the National Galleries of Ancient Art present, in the Palazzo Barberini, the exhibition focus La Cananea restored. New discoveries on Mattia and Gregorio Preti, curated by Alessandro Cosma and Yuri Primarosa, centered on the large canvas depicting Christ and the Canaanite by Mattia Preti, restored by the laboratory of the National Galleries.

This masterpiece from a private collection, coming from the Princes Colonna gallery, exhibited last year at Palazzo Barberini on the occasion of the exhibition The triumph of the senses. New light on Mattia and Gregorio Preti, it constitutes an important addition to the Roman period of Mattia Preti and testifies to the influence of Venetian painting - by Tintoretto and Veronese in particular - on the art of the "Calabrian Cavalier".

Alongside this painting will be exhibited some large-format paintings made independently or four hands by the brothers Gregorio and Mattia Preti in the second half of the seventeenth century. 

Of the two brothers is the Allegory of the five senses of the Barberini collection, in which the philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus exhort to rationally judge the pleasures derived from sensorial experiences. While only Gregory's painting Marriage at Cana of the Pontifical Teutonic Institute - for the first time on display to the public - testifies to the painter's lingering style and far from the refinements of his brother, evident for example in the Supper of the rich Epulone of the National Galleries. 

Gregorio's language, however, is a discontinuous language with results sometimes of great quality as in the Sant'Orsola di Santa Maria dell'Anima, datable between 1635 and 1640, found by Alessandro Mascherucci and Yuri Primarosa in the private rooms of the Teutonic Pontifical and also never exposed to the public. 

The collaboration between the brothers was interrupted in 1642 when Mattia was appointed knight of the Order of Malta and began an independent journey, only to meet in 1652 to paint together the counter-façade of San Carlo ai Catinari, where the distance between the profession is increasingly evident. of Gregorio and the talent of Mattia, who left Rome the following year to continue his career in Naples and Malta.