Though the reputed master, Lanfranco was not the model of Massimo; his principal imitator was Giambatista Benaschi, or Bernaschi, numbered with Roman artists by Orlandi, but who fixed his residence at Naples, and opened a numerous school; a decided machinist, but with a grasp of fancy which never suffered him to repeat a figure in the same attitude. His points of sight from below upward, are correct, and his foreshortenings dextrously contrived. None ever approached a master nearer, and forsook him with less success. Guercino never saw Naples, but Mattia Preti,[125] commonly called Calabrese, smit with his novel style, went to study it at Cento; not indeed exclusively, for no Italian school escaped the attention of Preti. Unpractised in colour to his twenty-sixth year, he attended solely to design, less to form beauty or trace characters of delicacy, than to express robust and energetic ones: in such he often succeeded, but sometimes sunk to heaviness. His colour resembled his line, not soft and airy, but dense, cut into masses of chiaroscuro, and with a general tone of ashy hues, tints of sorrow, contrition, anguish, the favourite topics of his pencil. The frescoes of Calabrese at Modena, Naples, Malta, have a stamp of grandeur. At Rome, in S. Andrea della Valle, he appears to less advantage, too enormous for the place, and too ponderous at the side of Domenichino. Italy is filled with his oil pictures, for his life was long, his hand rapid, and every place he visited, a scene of exercise: what he painted for galleries consisted commonly of half figures, like those of Guercino. He long, and nearly alone, contested the field with Giordano, to whose captivating airiness his weight was at last forced to yield. He retired and died in Malta, a Knight of its order, without leaving a pupil who rose above mediocrity. After this survey of the Bolognese School at Naples, the native one of Ribera claims attention. None ever swore more implicitly to a master's dictates: the energy of his style absorbed their eye, the atrocity of his character too often debauched their hearts. Inferiority alone discriminates the works of Giovanni Do and Bartolommeo Passante from those of Spagnoletto; though, in the advance of life, the first attempted to tinge with less vulgarity, and the second now and then affected a more select outline. Francesco Fracanzani had a certain grandeur of execution and bloom of colour: his "Transito," or Death of St. Joseph, at the Pellegrini, is among the first pictures of the city. But, by the pressure of poverty, he first became a dauber, then a criminal, and received sentence of death, which respect for his profession, from the public ignominy of the halter, mitigated to secret execution by poison.