While the National Museum of Fine Arts has closed so as to move to the Auberge d'Italie, another painting gallery has been beautifully restored and re-opened.

This is the Cathedral Museum at Mdina where at long last halls have been restructured and paintings hung.

At first glance, many of the paintings are ecclesiastical so many might think not really worth close study.

But as a lecture held last Friday on the spot by Prof. Keith Sciberras, helped by Lisa Xuereb, organized by the Friends of the Mdina Cathedral Museum and the Department of History of Art at the university, the collection includes some paintings that are well worth studying.

One such painting is the Mocking of Christ by Mario Minniti which can be admired in the Baroque Gallery.

Apart from being an artist in his own right, Minniti is also (or better) celebrated as a close friend of Caravaggio, and maybe something more than that. He certainly lodged with Caravaggio and he was maybe his lover too. His sensual pose in some of Caravaggio's paintings is remarkable.

Minniti came from Sicily but went to Rome at an early age and there he somehow became a friend of Caravaggio who was sowing his oats at the time.

Before that, there is a hint that Minniti came to Malta as a boy aged 15 and an obscure sentence says he came because of some trouble he had at home.

Anyway, around 1608 he was running around in Rome together with Caravaggio and on that night in Via della Scrofa - 29 May 1606, when Caravaggiio killed, possibly unintentionally, a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni from Terni (Umbria), an account mentions he was in the company of a young Sicilian and the two fled together, reaching Malta after an adventurous escape.

Before this, Minniti featured in some of Caravaggio's paintings. The Fortune Teller, Caravaggio's first composition with more than one figure, shows Mario being cheated by a gypsy girl. The theme was quite new for Rome, and proved immensely influential over the next century and beyond. This, however, was in the future: at the time, Caravaggio sold it for practically nothing. The Cardsharps - showing another naïve youth of privilege falling the victim of card cheats - is even more psychologically complex, and perhaps Caravaggio's first true masterpiece. Like the Fortune Teller, it was immensely popular, and over 50 copies survive.

Minniti followed Caravaggio to Malta and there is some suspicion he was the one who freed Caravaggio from his Fort St Angelo prison and helped him make his way to Sicily where he seems to have found a network that helped him move around from Syracuse to Messina and thence to Naples.

Minniti left a number of paintings both in Malta and in Sicily. In Malta one can mention his altarpiece depicting St John the Baptist for the church of the nuns of St Ursola in Valletta.

The one painting that can be admired in the Cathedral Museum is his Mocking of Christ. The work is signed and dated on the soldier's helmet: 1625/Marius/Menniti

He also left some copies of Caravaggio's paintings, such as his St Jerome and a St John the Evangelist that is at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta.