Preti’s artistic development began in Rome, where he had moved from his native Calabrian town of Taverna by the early 1630s. His brother Gregorio was already living in the Eternal City, and there – as well as during a likely sojourn in Naples – he would have admired the works of Caravaggio and his followers, from Ribera to the Northern Caravaggesque painters. The earliest works from Preti’s Roman period are an explicit reflection of Caravaggio’s legacy, with genre compositions (Concerts or Card Players) set in nocturnal light; whereas during the 1630s his style embraced the neo-Venetian trend that was spreading through the Roman art world. In the 1640s he left Rome for a series of journeys in Northern Italy so as to deepen his knowledge of the Venetian and Emilian painting traditions, which were to influence his subsequent oeuvre.
In October 1642 he was admitted to the Order of the Knights of Malta. In 1650 he received the important commission to paint frescoes in the apse of the Roman church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, and in the following year (or in the spring of 1652, at the latest) he frescoed the cupola and choir of San Biagio, the Carmelite church in Modena. The works from this period reveal his reflection on significant works by Lanfranco, the Carracci and Guercino. During the brief period after his return to Rome he was engaged with his brother Gregorio in the decoration of the church of San Carlo ai Catinari. He subsequently moved to Naples (1653), where he stayed, principally, until 1660, working prolifically and successfully for both public and private patrons.
Together with Luca Giordano (1634-1705) Preti was the principal driving force for the thorough establishment of Baroque painting in Naples, and he expressed this with great vitality and sincerity, in part because of his talented use of chiaroscuro, “returning us to a vision of concretely perceptible reality, based on true humanity and profound, enduring sentiment, and thus that much more heroic and monumental” (Nicola Spinosa, “Mattia Preti e il barocco a Napoli”, in M. Utili, ed., Mattia Preti tra Roma, Napoli e Malta, exh. cat., Naples 1999, p. 18).