PREVIATI, GAETANO. - Painter, born in Ferrara on 31 Aug. 1852, died in Lavagna on 21 June 1920. In his youth he attended the studio of Amos Cassioli in Florence, then moved (1877) to Milan as a pupil of Bertini, and in 1879 won the Canonica foundation competition with the energetic scene *Gli ostaggi di Crema*, in which evident intentions to surpass the conventional post-Romanticism of that period were already apparent.
Subsequently, the young artist moved between Cremona, Morelli, Faruffini, and D. G. Rossetti, towards a spectacular historicism, skillfully resolving luministic problems (*Il Valentino a Capua*, 1880; *Paolo e Francesca*, 1887; *Il bacio*, 1889), but only in 1891, by adopting the new Divisionist technique, did he reveal with the controversial and still debated *Maternità* his temperament as a dreamer, inclined towards symbols and figurative transcendence. From then on began the creative torment of P., accompanied by the hostility of the public and critics, as evidenced by his illustrations for Poe’s *Racconti straordinari*; yet two memorable achievements of modern art, and not only Italian, were his numerous illustrations for *I Promessi Sposi*, where the collective and landscape atmospheres of Manzoni’s masterpiece are evoked more lyrically than the characters themselves, and the fanciful painting *Il Re Sole* (1894, Brussels Museum), in which the chromatic values of P. are decisively affirmed, set against a melodious fabric of orange-yellow, violet, and silky azure.
Up to the pathetic cycle of the *Via Crucis* (1902), the brilliant master was able to alternate between flawed or rhetorical productions and works remarkable for their fresh inventiveness and poetic quality (notable among them are *Il viaggio nell'azzurro*, 1895; *La Vergine e il Bambino*, the idyllic roundel of the *Sacra Famiglia*, *Le Marie ai piedi della Croce*, 1879; *I Re Magi*, 1898); but already with *L'Assunzione della Vergine* (1903, Genoa cathedral) one can discern in the laborious imaginative process of the author the germ of decline, the intellectualistic substitute, the inability to bend matter to the demands of spiritual evasion. And the final decades of that unceasing activity did not yield the fruits that the late 19th-century period seemed to promise. Even today, there exists no impartial exegesis of this painter’s art; nonetheless, one must acknowledge in P. a genuine chromatic and luministic talent and a pioneering role with respect to 20th-century figurative aesthetics. Testimonies to his culture and rational tendencies remain the volumes: *La tecnica della pittura* (Turin 1905) and *I principi scientifici del divisionismo* (ibid. 1906), and, as a document of his troubled life and moral stature, the *Lettere al fratello* (Milan 1946).