PRETI, Mattia, called Il Cavalier Calabrese. - Painter, b. at Taverna (Catanzaro) on 24 Feb. 1613, d. at Malta on 3 Jan. 1699. Barely more than seventeen years old, he went to Naples, and from there, immediately afterward, to Rome to the workshop of his brother, the painter Gregorio.
His youthful activity, between 1630 and 1650, has been clarified between two different cultural interests: luminism and the neo-Venetian taste. To the first of these belong works such as the Musicians and Poets of the Albertina in Turin, the Flagellation of St. John Calibita and the fresco with the Charity of St. Charles Borromeo at S. Carlo ai Catinari in Rome, the Miracle of St. Pantaleon formerly in the Cecconi collection in Florence, the Tribute of the Corsini Gallery and the Agar and Ishmael of Palazzo Doria in Rome, the Raising of Lazarus of Palazzo Bianco and the Clorinda of Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, the Players of the Sili Collection in Rome, the Concert owned by Longhi, the St. John the Golden-Mouthed of the Gualino collection in Turin. Of the second orientation, on the other hand, the testimony is more complex and still not completely clarified, alongside the Bacchanal of the Raggi collection in Rome, the Triumph of Silenus of the Museum of Fine Arts of Tours, the Moses on Sinai of the Fabre Museum of Montpellier, the Little Concert of the Museum of Carcassonne, the Homer of the Galleries of Venice. In that twenty-year period P. traveled a great deal: before 1644 he was in Spain; then at Cento, at Parma, at Paris; at Modena he left frescoes in the church of S. Biagio, at Bologna he painted for Card. Pallotta a canvas with Olindo and Sophronia, today in the Jerace collection in Naples.
His many travel experiences were profitable to him to the point of determining, from 1650 onward (the frescoes in S. Andrea della Valle in Rome date from about this year), an unmistakable style, vigorous and emphatic at the same time, and one of the most complex and remarkable personalities of seventeenth-century painting. From 1656 to 1660 he was in Naples where his activity began with the frescoes depicting scenes of the plague on the city gates, today worn away by time and the elements. In the Pinacoteca remain the two sketches of the Porta Capuana and Porta Nolana, together with other drawings for the frescoes of the dome of S. Domenico Soriano, these too almost totally vanished. Among the other Neapolitan works are the Prodigal Son of the Royal Palace, the Ecce Homo formerly in the Proto-Albaneta collection, the Banquets owned by Gerace and of the Pinacoteca. But the masterpiece is constituted by the ten canvases painted for the ceiling of S. Pietro a Maiella with stories of St. Peter Celestine and St. Catherine of Alexandria. In 1660, P. left the city to go and decorate a salon of the Villa Pamphily at Valmontone and in 1661 he moved to Malta, where he left works in the church of St. John in Valletta and in others on the Island. In 1668 he returned to his native Taverna and painted there numerous canvases for the major churches: he sent others still from Malta, where he had to return, summoned urgently, around 1674. The Christ Hurling Thunderbolts, the St. Barbara, the St. Sebastian, the Baptism of Jesus with the Self-Portrait below in the guise of a knight, are among the best works preserved at Taverna. In the second Maltese period P. furthermore sent works to Naples, to Siena (a Preaching of St. Bernardino, 1675) for the Cathedral, and to Rome.
(Int. Andrena)