The young Mattia Preti in Rome: style, baroque painting, and the art market, c. 1630-1653

The outstanding reputation of Mattia Preti (1613-1699), one of the foremost Italian Baroque painters and draftsmen, rests on his vibrant easel paintings and dynamic murals executed across a long career and a geographic expanse encompassing Rome, Modena, Naples, and Malta. He arrived in Rome by 1632 and attained his first success by gaining the patronage of two papal families and earning the prestigious commission for a fresco cycle (1650-51) behind the high altar at Sant’Andrea della Valle, a major monument of Baroque art in the Eternal City. Yet scholarship has mostly neglected the two decades (c. 1632-53) the painter spent in Rome, in favor of his later years in Naples and Malta. My dissertation instead challenges the entrenched and limited characterization of Mattia Preti's general reputation and historical place within Italian Baroque studies by looking afresh at his two Roman decades. I argue that Preti’s success is due to his ability to respond with unusual alacrity and flexibility to the demands of Rome’s burgeoning open art market. Close examination of paintings offers evidence for my argument that Preti consciously and simultaneously experimented with different stylistic modes, deliberately manipulating his style in order to sell his paintings and attract major patrons. I trace how he moved fluidly among seemingly incompatible regional styles, like Roman Caravaggism, Bolognese classicism, and neo-Venetianism, before developing a personal manner combining aspects of all these styles, which is best exemplified in his Sant'Andrea della Valle frescoes Chapter One focuses on Preti’s earliest half-length easel pictures of genre and religious subjects and traces the painter’s imitation of, emulation of, and innovation upon earlier Roman Caravaggesque precedents. Chapter Two analyzes Preti's large-scale Caravaggesque paintings and argues that Preti ennobled his Caravaggesque style by updating its visual language and increasing the canvases' scale, working in an idiom I have coined "Caravaggism of the Grand Manner." By examining how Caravaggio's style still served as a viable stylistic mode near the middle of the seventeenth century, the chapter also sheds light on the demand for this manner among Rome's noble elite, which illuminates Preti's network of patrons during these pivotal years of his career. Chapter Three first examines Preti's engagement with Venetian painting, including Titian’s mythological landscapes and Veronese’s history paintings, to understand the appeal of Preti’s stylistic experiments for contemporary collectors and how his paintings impacted collecting practices. Chapter Four presents an in-depth study of Preti's most important fresco commission in Rome: the Martyrdom of St. Andrew in the apse of Sant'Andrea della Valle by situating Preti's frescoes within the iconographic tradition of the apostle Andrew and the trend of frescoed apse walls in seventeenth-century Rome. In sum, this dissertation employs key case studies of different styles from Mattia Preti's vast Roman output to shed new light on the two decades the painter spent in Rome, which are the least well-known but the most crucial for understanding Preti’s artistic identity.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Melissa Adria Yue