ALTHOUGH Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria (1915) must be the most entertaining book in English about any region in Italy, Calabria is not on most sightseers’ agenda. Time and earthquakes have dealt harshly with the monuments of the area. And some of the greatest works of art to be seen are there, as it were, by accident. The two remarkable Greek bronzes of nudes at Reggio, among the greatest masterpieces of the age of Phidias, are only there because they were shipwrecked off Riace after being stolen in Roman times from the treasury of the Athenians at Delphi, while the elegant Gothic tomb of Isabella of Aragon, wife of King Philip III of France, is in the Duomo of Cosenza only because she was accidentally drowned in the river Savuto on her return from the East in 1271. However remote, Calabria was at times of strategic importance, and the first English victory over a French revolutionary army on land, at Maida in 1806, was quickly celebrated in the names of a new development in north London and of Walter Scott’s favourite staghound. Like other parts of the former kingdom of Naples, Calabria did not benefit from the union of Italy.
No Calabrian city has been more abused in the last half century than Catanzaro, or so ruthlessly abandoned to the mercies of the road builder. But this is the obvious starting point from which to visit Taverna, the patria of the seventeenth-century painter Mattia Preti, il Cavaliere Calabrese, some twenty-six kilometres to the north. Once the seat of a bishopric, which was transferred to Catanzaro, Taverna is a sleepy rural town. The major church, San Domenico, was reconstructed in the 1670s. Preti, then based in Malta, was called on by his townsmen to supply a series of altarpieces between 1678 and 1687. Of the five canvasses on the right side of the church, only the fourth is not in its original position. The sequence begins with a key Dominican subject, the Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr. Preti himself presented the expressive Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian of 1677 on the third altar. The high altarpiece, the Vision of Saint Dominic, in which Christ appears like Jupiter with thunderbolts, is among the more dramatic of Preti’s later works. There are four more altarpieces by him on the left wall, including the Crucifixion on the third altar and the appropriately eloquent Preaching of the Baptist on the first altar, in which the ageing Preti himself appears in his habit as a Knight of Malta.
Preti worked for other churches at Taverna, notably Santa Barbara, in the apse of which is a large canvas of 1688 showing the saint being received in heaven. Of Preti’s four other altarpieces in the church, none isk in its original setting, and one, the charged and tenebrous Baptism on the right, was painted for the lesser church of San Giovanni Battista. The concentration of pictures by the artist at Taverna testifies to his patrons’ pride in Preti’s achievement and to the calm agricultural prosperity of the country on the southern flank of the Sila.
San Domenico: Mattia Preti, Saint John the Baptist with the Artist as Donor, c. 1687.
