The celebrations of the fourth centenary of the birth of artist Fra Mattia Preti begin today week in his birthplace in Taverna, near Catanzaro in Calabria, with the opening of an exhibition of many of his works brought together from all parts of the world.
In Malta, the celebrations begin on Friday when the St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation join the commemorations with the unveiling of a restored masterpiece by the Italian painter – The Allegory of the Triumph of the Order, a painting that commands the lunette on the inner facade of St John’s Co-Cathedral.
Later on, the Taverna exhibition will come to Malta where it will be on display at The Palace from May.
Although it will be election day in Italy, the celebrations, organized by the Taverna municipality and Heritage Malta together with inputs from the Regione Calabria and with Vittorio Sgarbi at its head, will still open on the day of the centenary.
The exhibition, with the title Della Fede e Umanita’ (On Faith and Humanity) focusing on the link between faith and culture, will bring together 52 Preti masterpieces from all over the world, including: Gesù ed i figli di Zebedeo, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano; I quattro Evangelisti, Galleria regionale della Sicilia, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo; Cristo in gloria con i Santi, Museo del Prado, Madrid; Cristo e il Tributo, Museo nazionale d’Abruzzo, L’Aquila; Bozzetto degli affreschi votivi della peste, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli; San Luca pittore, Pinacoteca di Castello Ursino, Catania; Autoritratto, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze; La negazione di Pietro, Galleria Nazionale Palazzo Barberini, Roma; Concert en famille, Museo del Louvre, Parigi; Il Battesimo di Cristo, National Museum of Fine Arts, Malta.
Also connected with the Preti centenary is an exhibition, ‘A brush with Passion: Mattia Preti’, being held in Washington in the US where it was opened on 9 February, highlighting cultural links between Italy and the US.
The Taverna exhibition will also have an Ecce Homo from the Mdina Cathedral museum, and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta Mattia Preti paintings.
The Preti centenary is also seeing the publication of many books on the artist including books by Keith Sciberras, Sgarbi himself, Prof. Spike and Sante Guido and Giuseppe Mantella, two restorers from Calabria who have spent the past 15 years restoring paintings and churches in Malta in close contact with many Preti paintings. Prof. Spike will be holding an important conference at St John’s on 26 February.
Drawing up a personal portrait of the artist
At this point, scholarship over the past years has uncovered all there is to say about the artist, Giuseppe Mantella told me in an interview. But there is still a lot to discover through linking the different parts of the artist’s life as they have been uncovered. Through this, one gets a more complete, ‘in the round’, appraisal of the artist and his life.
Born to a noble family, Preti made his way to Rome around 1630 and was influenced by the Scuola del Caravaggio like Annibale Carracci, Guercino, and Giovanni Lanfranco as well as Paolo Veronese. In Rome, he painted, among others, a picture for the San Andrea della Valle church.
In 1652 he relocated to Naples where his artistic output improved substantially.
It was in Naples that he had the first contact with the Order of St John. Preti had painted votive paintings for the seven gates of the city to commemorate the liberation from the plague and had come to the notice of the Jesuits in Naples.
When Grand Master de Redin was redecorating the Chapel of Aragon in St John’s, he asked the Jesuits who the best artist in Naples was and they mentioned Mattia Preti. De Redin commissioned him to paint St Francis Xavier for the chapel (the saint was a relative of the Grand Master) and liked the painting so much he also got him to paint St Firmin, the other protector of Aragon, for the same chapel.
De Redin then invited the artist to Malta where he arrived for the first time in June 1659, staying till November. That seems to have been the period where Preti got his inspiration, which would make him come back to Malta where he stayed till he died (in 1699).
In 1642, Preti became a Knight of Obedience when he was still in Rome. A Knight of Obedience is the lowest rank in the Order. Preti wanted to move up in the world and when he came to Malta in 1659, he asked to be upgraded to a Knight of Grace, basing his request on the fact he came from a noble family.
When the Order delayed its response, Preti got the Pope himself to write a letter to the Order.
Then he came up with a better idea: he offered to paint the entire vault of St John’s for free in return for being appointed a Knight of Grace. It is worth to note that the agreement to paint the vault for free was signed on the very same day he was promised he would be appointed Knight of Grace.
Obviously, being a Knight of Grace opened windows of opportunity for lucrative earnings but meanwhile he was just a poor Knight of Obedience and he had to earn a living not just for himself but also for his employees in his ‘bottega’.
That was why Preti, painting the vault in an almighty hurry, then took on many outside works and commissions.
It had always been thought that one Preti masterpiece, the St George altarpiece for the Chapel of Aragon, had been painted in Naples to where the artist returned after his first visit to Malta. But recent investigations during restoration have discovered that globigerina limestone fragments from Maltese rock had been mixed with glue and chalk in the preparation for the painting. The painting is now considered to have been done in Malta. So too the St James in the nearby Chapel of Castille.
Underneath the horse in the St George painting there is a battle scene with a town seen in the distance. It was usually thought this town was Valencia but it now seems the town is an allegory of Jerusalem.
Moving from Naples to Malta, Preti also changed the way he painted. In Italy he had painted in the traditional way on canvas while in Malta he taught himself to paint more rapidly on stone after a rather hurried preparation with linseed oil.
Besides offering to paint the entire vault of St John’s, Preti also offered to be what we would today call the interior designer of St John’s. What we see today, the rich, golden environment, is as much a Preti masterpiece as the painting on the vault.
When he came to Malta in 1659, the church was a very gloomy, dark place. It was also austere with nothing remarkable to see in it. The chapels were walled from each other and no opening existed between them. Preti got the Order to open up spaces between the chapels and he also wanted to enlarge the windows to let in more light. When this was refused, he obtained at least permission for the window at the back of the church, where he was later to paint the Allegory of the Order, be enlarged.
So while he hurriedly painted the vault, he also took on other commissions – for the Cathedral in Mdina and for many villages.
He painted very quickly. In the ‘contro-facciata’, there are places where the sky is unpainted and nude stone left instead. At that height, no one would notice. The clouds are just globigerina and linseed oil.
The designs, which today are at the National Museum of Fine Arts, are stained with oil, signifying they were held while the painting was being done. He must have used both small and quite large brushes, according to where he was painting.
Preti finished his painting of the vault on 20 December 1666, after less than five years of work.
German writer Thomas Freller writes of a German duke who arrived in Malta on a Grand Tour and visited St John’s at a time when the church was occupied by scaffolding and of also seeing the artist. At that time, the artist was painting, he tells us, the Salome scene.
This is also confirmed by another writer, Antonio Rufo, who says that by 1663 the artist had painted one-third of the ceiling.
The scenes on the ceiling tell the story of St John from birth to death, with his death being near the main altar but it seems Preti painted the other way – he began his painting from the main altar area and worked his way down to the main door.