The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mellieħa was the universe of my childhood. It stands just a few steps away from where I lived as a child in the small troglodyte home of my nanna Lela.
The building mostly dug into the rock with a facade built of stone, formed part of the row of rooms originally built in the 1840s for tourists and pilgrims visiting the sanctuary.
My mother’s family – the Muscats – were known as ‘tas-Sagristan’ as nannu Salvu, who died before I was born, used to be the sacristan of the sanctuary, like his father. My mother’s brother, Ġużeppi succeeded him after my nannu Salv died and before Ġużeppi emigrated to Australia.
As was customary I heard mass daily at the sanctuary – before sunrise. Nanna Lela was a great storyteller and spoke about St Paul’s shipwreck and the corsair raids on Mellieħa as if they had happened in her lifetime and could happen all over again.
That was why every evening we took steps to make sure no invaders would break into our home.
Although we lived a few steps away from the village police station – also originally serving as a room for visitors and pilgrims, and although during the day the main door was always wide open, my nanna felt it necessary to put two iron bars to bolt it properly at night to keep away those corsairs who invaded Malta and forced the villagers to abandon Mellieħa for 300 years and seek safety inland.
Every summer evening, on the pavement outside her house and after the recital of the rosary during which we invariably nodded off, we then woke up excited to hear her tales of ghosts, ogres, devils and restless souls wailing in search of peace after death and somehow or other the sanctuary always featured in these stories.
As a child I was told to look closely at the ex-voto paintings hanging in the sacristy where the image of Our Lady, tucked away in the right-hand corner, and emerging from the clouds, interceded for the victims tossing in the cruel seas: fishermen, sailors and Knights chasing corsairs. I also prayed to our Lady to protect me from all those who I felt treated me badly and asked her to punish them.
Years later, while visiting him in Melbourne, ziju Ġużeppi, looking rather guilty, admitted that: “Sometimes we used some ex-voto paintings to wipe the floor of the sacristy. There were so many of them and most of them were on cheap cardboard.”
The sanctuary with its belfry and yard was also a playground for me and other children. We played football and other games like hopscotch, marbles and hide-and-seek, for years absent from our streets and squares, and replaced by cars, buses and trucks.
Fantasy and magic
In those days, there was no boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. I was brought up to understand that the sanctuary was the most special and unique place on earth: St Paul and St Luke chose the cave for shelter and St Luke painted the image of Our Lady directly onto the rock of the cave.
We believed this narrative and dismissed competing versions giving prominence to St Paul’s Bay as the site of the shipwreck or the Grotto in Rabat as the place where St Paul sought shelter. Thankfully, we had no Mario Buhagiar to upset our fantasy by making us aware that St Luke had nothing to do with the Madonna paintings attributed to him in Mellieħa and beyond.
Angrily the parish priest told me not to entertain such thoughts and to keep them to myself so as not to disturb the comfort zone of the villagers- Evarist Bartolo
But already in my late teens I started reading more evidence-based history and began questioning the former narrative, incurring the censure of the parish priest of the time. Angrily he told me not to entertain such thoughts and certainly, at the very least, to keep them to myself so as not to disturb the comfort zone of the villagers. They had always believed that the origin of the sanctuary went back to the days when St Paul and St Luke sheltered in the cave and that St Luke had painted the Madonna on its rock.
Through Buhagiar in his book The Iconography of the Maltese Islands 1400-1900 I discovered that: “Among the earliest surviving works is the icon of the Virgin painted on the rock in the cave-sanctuary at Mellieħa. Byzantesque in inspiration but Sicilian or South Italian in execution, it is stylistically datable to the late 13th or early 14th centuries, and it displays a close iconographic similarity with several apparently coeval murals of the Madonna in the rock-cut churches of Eastern Sicily...”
I am now delighted by the new book The Brush of the Evangelist bringing together a number of essays by Buhagiar. While focusing on the paintings attributed to St Luke in Malta, Buhagiar rightly shows us how we cannot contextualise them and understand them without exploring them as part of a rich artistic and religious heritage across different lands, cultures and centuries, surviving persecution and destruction by fellow Christians and also the clash and encounter between the two civilisations of Christianity and Islam.
I have come across references to 83 works attributed to St Luke, 15 of which are statues. They can be found in at least 18 different countries including Malta: Greece, Montenegro, Italy, Syria, Russia, Germany, Cyprus, Poland, Croatia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Spain, France, Portugal, Romania, Lithuania and India.
I believe that this book goes beyond providing an aesthetic experience. Buhagiar’s humanistic approach makes us aware that the scientific method used to evaluate our heritage as part of the heritage of others does not need to be typical of how we have used science and technology in the last three centuries with a post-enlightenment mindset that considered the sacred anti-modern.
The new historical and scientific knowledge about the painting has enhanced and not destroyed or diminished the sense of magic, myth, awe and reverence that it has had for so many centuries.
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.