DAVID M. BOSWELL looks at a little known drawing of Charles V by Mattia Preti at the Fitzwilliam Museum
The collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge includes a drawing of the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V, seated in armour amid his military regalia on a platform within an arcaded hall. The drawing measures 22mm x 160mm and is executed in red chalk with a light wash in the same medium and squared for transfer in black chalk. It is confidently attributed to Mattia Preti (1613-1699) but has no known provenance before its acquisition by J.F. Knowles (1879-1959), one of the museum’s principal benefactors who supervised the copyright agency for the British University Libraries and the National Library of Scotland from 1921-1949. Knowles gave the drawing to the Fitzwilliam in 1958 with 43 other old masters drawings and it was recently exhibited there in 1998 in an exhibition of drawings and prints from Naples.1
Given the composition and the viewpoint from below, it has generally been considered to be an unexecuted project for Preti’s decoration either side of the oval windows that light his painted vault in the Conventual Church of St John in Valletta. But this warrants closer consideration and, I think, revision. What is the subject? If drawn with St John’s in mind, where was it designed to go? And why was it not executed?
The subject is clearly recognisable as Charles V who, in 1530, had ceded the Maltese Islands with Tripoli to the Order of St John which was seeking an appropriate role and a base after the loss of Rhodes to the Turks in 1523. Although he was commissioned to paint altarpieces and other works for several churches and chapels of the Order as well as for some parish churches in Malta and other religious orders, Preti’s major undertaking from 1661-1666 was painting the vault and the many lunettes etc. of the Conventual Church, supervising its general decoration and some structural modifications,2 and after that the major remodelling of the oratory for which Caravaggio had long since painted the altarpiece.3 Apart from the titular saints of several Langues in their chapels, most of Preti’s paintings in the church depict scenes from the life of St John the Baptist, personnel of the Order and events associated with some of its relics. The donation of Charles V, which effected the Order’s arrival in and subsequent identification with Malta seems a highly appropriate subject to include in such a symbolically significant building. In the year of the Great Siege, 1565, the decorations in Florence for the Medici heir’s marriage to Anne of Austria included a painting by Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605) depicting Malta presenting a Corona Obsidionalis to Charles’s son, Philip II of Spain, who is similarly enthroned.4
Given the barrel-vaulted structure of this great church with many vaulted side chapels and several points of access, there were many lunettes available for such a subject. But actually the range of possible sites for Charles V are relatively few. Some lunettes have never been painted because other pictures hung there or they were provided with decorative emblematic reliefs. Others depict events and manifestations associated with the titular saints of the Langues where subsequent historic events and persons would have been inappropriate. Three possible sites may be considered.
The first is the atrium before the entrance to the oratory from the west end of the church. The three lunettes were painted by Antoine de Favray and completed the remodelling of this area in 1751 under Prior Rull. But this had until then been the chapel of S. Carlo Borromeo with the decoration completed before Preti began his work, and these lunettes by Cassarino (early 17th Century) were re-sited in the atrium of the sacristy in 1747 to make way for Favray’s work.5
A second site for such a figure as the seated emperor could have been to the left of one of the 12 oval windows below Preti’s great painted vault. The artist advocated the enlargement of these windows so that his paintings would be better lit but, like his proposed remodelling of the Langue-chapel arches, the Order’s authorities cautiously refused to risk destabilising Cassar’s monumental structure.6 Even as proposed by Preti, however, the spaces either side of such enlarged windows would not have generated the sort of shape implied by the drawing of Charles V. And neither did the oval windows he subsequently decorated with seated figures. These are all named saints and martyrs and former members of the Order, including the Grand Masters who brought the order to Malta and withstood the Great Siege. More importantly they are seen in an exaggerated and dramatically foreshortened perspective, enhanced by vigorous gestures, looking steeply up into the vault or down at those congregated below. And this is exactly how they appear in Preti’s preparatory drawings.7 They tend to overfill their cramped positions abutting the ribs of the barrel-vault and in no way compare with the composition and stance of Charles V.
The remaining potential site for Charles V is the great lunette filling the west end of the nave between the gallery over the entrance and the vault. Until John Spike deduced that Preti would not have painted this until the west window had been enlarged for him from 1664 8, it had been presumed that the artist had started at the west end soon after completing the eastern apse which he began in 1661.9 If Preti did not start painting this lunette until after Nicolás Cotoner succeeded his brother Raffaelo, his original patron, on 13 October 1663, he would already have known that he had to incorporate both these Grand Masters in the composition. And he did so by portraying the elderly Raffaelo (1661-63) on the right seated and pointing at the flagship of the Order’s galley squadron as represented in a painting beside him. Nicolás (1663-1680) is depicted ministering to a plague victim with two pages behind him. In the centre above the window is a lively allegorical characterisation of the Order brandishing a sword and sceptre, much the same as the Vittoria and the personification of Malta. So here we find the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights Hospitaller represented.
So far as I am aware there is no specification of exactly what Preti was to paint at St John’s and indeed he offered to do the proposed work, including the gilding, at his own expense. He clearly made preparatory drawings of which only a few survive, most of these details of particular figures. It seems likely that he would have worked out the overall programme at the outset, even though he could easily modify this as he worked his way through. If so, any idea for the western lunette could not have included Nicolás Cotoner as Grand Master and the lower parts of the composition could have been quite different. Charles V, the sovereign who bestowed Malta on the Order, would have been an appropriate figure to portray in an allegorical painting of the Order. It was to his successors as Kings of Sicily that the Maltese falcon was offered annually. Moreover, the way in which he is drawn corresponds with the seated figure of Raffaelo Cotoner in reverse: Charles is enthroned, on a dais, facing right but looking down with his head turned slightly. The painted architecture above and behind him could be incorporated in the lunette like that above Grand Master Raffaelo.
Grand Masters Le Puy, who gave the Order its rule, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who brought the Order to Malta, de la Valette, who withstood the Great Siege, and La Cassiére who established the Order’s capital in Valletta, are all depicted beside the nave windows. And so is the founder, Blessed Gerard, who was given an even more prominent place in Preti’s remodelling and decoration of the oratory in the 1680s. At the east end is the Baptism of Christ by St John. Could the subject for the west end if proposed in c. 1661-62 have been the Sovereign Military Order of St John as re-established by the cession of the Maltese Islands to the Order by the Emperor/King Charles V? As Balearic subjects of Spain themselves, it would have been highly appropriate for the Cotoners to recall the donation of Malta to the Order by a previous King of Spain.
Once Raffaelo Cotoner had died, however, the situation would have been quite different. The deceased Grand Master is still there in his flagship as depicted on a framed canvas in order to overcome the compositional problems of introducing the Grand Harbour to the scene. On the opposite side, Nicolás Cotoner was to be accommodated with the sickbed, and the line of the picture frame on the right is approximately continued in the form of the fortifications by which he is chiefly remembered that rise behind the group of figures in the foreground.
In Mattia Preti’s tercentenary year it is worth considering what the artist may have had in mind when squaring up this drawing of Charles V. If it was drawn with St John’s in mind, where might it have gone? The stance and composition do not correspond with those flanking the nave windows. So could it have been a part of an earlier project for the western lunette before Raffaelo Cotoner died? If not, could it have been for St John’s Church at all, or for some other project by Preti which has not so far been suggested, let alone identified?
1. Reproduction by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge. I am grateful to David Scase and Jane Munro for providing details of the drawing and its donor.
2. The best and most exhaustive source is now Spike, J.T. (1999) Mattia Preti: Catalogue Raisonée of the Paintings, Museo Civico di Taverna, Centro Di. This was published to coincide with the series of exhibitions being held in this tercentenary year of the Preti’s death.
3. Stone, D. (1997) ‘The context of Caravaggio’s beheading of St. John in Malta’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. Cxxxix, pp.161-70.
Sciberras, K, (1999) ‘Ciro Ferri’s reliquary for the Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato in Malta’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. Cxli, pp. 392-400.
4. See Kinnane-Roelofsma, D. (1996) ‘Britannia and Melita: Pseudomorphic Sisters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. lix, pp. 130-47 and fig. 32.
5. Cutajar, D. (1989) Malta: History and Works of Art of St John’s Church, Valletta, Valletta, M.J. Publications, pp.63-64
6. For a useful summary of the subjects and career of Preti in the church see Scicluna, Sir Hannibal (1955) The Church of St. John in Valletta, Rome, privately printed.
7. See e.g. the drawing of St. Nicasio belonging to the Ashmolean Museum, reproduced in Corace, E. (ed) (1989) Mattia Preti, Rome, Fratelli Palombi, p. 102.
8. Spike, J.T.(1989) ‘C.Mattia Preti’s pictorial career’ in Corace, E. (ed) p.36.
9. The most recent and complete documentation of Preti’s career is now spike, J.T. (ed) (1999) Mattia Preti: The collected documents, Banco di Credito Cooperativo Della Sicilia Piccola, Taverna, Centro Di.
Dr David Boswell is sociologist, architectural historian and writer of articles on Maltese art
This article first appeared in the Easter 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.