The Milanese painter Carlo Preda, active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, has been the subject of little study, and almost exclusively for his imaginative and excellent sacred compositions. Yet, alongside Vimercati and others of his generation, he played a vital role in the development of the Italian barocchetto. The author adds some secular works to his oeuvre: three allegories of the Seasons (Flora, Ceres, Pomona) and two of the "Elements", with Vestal Virgins attending to Fire and Water; and two other unpublished canvases with "Venus and the Pains of Love" and the "Suicide of Cleopatra". These paintings show Preda as a felicitous artist, open to the innovative, modern style of the Emilian and Roman schools. His work also reflects an unprecedented vision of the world and passionate atmosphere of the country villa, where painting and the decorative arts coexisted with Arcadian poetry and lyric "melodramma", constituting a true "theatre of sight and sound".
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