[1] Preti was one of the few concettisti to find favour in the Rome of Pope Urban VIII; he served as secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and was accompanying him on a Spanish embassy when he died suddenly in the spring of 1626.

He is best known for his idylls, a genre which he established with the mythological Salmace of 1609, inspired by a story in the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and then extended to more straightforwardly amorous subjects.

[1] He makes moderate use of complex metaphors and acutezze, inclining to a gently sensuous style, which captures physical detail (his description of the nymph Salmacis bathing is exemplary), while avoiding the more intense and disturbing erotic charge to be found in Marino.

[4] His ideas were similarly conservative: in his brief treatise Intorno all’onestà della poesia (1618) he reasserts the Renaissance Neoplatonist view of the moral functions of love poetry.

[2] Preti's sonnet, 'Penna immortal...', proclaims his poetic debt to Marino, and his description of the mechanism of a clock is a famous example of the Marinist liking for difficult and unconventional subjects.