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An Angel Blowing a Trumpet (recto); The Virgin and Child with Kneeling Saints (verso)

Creator

Italian Artist · 1613–1699

Although Mattia Preti spent much of his life elsewhere, he is traditionally associated with the city of Naples. Together with Luca Giordano, Preti extended the reputation of Neapolitan painting throughout Italy and internationally. Originally from Calabria in southern Italy, Preti went to Rome around 1630, sharing a room with his brother Gregorio who had arrived about two years earlier. Gregorio m

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Date: about 1652
Medium: Red chalk (recto); black chalk (verso)
Culture: Italian
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum

A chubby angel sweeps down from the right, cheeks puffed out as he blows air forcefully into his outstretched trumpet. Mattia Preti used dark, exuberant strokes of red chalk to outline the arms, chest, eyebrows, and cheeks of the angel. He used light hatching to give texture and to create shadows, and quickly sketched the position of the wings. Preti created this work as a preparatory study for a fresco in the cupola of the church of San Biagio in Modena, Italy. In that church, a nearly identical angel hovers over a window on the rim of the cupola, directing his trumpet towards Saint Jerome. Knowing that Preti finished his work on the frescoes in the church by March 1652, scholars guess that this drawing was finished sometime before this. Despite the *pentimenti* along the angel's right arm and an added twist to the shape of the trumpet, this drawing is very similar to the fresco and must represent a final stage in the preparation of the composition.

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