At the foot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new acquisition, a painting of John the Baptist by Mattia Preti, one is tempted to place a cartouche with the single word: Baroque. That is the degree to which this work exemplifies the dominant style in Italian art in the middle of the 17th century. Here is the Bible glimpsed through flashes of lightning and rendered in all the scenographic brilliance, and with all the cinematic effects, that this style enshrined.

Given to the Met in 2005 by Melissa and Phillip Aronson, the painting was placed on view last week after an extensive cleaning and restoration. It depicts a hulking, robust young man in the prime of life, rendered in a grayish brown that approaches grisaille. There is a trace of mauve in his magnificently rendered draperies, while a nightmarish black shadow engulfs his head. Almost spilling out of the frame, the fully-frontal saint appears in something akin to what cinephiles call a Dutch tilt, suggestive of passion and imbalance: As the composition fans out from the saint’s feet, at the lower left, wispy clouds streak across the evening sky in the top right. The saint makes his signature gesture, pointing heavenward, while his signature marker, the lamb of god — an analogy of Christ — sits at the bottom right of the composition.

Throughout Preti’s career, this scenographic quality persists. Such is the quotidian nature of his style that we almost feel we are seeing, not a poetic evocation of a saint, but a hyperrealist depiction of an actor playing one.

Preti’s St. John represents a strain of Baroque art that stands to the rest of contemporary Italian painting in much the same relation as film noir stands toother styles of movie making. There is a studied sullenness to this painting, a total resistance to mirth, that insists upon its unshakable authenticity, without quite realizing that, in the end, it too, is as much a “manner” as were the serpentine sinuosities of Parmigianino 100 years before. Like film noir, it seems exuberantly “male,” roundly rejecting the feminine and sentimental side of life in favor of a worldview that is not tragic, but dramatic in the sense of being harshly theatrical.

Preti (1613–99) was a follower of Caravaggio, in so far as his style would not be conceivable without this predecessor from two generations earlier. But the revolution initiated by Caravaggio and the Carracci, a rejection of the late Mannerist style into which they had been born, had become, in Preti’s day, an easy option for European painters to adopt. A parallel suggests itself in the ease with which almost every artist today portrays himself as a rebel, until rebellion becomes the conformity of choice. There is nothing facile about Preti’s art, but it leaves the impression — despite its implicit claims to the contrary — of embodying rather than challenging orthodoxy.

A native of Calabria in Southern Italy, Preti spent much of his formative years in Rome, before traveling to the central Italian city of Modena, then Naples, and finally settling on Malta, where he became a knight of that island’s famous Order. Because of similarities between Preti’s St. John and his frescoes on the walls of San Biagio in Modena, the Met believes that their painting dates from around 1651. Modena’s proximity to Bologna would explain the strong Bolognese appearance of the work, the brooding chiaroscuro of Guercino’s middle years, as well as the partial mitigation of Guercino’s severity that we find in Giovanni Lanfranco. In Lanfranco as well we sometimes find that same “actorly” conception of the human form that is so typical of Preti.

Like many artists who came of age in the wake of Caravaggio, and whose early style was committed to his deep chiaroscuro, Preti subsequently softened and expanded his palette, especially in Naples and Malta. In these later works, one or two lush and brilliant colors emerge, almost with a trace of daintiness and artifice, from the deep darkness of the chiaroscuro. In the Met’s other Preti, “Pilate Washing His Hands,” painted in Malta in 1663, you see elements of this chromatic expansion within a context of considerable darkness, though it is nowhere in evidence in the earlier depiction of the Baptist.

In part, the effect of the Met’s noble St. John is created by the painting’s slightly compromised state of preservation. Several patches of its surface appear to have been scraped rather thin. But in a curious way, this state so neatly matches the rugged and bedraggled majesty of the saint himself as to seem almost like an enhancement.

jgardner@nysun.com