If you were to count all the churches on the Maltese islands there would be more than one for every day of the year. This has presented a tremendous opportunity for Maltese artists because, as Dominic Cutajar has written, “these churches happened to be large, with wide spacey surfaces calling loud to be filled with some sort of decoration.”[i] When the number and size of churches is combined with 87% of the population being regular churchgoers – the highest proportion in Europe – you have a Church that is alive, kicking, and a major commissioner of art.
For artists however there has been a catch, as Cutajar again outlines, “the large village churches were as yet carrying forward with incredible obstinacy the spirit of Baroque triumphalism thinly disguised in Neo-classic and romantic garbs.” As a result, the art-critic, philosopher and priest Peter Serracino Inglott has argued “that while the Church continued to be in Malta the major commissioner for art works, few of these have resulted in works of beauty throughout the last century.”[ii]
Maltese Churches are primarily baroque in style with grandiose interiors, gilded arcades and ceilings, ornate altars and canopies, and walls and vaults covered in paintings and frescoes. The Maltese have a preference for dramatic realism that derives from the stars of their art history; Caravaggio, Mattia Preti, and Guiseppe Cali. Before escaping a death sentence imposed by the Knights of St John, Caravaggio completed two paintings dealing in the drama of death; its light and darkness indicated by means of chiaroscuro. Preti transformed the stark interior of St John’s Co-Cathedral, where Caravaggio’s paintings hung, into a sumptuously decorated showpiece of Baroque art. In his large, dramatic altarpieces, produced for churches all over Malta, Preti combined Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro techniques with naturalism. Cali meanwhile painted over 600 works for the churches and palaces of Malta introducing Romanticism to the islands with his epic work, The Death of Dragut.
Whether deriving from the burden of art history or, as Serracino Inglott surmises from settings of liturgical and festive performance, the preference for dramatic realism in the garb of the baroque or romantic resulted in the works of the early Maltese pioneers of Modern Art failing to gain admission to Malta’s churches. This despite the fact that, as Serracino Inglott notes, “many of the most explorative of Maltese artists kept on producing works of art which undoubtedly were attempts at revealing the sense of the transcendent, often through explicitly religious themes, but most of these were not made for liturgical use or for insertion or performance in church precincts.”
[i] D. Cutajar ed., Malta: Six Modern Artists, Malta University Services, 1991.
[ii] P. Serracino Inglott, ‘What future for art in Malta in the new Millennium?’ in J.P. Cassar ed., art in malta today, St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, 2000.
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