PREVIATI, GAETANO. — Painter, born in Ferrara on 31 August 1852, died at Lavagna on 21 June 1920. As a young man he attended the studio of Amos Cassioli in Florence, then moved (1877) to Milan, where he became a pupil of Bertini; in 1879 he won the competition of the Canonica Foundation with the vigorous scene Gli ostaggi di Crema, in which there were clear signs of an intention to overcome the post-Romantic conventionalism of the period.
Subsequently, the young artist oriented himself among Cremona, Morelli, Faruffini, and D. G. Rossetti toward a spectacular historicism, skillfully resolving problems of light (the Valentino a Capua, 1880; Paolo e Francesca, 1887; Il bacio, 1889); but only in 1891, adopting the new divisionist technique, did he reveal, with the controversial and still disputable Maternità, his temperament as a dreamer, inclined toward symbols and figurative transcendence. From then began P.’s creative torment, accompanied by the hostility of the public and critics, to which the illustrations for Poe’s Racconti straordinari bear witness; yet two memorable achievements of modern art, and not only Italian art, were the numerous illustrations for Promessi Sposi, in which collective and landscape atmospheres of Manzoni’s masterpiece are lyrically evoked far better than its characters, and the fairy-tale painting Il Re Sole (1894, Brussels Museum), in which P.’s chromatic values are decisively affirmed on a melodious fabric of orange-yellow, violet, and silky blue.
Up to the poignant cycle of the Via Crucis (1902), the ingenious master succeeded in alternating fallacious or rhetorical productions with works remarkable for inventive freshness and poetic inspiration (notable among them are Il viaggio nell’azzurro, 1895; La Vergine e il Bambino, the idyllic tondo of the S. Famiglia, Le Marie ai piedi della Croce, 1879; I Re Magi, 1898); but as early as the Assunzione della Vergine (1903, cathedral of Genoa), the seeds of decline, the intellectualistic substitute, and the inability to bend matter to the demands of spiritual escape can be discerned in the author’s laborious imaginative process. And the final decades of that unceasing activity did not yield the fruits that the period of the late nineteenth century had led one to anticipate. Even today there is no impartial interpretation of this painter’s art; nevertheless, P. must be credited with genuine chromatic and luminous talent and with an anticipatory role in relation to twentieth-century figurative aesthetics. Testimonies to his culture and his rationalizing tendencies are provided by the volumes La tecnica della pittura (Turin 1905) and I principi scientifici del divisionismo (there 1906), and, as a document of his troubled life and moral stature, by Lettere al fratello (Milan 1946).