Patho-anatomical realism in Mattia Preti's art

Abstract

The end of the Medieval saw an intellectual breakthrough in the sciences and arts that inaugurated an entirely new concept in expressive form. Renaissance art underwent a metamorphosis fundamental to which was the naturalistic representation of the human figure where the artists of the age gave visual expression to reason and nature in the birth of human form. This enabled in the first instance a close interrelationship between the study of anatomy and the depiction of the human form in art. Accordingly, the strictures of earlier Gothic art were re-evaluated and the austere iconography dissolved in a proliferation of concrete experiences and physical realities giving rise to a progression from pure Renaissance to Michelangelo, to various imitators exaggerating the human anatomy (the mannerists) and eventually to Baroque art.