Mattia Preti (1613 -1699), Disbelief of Saint Thomas, c.1630-40, Oil on canvas, 230×173 cm, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa
When Mattia Preti left the small Calabrian town of Taverna and arrived in Rome around 1630, Caravaggio had been dead for twenty years. The painter he came to imitate so closely was already a ghost, known only through paintings, scandalous anecdotes and through the work of those who had tried to carry his manner forward. Preti’s early training is said to have been with Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (1578-1635), the Neapolitan Caravaggist, and that formation seems to have fixed a lasting attachment to tenebrism and close-range naturalism. In Rome, where Preti shared a studio with his elder brother Gregorio, he encountered the full range of Caravaggio’s afterlife: the tavern scenes and card games of Bartolomeo Manfredi, the brooding devotional works of Valentin de Boulogne, and the raw physicality of Jusepe de Ribera. He also absorbed the quite different lessons of Guercino, Guido Reni, and Giovanni Lanfranco, though in these early years it was the Caravaggesque current that shaped his output most decisively.
The term most often applied to this phase of Preti’s career is the Manfrediana methodus, a phrase coined by the German painter and biographer Joachim von Sandrart in 1675 to describe the particular manner in which Manfredi had translated Caravaggio’s innovations into a more widely reproducible idiom: half-length figures at life scale, sombre palettes, shallow pictorial spaces defined by chiaroscuro, and an emphasis on direct observation rather than idealisation . Manfredi’s own works were so close to Caravaggio’s that several were attributed to Caravaggio well into the twentieth century, and the same confusion attended Preti’s earliest religious compositions. But Preti differed from Manfredi in one important respect: where Manfredi’s figures tend to function as types, Preti gave his protagonists something closer to an interior life.
The Genoa canvas is one of at least five known treatments of the Incredulity of Saint Thomas that Preti produced across his career, a fact that raises questions about workshop practice, serial production, and the market for devotional imagery in mid-seventeenth-century Italy. The Compton Verney version, for instance, is dated to the 1670s, by which point Preti had long settled in Malta and his style had moved well beyond its early Caravaggesque phase. Was the subject simply a reliable seller? Did later patrons request copies of a composition Preti had first worked out decades earlier? These are questions the existing literature has not fully resolved. The Palazzo Rosso picture, with its tightly cropped three-quarter-length figures, stark directional lighting, and dark, featureless background, sits comfortably within the idiom of the 1630s. Christ’s raised arm exposes the stigmata wound while Thomas extends his hand towards the wound in Christ’s side, a gesture that follows the compositional logic established by Caravaggio’s own treatment of the subject (c. 1601–1602, Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam), painted originally for the Giustiniani collection.
What marks this as an early work, rather than a later reworking of the theme, is the degree to which Preti submits to convention. The palette is narrow, the background offers nothing, and the figures are locked into a relationship governed almost entirely by the fall of light. There is none of the Venetian colour or the dramatic spatial ambition that Preti would develop after his probable stay in Venice in the mid-1640s, and none of the monumental scale he brought to the apse frescoes of Sant’Andrea della Valle in 1650–1651. It is, in other words, a picture made by a young painter still working within the rules of a tradition he had inherited rather than tested. That he would later return to the same subject in quite different registers suggests that the Doubting Thomas held some particular significance for him, though whether devotional, intellectual, or simply commercial is difficult to say.
References
Leone, G. (ed.) (2015) Mattia Preti: un giovane nella Roma dopo Caravaggio. Exhibition catalogue. Rome: Galleria Corsini, 25 October 2015 – 18 January 2016.
Spike, J.T. and Spike, M.K. (1999) Mattia Preti: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Centro Di, Firenze
