Virginia Museum of Fine Arts acquires Mattia Preti’s Visitation

23 January 2015

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has acquired an important painting by 17th-century Italian artist Mattia Preti, depicting The Visitation (1640s)

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has acquired The Visitation by Mattia Preti, painted in the 1640s. Preti is often described as the last great exponent of Caravaggesque naturalism, and the picture shows what he took from Caravaggio, the close observation and the refusal to idealise, turned to a scene of tenderness rather than violence