himself in studies of the Venetian Renaissances, especially Titian and Paolo Veronese, in search of more colors and a grander theatricality in his compositions. The exhibition A Brush with Passion: Mattia Preti (1613-1699) features a prime example of this new direction, the ‘Banquet of Herod’ in the Toledo Museum of Art, which is one of the artist’s masterpieces. Fiercely self-reliant and incessantly inventive, Preti followed Caravaggio’s restless path leading first to Naples and then beyond to Malta. His paintings on the vault and for most of the altars in the Church of St John in Valletta earned him a high title in the Sovereign Military Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. His last four decades were dedicated to commissions for the Knights and the leading noble families of Europe. These paintings have found their way to the world’s museums and for which Preti’s anniversary is being commemorated.