Malta’s only important late Gothic sculpture is the white marble state of St Paul which, since at least the 18th century, has been enshrined in an aedicule on the west facade of the church of St Paul Outside the Walls, at Rabat. Its provenance is unknown but the quality of the work is indicative of a prestigious commission perhaps for the Cathedral or, possibly, for the hallowed burial ground, and Pauline pilgrimage centre, at Rabat itself. The expressively modelled head, the stiff pleats of the drapery, and the elegantly elongated body with its accentuated S-curve point to a good workshop, probably, although not necessarily, in Sicily.
Works of sculpture were sometimes commissioned to provide worthy sepulchres for the nobility and the gentry. Thus the tomb, in Mdina Cathedral, of the milite Franciscu Gattu, who had dominated the civic life of the city at the turn of the 15th century, was closed by ledgerstone decorated with his armorial shields, and carried an inscription in a very angular gothic alphabet. In spite of its limited artistic interest, the stone is the only one of its kind surviving in Malta and is, therefore, of importance to Maltese art history. One must also concede that the stone carver has skilfully exploited the heraldic devices and the intricate gothic letters (which he sometimes terminated in foliated flourishes), to create a pleasing, albeit minor, piece of medieval decorative art.1 An apparently finer tomb, which does not survive, was the one willed in 1487, by the nobleman Joannes de Nava, for the Rabat church of the Franciscan Conventuals. It consisted of a marble casket adorned with a trophy of arms that was composed of a gilt sword, daggers, spurs, and a silk banner emblazoned with his armorial shield.2
The tombs of the rich could, in addition occasionally contain objets d’art. A case in point was an ebony medallion with an effigy of the Virgin of Bounty, discovered around 1600 in one of the graves in the homonymous chapel founded by Pietro Caxaro, in 1485, in the Dominican church of St Maria della Grotta at Rabat.3 This church enjoyed good patronage. Among its objets d’art was a freestanding white marble holy water stoup, donated by a certain Petrus Bercaxi around the turn of the 16th century.4 The basin, which survives, is worked in the shape of a scallop shell and is remarkable for its simple purity of line. On its front is a circular medallion inscribed with a cross monogram and the donor’s name.
Another freestanding, white marble, holy water stoup of better quality was acquired in Palermo, in 1474, for Mdina Cathedral. The basin (diameter 62cm; height 24cm), which survives in good state of preservation in the parish church of Gharb, in Gozo,5 has close affinities with the Palermo workshop of Domenico Gagini (1425/30 – 1492) to whom it is here attributed. Technically, and artistically, this is a work of merit. The marble is highly polished and the decoration, made up of a foliated garland and elegant reeding, is satisfyingly appropriate. The focal point is a low relief medallion of a majestic St Paul.
Domenico was the head of a dynasty of sculptors which originated in the marble-quarrying district of Bissone, Lombardy, but rose to prominence in Genoa where, for a while, it dominated the field of sculpture. He came into contact with the renaissance in Florence where he moved in the circle of Brunelleschi and was impressed by Gihiberti. By 1455 he had gravitated south to Naples where, alongside Francesco da Laurana, he was one of the principal sculptors of the great arch of Alfonso of Aragon. In 1458 he established himself in Sicily where he played a seminally important role in the diffusion and consolidation of Renaissance ideas.
Something of the charm and vivacity of Domenico’s style can be appreciated in Malta in a second commission for Mdina Cathedral. This is a white marble baptismal font produced in 1496, nearly four years after his death, in the workshop he had founded in Palermo and on which, in old age, he had become increasingly dependent, often with a consequent fall in artistic standard. The workshop perpetuated his style and continued receiving commissions for a long time after his death. The Mdina baptismal font was one of its better productions.6 It consists of a scalloped basin (diameter 94cm; height 47cm) carried by four caryatid young men (height 56cm) clustered together on a circular base (height 23cm). Their slender grace and stylised drapery folds are essentially Gothic but there is a Renaissance feeling in the concern for the structure of the body and, particularly, in the flexed knees and raised arms. The basin is emblazoned with municipal and episcopal shields and carries two medallions with respective low-relief representations of St Paul and the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan.
Domenico’s son, Antonello (1487/9-1536) also worked for Maltese patrons. On 23 February 1504, he entered into agreement with the Rabat Franciscan Minors of Sta Maria di Gesú to produce for their church a marble statue of the Virgin and Child costing 20 oncie.7 The statue is an early work, and Antonello had not yet profited from the experience of a contact with Michelangelo when, in the course of a visit to Rome in 1505-6, he worked under his direction on the decorative sculpture of the tomb of Pope Julius II. It should therefore be considered in the context of the workshop practice of his father where Madonna statues, often executed by assistants, were variants on a popular prototype. Antonello’s Madonnas, between July 1498, when he got his first known commission, and the winter of 1505, when he moved to Rome, were very much in this tradition, although it is possible to detect the emergence of a personal style. Drapery folds become more plastically voluminous and the head and facial features are characterised by a somewhat abstracted stylisation that recalls Francesco da Laurana.8 The Rabat Virgin and Child is one of the most successful of these early works and served as a model for at least one other statue, that commissioned in October 1504 for the church of Sta Maria delle Grazie (now in the church of Santa Tereza) at Catanzaro.
The iconography of the Rabat statue is carefully stipulated in the contract which also gives the desired measurements. Of particular interest are the instructions on the painted decoration, in azure and gold, to brighten up parts of the dress and mantle of the Virgin. Only faint traces survive especially on the undersides of the drapery folds. The eight-sided pedestal, inscribed with the now barely legible signature of the sculptor and the date 1504, carries the half-length, low-relief effigies of Saints Paul and Francis of Assisi, who carry their respective symbols in a majestic manner that is still largely medieval. Of more contemporary interest is a central anecdotic scene of the Stigmatisation of St Francis. It is here, more than in the statue proper, that one feels the spirit of the renaissance.9
Other Maltese statues have a stylistic connection with the early Antonello Gagini. A St Mary Magdalene, in the same church as the Virgin and Child, comes from a related quarter but is of inferior quality and, probably, not a product of his workshop. The St Agatha in the church of the saint at Rabat is, in spite of the vulgar re-paintings of the original polychromy, garish cheap gilding, and clumsy attempts at restoration,10 a better statue, and a possible workshop piece. The slightly less than life-size statue has a similar anatomical structure and facial features to many of Antonello’s early Madonnas, but (unlike most of them) she is represented in a seated posture. Another indication of its early date is the typology of the octagonal pedestal which carries low-reliefs of virgin-saints on the sides, and a central representation of two angels carrying a platter with a pair of tongs and two female breasts, these being the saint’s emblems. Of finer quality but of later date and more difficult to attribute is the alabaster, bust-length, low-relief of the Virgin and Child, now venerated under the name of the Virgin of the Grotto, at the Rabat Dominican church. It seems to have been commissioned in or after 1508 as a Virgin of Loreto, but the centre of production is not recorded.11 Sicily is a likely possibility while the Renaissance qualities may, perhaps, point to the Gagini circle.
A late sculpture from the workshop of Antonello Gagini is the full-length figure of Grand Master Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam in the repose of death, on the lid of his sarcophagus in the Crypt of the Grand Masters in St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta. The sarcophagus itself is in local soft limestone and has no connection with Antonello Gagini. L’Isle Adam died in 1534, and the ornate lid was completed within a year when it was fitted on the Grand Master’s original tomb in the chapel of St Anne, at Fort St Angelo. It was removed to St John’s around 1579 when the crypt was ready to receive burials. There, however, survives at Fort St Angelo a memorial slab with an inscription and the profile portrait of the Grand Master. This could have belonged to the monument as first set up, but its connection to the Gagini workshop is unknown.
Returning to the sarcophagus lid, the white marble recumbent figure belongs to a typology of funerary sculpture that is essentially medieval, but which remained in demand well into the sixteenth century. The Gagini workshop undertook several such commissions for the tombs of Sicilian prelates and other dignitaries. The L’Isle Adam tomb commission coming, as it did, from the most famous chivalric order of Christendom probably carried notable prestige, but the work is not entirely satisfactory. It is characterised by a general flatness, and there is an unpleasant fastidiousness in the rendering of the lacework and embroidered ornaments of the grand master’s Conventual vestments, and of the pillow on which he rests his head.
Antonello Gagini died in 1536 but, as had happened after the death of his father, the workshop continued to receive commissions and flourished for many more years. In this way the Gagini artistic tradition was consolidated and remained a conditioning force shaping the development of Sicilian sculpture for most of the 16th century. The extent of its influence on the artistic life of Malta during the crucial first years of the Knights’ period still awaits art historical elucidation.
Notes:
1. The ledgerstone (109 x 65 cm) survives in a private collection. The inscription reads POR AMOR M[ILES] *FRAN*CISCU*GA*TU
2. The will, known through a late copy in the National Library of Malta (Libr. Ms 635, f.64rv) is partially published by G. Wettinger in A.T. Luttrell (ed.), Hal Millieri: A Maltese Casale, Its Churches and Paintings, Malta 1979, 110,117 n.33. The tomb stood in the apse: G.F.Abela, Della Descrittione di Malta, Malta 1647, 392.
3. M.Fsadni, Il-Migja u l-Hidma ta’ l-Ewwel Dumnikani f’Malta (1450-1512), Malta 1965, 53-54.
4. M.Fsadni., Id-Dumnikani fir-Rabat u fil-Birgu sa l-1620, Malta 1974,42.
5. It was donated to the Gharb parish church in 1728: details on the bequest and on the commissioning of the work in M. Buhagiar – S. Fiorini, Mdina, The Cathedral City of Malta, Malta 1996, vol.1, 174.
6. Details in Mdina, I, 175-178. On the attribution of the font to the workshop of Domenico Gagini: H.W. Kruft, Domenico Gagini und seine Werkstatt, Munich 1972, 55, 244. The artistic significance of D. Gagini is highlighted in R. Pani, Il rinacimento nell’Italia Meridionale, II, Milan 1977, 302-307.
7. The deed signed in Messina and registered in the acts of Notary Geronimo Mangianti [Messina: 22.ii.1504] bound the artist to complete the work by the coming feast of Corpus Christi. It is published in G. Di Marzo, I Gagini e la scultura in Sicilia nei secoli XV e XVI, iii, Palermo 1880, 60-61. Further details in G. Aquilina – S. Fiorini, The Origins of Franciscanism in Late Medieval Malta, Malta 1995, 83.
8. The best studies on the early works of Antonello Gagini remain those of H.W. Kruft. See in particular, “Figure Giovanili di Madonne di Antonello Gagini”, Antichità Viva, Fascicolo n.2, Florence 1975, and “Antonello Gagini als Mitarbeiter Michelangelo am Grabmal Papst Julius II”, The Burlington Magazine, cxvii, 1975. Antonello’s first documented Madonna was for the chiesa madre of Bordonaro near Messina.
9. The pedestal has, unfortunately, been separated from the statue and now forms part of the Valletta Fine Arts Collection.
10. The hands have, in particular been badly mutilated. The martyr’s palm-frond and cross, and the gilt Gloria with its attendant winged cherub heads and putti, are all modern kitsch.
11. On the history of the relief: M.Fsadni, Il-Migja u l-Hidma ta’ l-Ewwel Dumnikani f’Malta, Malta 1965, 58-9.
Professor Mario Buhagiar PhD (Lond.) is founder and current head of the History of Art programme at the University of Malta and has been largely responsible for the academic formation of Malta’s rising generation of art historians and professionals working in related fields. His publications include The Iconography of the Maltese Islands (Malta, 1987) and The Late Medieval Art and Architecture of Malta (Malta, 2006).
This article first appeared in the Christmas 2000 issue of Treasures of Malta, which is published by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti. Treasures of Malta is a magazine about art and culture which is published three times a year, and is available from all leading bookshops.