The tendency of generations to remove artefacts, cultural or otherwise, the legacy of their predecessors, is not particular to this country only. Cancel culture regularly rears its ugly head; internationally, many public monuments that were deemed to be offensive and historically uncomfortable were unceremoniously dumped into rivers or pulled down.

However, this phenomenon is not just strictly linked to a strangling characteristic of being politically correct at all costs, destroying nuance and interpretation in the process.

This propensity to remove traces of artistic expression that does not conform to that particular epoch’s popular opinion, skewed and bigoted as it might be, can also be found in many instances of art commissions by Maltese Church authorities.

Maltese artist Antoine Paul Camilleri has suffered the humiliation of having his work removed from places of worship.

His Via Crucis (based on St Pope John Paul II’s Scriptural Way of the Cross) as well as an over two-metre sculpture of the Risen Christ for Pembroke parish church, commissioned by then parish priest Fr Anton Portelli in 1994, were removed to another location after Portelli was reassigned to new duties by the Curia in 2006.

Camilleri remarks: “I was surprised when I first entered the church and did not see the Risen Christ. I did not know the new parish priest; however, I asked for the reason for its removal.”

He continues: “When my wife asked why, some people who attend the church told her most probably it was because the Risen Christ was a shock for some. They expected it to be like the traditional ones, with Christ holding the flag, flesh colour, black hair and physique of an athlete.”

This was obviously a blow for the artist, “because of all the hard work, all the weeks working in the church, which was still under construction. All this in the cold of winter, welding the structural frame of the figure and later applying a synthetic material, with the similar colour and texture of terracotta.”

In the late art critic Emanuel Fiorentino’s words regarding the Risen Christ: “Camilleri’s interpretation of the theme goes right into the heart of the matter. It manifests the struggle between the gravitational pull of death and the weightlessness of a regenerated life”. The concave space that was devoted to the sculpture has meanwhile also been removed.

As regards the Via Crucis, the artist imbued pathos and poignancy into the narrative by removing all embellishment from the iconography; his use of the terracotta medium was opportune. The imagery was expressionist and raw, removing layers of possible embellishment that would have hampered the message of salvation. Essentially, the 14 stations commemorate sorrow, and death through the most harrowing of methods. Camilleri’s stations were empirical representations of this, inviting prayer and meditation without getting lost in the representation of fabric detail and excessive goriness.

Quoting Fiorentino again: “Camilleri has in a number of ways managed to enrich the spiritual dimension of these Via Crucis episodes so essential for riveting the attention and inspiring the devotion of the faithful.”

After this experience, I know how other artists before me must have felt and what they went through when their artwork in a church was either replaced or destroyed- Antoine Paul Camilleri

The artist was not at all surprised when the Via Crucis was also removed some time later. “I consider this period a very dark one for me,” he ruefully observes. He says that although he still occasionally works on religious themes, he exercises caution and would only accept commissions coming from friends and patrons, rather than actual Church commissions.

“After this experience, I know how other artists before me must have felt and what they went through when their artwork in a church was either replaced or destroyed,” Camilleri remarks.

When asked about the whereabouts of these works, the Curia Communications Office claimed that “Antoine Paul Camilleri’s works were placed in the Pembroke parish centre by the former parish priest. They remain in very good condition.” The office added that it had no further information to provide as to the reason why they had been removed from their original location.

There is a history of such ‘cancellations’ or removals under the auspices of the local Church, more so in the 20th century.

Giorgio Preca’s crucifixion for Stella Maris parish church

Maybe the most famous example of artworks suffering from the indignity of popular scorn is the case of Giorgio Preca’s famous Crucifixion altarpiece, commissioned by a Stella Maris parishioner during the years following the end of World War 2. Preca (1909-1984), one of Malta’s pioneers of 20th-century modernism, was at that time entrusted to restore some artworks in the Sliema parish church.

Preca’s altarpiece met a sad fortune, as it was abolished to virtual anonymity at a wayside chapel in Żejtun. After the death of the above-mentioned parishioner, members of the Sliema parish clamoured to have the altarpiece removed, as its iconography jarred with their misguided preconceptions.

Preca’s fellow artists, those who were the protagonists of the three artists’ groups of the 1950s, the Modern Art Circle, the Modern Art Group and Atelier 56, that ushered modernism in Malta, pleaded with the ecclesiastical authorities of those days to at least find a more suitable venue for the Preca work to be admired by the Maltese public. However, their efforts fell on deaf ears and the painting still languishes at the same location in the village in the south of Malta.

Giuseppe Briffa and the Mosta Rotunda

Giuseppe Briffa (1901-1987) suffered a similar indignity that practically destroyed the artist’s reputation of being a protagonist of Maltese 20th-century church art and affected his ecclesiastical commissions thereafter. The artist, together with Ġanni Vella (1885-1977), was expected to fill the vacuum left by the death of Giuseppe Calì (1846-1930) and Lazzaro Pisani (1854-1932), the two major contributors to local ecclesiastical art for decades until their death in the early 1930s.

Briffa introduced a modernist but seemingly ‘acceptable’ approach to sacred art, but conservatism reared its ugly head when the Mosta parish church commissioned him for a cycle of paintings to adorn part of the Rotunda. For the parishioners, his Stile Liberty, which internationally was already out of fashion, clashed with the Calì cycle of paintings already in situ.

After much deliberation, the parishioners and the Mosta clergy had their way and the Briffa choir of angels that he had already worked on were painted over. One can still at times make them out in the space between three of the windows, shadowy reminders of a commission gone wrong through intransigence and short-sightedness.

This debacle had a devastating impact on Briffa and his sacred art took a backseat from then on as he was rarely considered by church authorities for other commissions.

Frans Galea’s Qormi pedestal

Another example of this insensitive behaviour by the church authorities is that which befell sculptor Frans Galea’s pedes­tal, the base commissioned for the Qormi titular statue of St Sebastian, which incidentally was the work of Galea’s former tutor at the Malta School of Art, sculptor George Borg (1906-1983). Galea (1945-1994) followed Borg’s original ideas for it.

However, the sculptor shockingly died in Rome, while overseeing its casting. Although the pedestal was used for its intended purpose for some years, it suffered the ultimate indignity when it was later dismantled by the authorities of that parish church, who insensitively commissioned another sculptor to replace Galea’s work.

Antoine Camilleri’s white marble altar and tabernacle

Malta lost out on a trove of church art as giants of Maltese modernism, such as Josef Kalleya (1898-1998), Carmelo Mangion (1905-1997) and Antoine Camilleri (1922-2005), all three of whom had repertoires seeped in spirituality, were never really considered to embellish places of worship. Thankfully, the two stained glass windows by Camilleri (Antoine Paul Camilleri’s father), a rare ecclesiastical commission for the seminal Maltese modernist artist, at St Nicholas of Tolentino church in Tarxien, are being restored, halting the degradation process that threatened their existence.

However, Camilleri’s altar and tabernacle in white marble, commissioned for the church of the Augustinian Friars in Paceville, have been destroyed and replaced. Antoine Paul Camilleri says: “I remember my father worked really hard to come up with the final design.”

This reminds one of the case in which the two original statues on the Mosta parish church parvis, representing Our Lady and St Joseph respectively, were unceremoniously ‘removed’, according to very reliable sources. Old photographs bear testimony to the original sculptures, the work of Salvatore Dimech (1805-1887). Today, two Vincent Apap (1909-2003) sculptures adorn the parvis of the Rotunda; it is a shame that the original statues are nowhere to be found.

Why the cancellations?

The reasons for these cancellations could be various, besides the obvious ones in Preca’s and Briffa’s cases. A new archpriest might feel overwhelmed by his predecessors’ projects and would like to make his mark in a misguided way; a dislike towards the oeuvre of the artist in question, coupled with a ‘bond’ with the work of another artist; ulterior undefined motives. It is a shame that such ill-conceived springboards have resulted in loss of artistic heritage, or its removal to other destinations, specified or otherwise.

Antoine Paul Camilleri feels that such episodes are a learning experience for the artist that come at a huge personal cost. “My father used to advise me to be wary of Church commissions,” he says, adding that an artist friend of his, soon after the unsavoury Pembroke parish church experience, had these words to say: “Your biggest mistake was that you only charged them for the expenses, and that is one reason they did not hesitate to remove the artwork.”

“And he is right,” the artist concludes.

Ray Bradbury, in his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, says: “For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities… to interfere with aesthetics.” It is more shocking when it is the majorities, and the authorities that should know better, who are the culprits for throttling art and heritage.