Mattia Preti (Taverna, Italy 1613 - La Valletta, Malta, 1699) “Saint Francis receiving the stigmata” Oil on canvas. Relined. Accompanied by its original carved and gilded wooden frame. 184 x 144 cm. Provenance: - Important private collection. Palma de Mallorca. Since the creation of the piece.  A certificate issued by Professor Tommaso Borgogelli on April 16th, 2025 is enclosed. As he states, this is an unpublished painting. To begin with, the work is chronologically placed in a period of full artistic maturity corresponding to Preti’s stay in Malta, where he settled in May 1691 after receiving the commission from the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem (known as the Knights of Malta) to carry out the decoration of the Conventual Church of Saint John the Baptist in Valletta, today’s Co-Cathedral of St. John, one of the Order’s most ambitious projects, which required an artist of great reputation. Regarding the composition, notable for its strong verticality, he explains that it is constructed in various atmospheric layers and crossed by a diagonal beam of divine light, reflecting one of the most evocative tendencies of Preti’s spirituality in his mature years. The figure of the saint, kneeling in the foreground against a backdrop of darkness illuminated by sudden flashes of light, reveals his characteristic iconography and the pathos typical of the “Cavalier Calabrese” (the sobriquet he adopted upon entering the Order of the Knights of Malta). These features include the fixed gaze directed toward the supernatural apparition (outside the frame), the open, theatrical gesture of the right hand, the arched position of the torso, and the dramatic tension of the limbs, all elements that recall the compositional and stylistic formulas developed by Preti during the last two decades of his life. Although in these periods Mattia Preti often relied on the assistance of his workshop, in Professor Borgogelli’s opinion, given the consistent quality throughout the entire execution (that is, lacking weaker areas that might indicate workshop intervention), as well as the inventive composition and the pictorial handling, this painting must be attributed entirely to the master’s own hand. To support this argument, the professor focuses on the most intense passages of the painting, such as the treatment of the saint’s habit, rendered with broad and dense brushstrokes, the luminous quality of the flesh tones, and the vigorous construction of the protagonist’s face, modelled by light and marked by deep shadows: all fragments fully coherent with the painter’s late manner. In the absence of firm documentary evidence, but on the basis of the stylistic and technical features described above, the professor proposes a date around 1680. For comparison, he refers to the Self-Portrait preserved in the Uffizi Gallery, in which, in addition to a similar painterly ductus, worn and not highly mimetic, we find the same chromatic palette dominated by brown hues and muted reds. Likewise, to support both the attribution and the dating of the work, he compares it with the Sant’Angelo in the Basilica of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Valletta, painted together with a Saint Albert of Trapani in the late 1670s, in which the protagonist, in both physiognomy and posture, appears to be the same model as the Saint Francis in our painting. In conclusion, Borgogelli states that Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata constitutes an interesting and significant addition to the corpus of Mattia Preti’s late artistic production, contributing to a better understanding of the pictorial, stylistic, and thematic development of the Cavalier Calabrese during the final years of his long and important artistic and personal career. Mattia Preti was born in Taverna in 1613 and became one of the most outstanding painters of the Neapolitan school in the second half of the 17th century. He is known as the “Cavalier Calabrese” due to his origins and his later investiture as a knight of the Order of Malta. Around 1628, together with his brother Gregorio, also a painter, he moved to Rome. It was during these years that he showed great interest in Caravaggism and in the work of Northern and French followers of Merisi. Towards the end of the 1630s, he studied the neo-Venetian current, the works of classicists such as Lanfranco, and the painting of Guercino and the Venetians Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. In Rome he executed the fresco decoration of Sant’Andrea della Valle between 1650 and 1651, depicting scenes of the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, considered one of his masterpieces. Together with the frescoes in Modena, where he painted the Evangelists and The Paradise, this intervention represents one of the finest examples of the painter’s mature phase. After his stay in Modena, Preti returned to Naples in 1656, becoming a central figure in the local artistic scene and benefiting from his contact with the young Luca Giordano. In 1661, he moved to Malta, where he entered the Order of Malta and was knighted. He worked there until his death in 1699, the Order becoming his most important patron; for them he executed his most ambitious work, the renovation of the Church of Saint John in Valletta, without ceasing to receive commissions from Neapolitan churches, the city where he had left an artistic mark of the highest order. Reference bibliography: - Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. (s.f.). "Mattia Preti". https://www.museothyssen.org/coleccion/artistas/preti-mattia - Museo del Prado. (s.f.). "Preti, Mattia". https://www.museodelprado.es/aprende/enciclopedia/voz/preti-mattia/d11a6ca0-20d5-4cdb-954c-f5615c8ca701