Today is the last day of the Mattia Preti exhibition being held at Taverna, his birthplace, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his birth.

It has been a spectacular success, with the last days registering an average 1,000 visitors per day and this in a small town of 3,500 inhabitants outside Catanzaro.

This influx of visitors from all over Italy, and also some from Malta, have been flocking to see a collection of 50 paintings by Preti including six from Malta, and from museums such as the Prado, the Louvre, the Vatican Museum and the like.

The exhibition was organised jointly by the Taverna authorities and Heritage Malta.

The exhibition will be taken down next week and shipped to Malta where it will be mounted in two big halls at The Palace in Valletta. The exhibition opens on 3 May.

Actually, curator Sandro Debono told this paper in an interview, that the exhibition displayed in Malta will allow a much better show of the Preti paintings because the building used in Taverna used to be a convent and thus restricted in space.

The exhibition will be mounted in the Dining Room and the Throne Room and will thus have more space.

Besides, the exhibition will be purposely displayed in such a manner as to clearly present some new interpretations and hypotheses about the painter and also offer some interesting juxtapositions.

The paintings will be presented in clusters, according to themes and dates of composition reflecting a careful selection of works that can relate to each other.

For instance, one of the interesting themes to be clearly presented at the Valletta exhibition is the potential influence of Durer on Preti. Maybe Preti saw some Durer designs in Rome during his stay there or maybe he saw prints of Durer’s works. Durer prints from the Mdina Cathedral Durer collection will be exhibited next to Preti and a crucifixion by the Neapolitan artist Battistello Caracciolo.

Another hypothesis regards possible influences by Guercino on Preti as in the ‘Doubting St Thomas’ painting and a similar Guercino painting at the Vatican. The two paintings, together with one by Caracciolo from the same period, will be exhibited next to each other at The Palace.

There will be, obviously, some Preti paintings of St John the Baptist including one where the Baptist is wearing the Order’s red and white habit.

One other advantage the Valletta exhibition will have over the Taverna one is that in Taverna the paintings by Preti in Taverna churches were left in situ whereas here they will be brought for people to see.

Other than the six paintings taken from Malta for the Taverna exhibition, there will not be any other addition from Malta. Instead, the exhibition display will feature information on the whereabouts of other Preti paintings around Malta and inviting people to go and see them. Thus the exhibition will lead to a wider exhibition on the artist.

In Taverna, most of the focus was on the Preti cycle in the San Domenico church, the church of the nobles where the Preti family has a chapel.

The historical background is fascinating. Just before he was born, Preti’s family had fallen on bad times and its nobility was downgraded. This explains Preti’s lifelong struggle to climb up the social ladder also thanks to his knighthood of the Order.

Yet another juxtaposition at The Palace exhibition will, for instance, focus on paintings of roughly the same size each with three figures in the centre, including, in this case, a Caravaggio inspired work by Mattia Preti never seen in Malta before.

Preti’s brother, Gregorio, was also an artist but is relatively unknown in Malta, nor do we have any paintings by him. But paintings by Gregorio Preti from Museo Civico di Taverna will provide a comparison with the art of his brother.

Some of the paintings have never travelled outside national territory before and rarely seen or exhibited: such is the case of a ‘Beheaded Corpse of St John the Baptist’ that used to hang in the bedroom of the bishop of Seville.

There is one painting with a unique feature: it is a Crucifixion that used to hang in the Sacra Infermeria big hall and its perspective is such that it is meant to be seen only by one person lying in one particular bed. It could be that Preti intended the painting to give spiritual comfort to people who were dying and taken to this bed so that the last thing they saw was Preti’s crucified Christ.

Surprisingly (or rather not), there is also a political angle. In the first decades of the 20th century, Preti’s works in Malta was used by the philo-Italians in the Maltese political scene to reinforce the claims of a strong and indelible Italian presence in Malta.

In fact, Preti was discovered by the British only very recently. The Preti painting in the National Gallery in London (also in The Palace exhibition) was purchased by the National Gallery in the 1960s.

At a lecture held on Thursday at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, experts showed how they discovered that Preti painted 'The martyrdom of St Catherine' on top of a painting on St Paul he had done earlier.

Also at the Istituto, just in front of The Palace, Giuseppe Mantella and his team will be restoring a Preti St Francis from St Francis church in Valletta in the coming weeks, providing an object lesson on how precious art should be preserved.

There will also be a series of lectures around the exhibition. On 2 May, on the eve of the launch, Luigi Tassoni, a well-known Italian and Mattia Preti scholar will be speaking about Preti’s art, highlighting the ideas, strengths and merits of the Mattia Preti exhibition, which will be opened by President George Abela. 

The exhibition will be open from 3 May to 7 July from 10am to 4pm but may be extended on some days. Events with special viewing will be held on particular occasions along with special guided tours.