Adeodato Malatesta

Adeodato Malatesta (May 14, 1806[1]– December 24, 1891) was an Italian painter, trained in a grand Neoclassical style, depicting mostly of sacred and historic subjects.

As his name A deo dato or given to god implies, Adeodato's father had planned a career for the boy in religious orders, but his maternal uncle seeing his disposition to arts, encouraged the young man to enroll in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Modena [it] (Accademia Atestina), where the Academy's director, professor Giuseppe Pisani [it], seeing the young man's skill, obtained for him a stipend to study in Florence under the Neoclassical artists Benvenuti, Bezzuoli, and Bartolini.

Moving to Rome, he painted Miracle of St Francis for a church in province of Massa-Carrara; and the Vestizione di Alfonso d' Este, which was sent to Vienna.

[1] In the spring of 1837, Malatesta returned to Modena where he painted an altarpiece depicting St Filomena for the church of Chiesa del Voto.

He painted an oil canvas l'Invalido della grande armata; a Jeremiah cries over the ruins of Jerusalem; a Crucifixion; a Flight to Egypt; and Marriage of the Virgin.

[5] He is described by Ashton Rollins Willard as a "stately and courtly gentleman of the old school, with not too high an opinion of his own attainments", active in a provincial center, and notes that the "general character of Malatesta's work and his persistent adherence to figure painting in the historical Italian manner at a time when the general tendency was toward a more naturalistic form of expression, places him in the same group with Podesti and the other historical painters of the middle period" of 19th century.