The Department of History of Art within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta will be rounding up its programme of prestigious extra curricula cultural events for the current calendar year with a lecture by the leading art historian and scholar Dr Gabriele Finaldi. Dr Finaldi, who is currently deputy director of the famous El Prado Museum, Madrid, will be talking on paintings by Caravaggio and of Caravaggist inspiration in the El Prado collection. His lecture will be a fitting conclusion to the celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of the great artist’s productive Maltese period.

Dr Finaldi’s lecture will be take place next Tuesday, 18 December, at 6.15pm, in the Erin Serracino-Inglott Hall, at the University of Malta. Art lovers, collectors and connoisseurs as well as the general public are cordially invited to attend.

Dr Finaldi enjoys a great international reputation in the art historical world as a leading luminary on Italian and Spanish paintings. Before joining the El Prado Museum he was, for a number of years, curator of Later Italian and Spanish Paintings, at the National Gallery, London. His book The Image of Christ (National Gallery, London, 2000) published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Gallery, has been hailed as a major work on the subject.

Dr Finaldi is the recipient of prestigious fellowships and is a welcome visiting professor to major universities and art institutions where his numerous publications are used as textbooks.

He has also curated a number of major exhibitions culminating in the great Tintoretto exhibition at the El Prado in January of this year, considered as the largest exhibition of the 16th century Italian painter in the past 70 years and one of the most significant shows of his work outside his native Venice.