Men (and a Woman) Who Painted Malta

Churches on Gozo have ornate decoration but, so far as I have seen, no stand-out works of art. That cannot be said of the co-cathedral, St John’s, in Valletta.

Are you familiar with the term co-cathedral? I wasn’t. It is a bishop’s seat (a cathedral) which shares this function with another cathedral. In Britain for example, Bath and Wells, in Malta St John’s in Valletta and St Paul’s in the former capital Mdina. St John’s is super-high baroque and has this altarpiece by bad boy Caravaggio. He came to Malta on the run from a murder rap in Rome. The Knights of Malta sprung him from prison,  inducted him into their Order and commissioned this picture, his masterpiece they that think they know say, and his only signed work. The picture is still in situ but the Knights found Caravaggio strong meat expelling him from the Order as a “putrid and fetid limb”.

Let’s look at other more congenial artists who have painted on Malta and with whom we might rather dine. Edward Lear visited in the middle of the 19th century. Here are two of his watercolours painted on Gozo.

I had difficulty picking these examples as there are so many that conjure up Gozo’s land and seascapes. In the 1960s cartoonist HM Bateman was a visitor, staying at the Royal Lady Hotel in Mgarr, now re-built and called the Grand Hotel where I am staying. His granddaughter, Lucy Willis, came to stay in 2011 to find out more. She climbed some steps behind the hotel and at the end of an alley found a man mending his fishing nets who macabrely remembered that when he was fourteen he found her eighty-two year old grandfather who had died of a heart attack while out walking. The alley is still full of cats and he is still mending his nets.