Painter

Giovanni Battista Caloriti was the son of a slave-girl in the house of Judge Giovanni Caloriti. The family Caloriti are said to have been of Rhodian origin.

Another information available about Caloriti, given by Bernardo de Dominici, Preti’s biographer is that he was a follower of Mattia Preti.

Caloriti, commonly known by his contemporaries as Gio Battista il nigro or simply il negro pittore, was born to a slave girl in the house of Giovanni Caloriti, a judge of Rhodian extraction. He was baptized at Porto Salvo church in Valletta on 15 June 1638 and subsequently manumitted on the death of the judge’s wife, Donna Antonia. In 1666, he made a request for a marriage-legacy, claiming that he and his bride – the 15-year-old Teresa Gabriele (or Cabrera) ‘were poor and helpless, having no possessions, and living by means of their labour and industry’. Their marriage took place in Valletta on 26 February 1667 and they had a numerous progeny, six of whom died in infancy. Their second-born, Gio Antonio, died at the age of thirty-one. This was a double calamity as he was a useful assistant to his father. The third-born, Giuseppe, survived to full adulthood, and after his father’s demise on 1 January 1718, enjoyed a distinct reputation in his own right as a painter of vedute – thus following in his father’s footsteps.

In spite of his modest origins, Gio Battista Caloriti won the trust and respect of his contemporaries. He enjoyed the close friendship of fellow artists – including the various members of the de Dominicis family, Giuseppe d’Arena, and, above all, of Preti himself.  When the capo-mastro Francesco Sammut – a most capable and enterprising architect – died in the Sacra Infermeria, he chose Caloriti as his testamentary executor, preferring him to his own brother, Carlo. Caloriti also proved to be a successful appaltario of the commontreasury being awarded the important contract ‘di colorire e dar calore o sia tintura ... alle sette galere della medesima sacra Religione’ on at least two occasions.

De Dominicis wrote that Caloriti had difficulties in figure-drawing so, on Preti’s advice, he confined himself to producing ‘vedute di Malta ed altre città’. Gio Batta and Giuseppe Caloriti are, in fact, the earliest-known Maltese landscape-artists, although their activity was restricted to the more limited field of vedutismo.

Gio Batta carried out all kinds of artwork, such as painting coats-of-arms, frieze decoration using stencils, and also figure-painting. He painted ‘quattro pezzi di quadri’ representing the prophets and saints Elijah, Elisah, Albert, and Angelo for the Carmelite church in Mdina.

This biography is part of the collection created by Michael Schiavone over a 30-year period. Read more about Schiavone and his initiative here.