The Banquet of the Rich Glutton

The parable of Dives and Lazarus — the rich man feasting while the beggar starves at his gate — furnished Baroque painters with one of scripture's most cinematically vivid moral contrasts. Preti returned to this subject multiple times across his career, and this 1685 version painted for the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica represents one of his late treatments, when his palette had become richer and his handling more assured. The banquet table groans under silver plate and food, the host lolls in conspicuous ease, and servants bustle with further provisions. The scene is set outdoors or in a deep loggia, allowing Preti to deploy the kind of atmospheric perspective and distant landscape vignette he had absorbed from Venetian sources. At the margins of the feast, barely visible, lies the figure of Lazarus, present more as a moral footnote than a narrative protagonist — which is precisely the parable's point. By placing abundance at the compositional centre, Preti implicated the viewer in the sin he depicted.

The handling shows the loosened touch of Preti's late style: broad strokes define drapery and tableware, while faces and hands remain the focus of more deliberate modelling. Silver vessels are rendered with confident highlights applied over a mid-tone ground, capturing reflectivity without laboured detail. The outdoor setting admits a cooler, diffused light that differs from the candlelit drama of his earlier works, producing a mellower tonal range.