PREVIATI, GAETANO. - Painter, b. in Ferrara on 31 Aug. 1852, d. in Lavagna on 21 June 1920. As a young man he attended the studio of Amos Cassioli in Florence, then moved (1877) to Milan as a pupil of Bertini, and in 1879 won the competition of the Canonica foundation with the vigorous scene Gli ostaggi di Crema, in which evident intentions of surpassing the post-Romantic conventionalism of that period were already announced.
Afterwards, the young artist oriented himself among Cremona, Morelli, Faruffini, D. G. Rossetti, toward a spectacular historicism, resolving with skill 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 much-debated and still debatable Maternità his temperament as a dreamer, inclined to symbols and figurative transcendences. From then on began the creative torment of P., accompanied by the hostility of the public and of criticism, of which the illustrations for Poe's Racconti straordinari bear witness; but two memorable conquests of modern art, and not only Italian art, were constituted by the numerous illustrations for the Promessi Sposi, where far better than the characters the collective and landscape atmospheres of Manzoni's masterpiece are lyrically evoked, and by the fairy-tale painting Il Re Sole (1894, Museum of Brussels), in which the chromatic values of P. are decisively affirmed, on a melodious fabric of orange yellow, violet, silken blue.
Up to the pathetic cycle of the Via Crucis (1902) the ingenious master was able to alternate with fallacious or rhetorical productions works admirable for inventive freshness and poetic inspiration (one recalls 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 already with the Assunzione della Vergine (1903, cathedral of Genoa) one discerns in the laborious imaginative process of the author the germ of decadence, the intellectualistic surrogate, the inability to bend matter to the demands of spiritual escape. And the last decades of that ceaseless activity did not yield the fruits that the period of the late nineteenth century gave reason to foresee. Even today there exists no impartial exegesis around the art of this painter; in any case, P. must be recognized as having a genuine chromatic and luministic talent and a pioneering function with respect to twentieth-century figurative aesthetics. Testimonies of his culture and of his reasoning tendencies remain the volumes: La tecnica della pittura (Turin 1905) and I principi scientifici del divisionismo (ibid. 1906) and, a document of his troubled life and his moral stature, the Lettere al fratello (Milan 1946).