Mattia Preti

Mattia Preti was in his late forties when he took on the work that would occupy much of the rest of his life: the vast ceiling of St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, the church of the Knights of Malta. Across the stone vault he painted, in oil directly on the prepared surface, scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist, and he kept working on the island for close to 40 years.

He had come a long way to get there. Born in 1613 in Taverna, a small town in Calabria in the south of Italy, he followed his older brother Gregorio, also a painter, to Rome around 1630. There he absorbed the drama of Caravaggio, who had died only a few years before, learning to make figures loom out of deep shadow. He painted church frescoes in the city before moving on to Naples.

Malta made him a knight. He was admitted to the Order of Saint John around 1660, which is why he is still known as Il Cavalier Calabrese, the Calabrian Knight. He died in Valletta in 1699.