Malta in 1530 and the Hospitaller Legacy

Charlene Vella of the University of Malta examines the artistic and architectural state of the Maltese Islands around 1530, when the Hospitaller Order of the Knights of St John arrived under Grand Master Jean Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Against the bleak 1524 commissioners' report and Jean Quintin d'Autun's 1536 account, Vella shows that the local gentry and religious orders in Mdina and Rabat were already commissioning Italian Renaissance sculpture and painting from Sicily.

The first part of the lecture presents works produced for Maltese churches by the Palermo workshop of Domenico and Antonello Gagini, including the 1474 holy water stoup and 1496 baptismal font for Mdina Cathedral, the 1504 Virgin and Child in Rabat, and the 1535 funerary monument of L'Isle-Adam. Vella also discusses polyptychs by Antonello da Messina's nephews Salvo d'Antonio and Antonio de Saliba, and a Renaissance panel in Żejtun overpainted in 1672 by the painter-knight Pedro Núñez de Villavicencio.

The talk then follows the Knights' departure from Rhodes in 1523 aboard the carrack Sant'Anna and their settlement at Birgu and the Castrum Maris (Fort St Angelo). Supervised by Fra Diego Perez de Malfrere and the Rhodian master mason Niccolò Flavari, L'Isle-Adam's building works introduced a conservative Hospitaller Gothic style with ribbed vaults in the Sacra Infermeria, the Magna Curia Castellania and the Franciscan cloister at Rabat. Vella concludes with works brought from Rhodes or commissioned after the 1532 fire at San Lorenzo, including the Madonna of Phileremos, a triptych from the circle of Jan van Scorel, a fourteenth-century Byzantine reliquary diptych with reliefs hypothesised to come partly from Cyprus, a Parisian chalice of 1530 to 1531, and a painted crucifix by Polidoro da Caravaggio.