Dante Alighieri refers to Malta once in the Divina Commedia, his epic masterpiece (written between 1308 and 1321). The Malta he records is a place of extreme pain and punishment.
Scholars disagree if the poet had in mind our island, renowned as a place of exile or the Torre di Malta, near Padova, equally renowned as a particularly cruel prison.
Whichever it was, given the pervasive Italianate culture prevailing in Malta up to the 19th century, Dante Alighieri and his masterpiece must have been household names to anyone barely literate on the island.
The poet’s birth, reputed to have occurred in 1265, was commemorated on every centenary by lavish manifestations.
In 1865, a leading sculptor, Enrico Pazzi, had been commissioned to assemble a large monument in marble to the national bard in Piazza Santa Croce, Florence. It is a fine work, within the constraints of Victorian aesthetics.
With the approach of 1965, the seventh centenary of Dante’s birth, the idea of having a commemorative memorial erected in Malta started gaining momentum.
The central committee of the Società Dante Alighieri, founded in 1889 by the poet Giosue Carducci for the diffusion of Italian culture and language, resolved to endorse the project and make it its own.
At first, the plan moved in the direction of having a copy made of the Pazzi statue – safe and boring – but then better judgement prevailed. Why not commission a monument by a sculptor chosen competitively from among the Maltese community of artists?
The central committee of the Dante Alighieri society in Rome entrusted Raffaello Causa, the illustrious art critic and director of the Capodimonte museum in Naples, to be the final arbiter on which sculptural concept to choose for the Malta monument.
Causa does not seem to have had many hesitations: he opted for the designs and model elaborated by Vincent “Ċensu” Apap, and what a felicitous choice that turned out to be.
The Italian Dante Alighieri society had a tormented relationship with Malta. Its local branch was set up in the first decade of the 20th century, under Arturo Mercieca, later Chief Justice.
Its next president, from 1915 onwards, was Enrico Mizzi, later Prime Minister. It enjoyed anything but an easy existence.
In 1913, the Maltese ecclesiastical authorities became aware that a high profile and militant Freemason, Senator Paolo Boselli (later Prime Minister), headed the central Italian committee as president.
Bishop Pietro Pace issued a public warning about the incompatibility of being a good Catholic and belonging to the Maltese branch of the Dante Alighieri. This discredited the society no end.
To add to the dismay, in December, at the instigation of the colonial authorities that viewed with concern any manifestation of Italian culture in Malta, the central committee agreed to disband the local branch.
This reconstituted as a wholly autonomous Maltese entity on December 7, keeping the old name and the same objects and reasons.
All pro-Italian cultural activity was officially banned in the 1930s and the Circolo Dante Alighieri only started functioning again in Malta in 1959, under its first post-war president, George Zammit.
Apap went for an uncompromisingly austere representation of the poet, in which the verticality of the composition becomes the very composition, possibly inspired by the fresco portrait of Dante by Domenico di Michelino in Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence (except for the hanging arms).
Apap’s poet is in the ecstasy of contemplation, introspective, potently detached from himself, the mundane and the carnal.
In his visage are the conflicts and the equilibrium of hell, purgatory and heaven, inside and outside him.
He embodies all the drama, and none of the melodrama, of the Pazzi statue 100 years earlier. Apap’s closest call was his own Temptations of St Anthony, shorn of any hieratic hysteria.
The statue was cast in bronze in Italy by the traditional ‘lost wax’ method to the master prepared by Apap in clay and then in plaster.
Some of Apap’s preliminary sketches survive, as does his competition bozzetto, in two specimens, one in a private collection and another with Heritage Malta.
These are not to be confused with the small models of the monument prepared by Apap after the statue was inaugurated, a memento offered by the artist to the committee members involved in the Dante monument project.
Strangely, these souvenir statuettes show Dante on four boulders, a fact that goes some way to challenge the intriguing symbolism attributed to the pedestal of the Floriana monument, in which the three (or four?) roughly hewn blocks of Roman travertine marble are said to represent the three books of Dante’s theological and intellectual epic: hell, purgatory and paradise. It is a lesson in not over-reading what we would like to believe into an artist’s inspirational programme.
The seventh centenary of Dante’s birth fell on the year following Malta’s Independence.
In power was Giorgio Borg Olivier’s Nationalist Government, the offspring of a party that had for almost a century identified with Malta’s cultural italianità and had been reviled by its political adversaries for its pro-Italian leanings.
The war, in which Fascist Italy had attacked and bombed Malta for almost three years, had not been forgotten and raw anti-Italian sentiment still animated parts of the population. The public display of a monument to Dante was not bereft of delicate political hazards.
It was a daring move to accept to have it displayed; it was a timid spirit of compromise that established that it should be located as inconspicuously as possible.
The final decision might have been bolder had the Government been aware that Dom Mintoff, the powerful leader of the Labour Party, had been formally and secretly negotiating Malta’s integration with Italy, at exactly the same time Borg Olivier was negotiating Malta’s independence from the UK.
The official exchanges documenting Mintoff’s highly secretive plans to integrate Malta with Italy only surfaced considerably later.
In 1965, the Government still believed that placing the Dante monument in a prominent place could be perceived as provocative and insensitive by a number of Maltese and would have afforded political mileage to the Opposition.
At first, a site next to the Nato headquarters in Floriana had been identified but this was later discarded and a suitable, but even more inconspicuous place, was found for it by the Director of Museums, Fr Marius Zerafa OP, on the flank of St Anne’s curtain close to St Mark bastion, opposite the main Mepa offices in Floriana.
The monument and the ramparts complement each other splendidly, the starkness of the stone curtain echoing the poet’s cosmos of meditation.
Quite uncharacteristically, the budget for the project had been underspent and some use had to be found for the surplus financing. A wrought iron fence decorated with eight-pointed crosses and the Florentine lily enclosed the monument.
For the inauguration ceremony, the Italian Minister for Education, Luigi Gui, came over. Gui had left his mark in Christian Democratic politics but had also acquired a solid reputation as a philosophical animator.
Relying on him to celebrate the supreme Christian thinker was perhaps more of a deliberate choice than a coincidence.
The inaugural event took place on May 6, 1967.
The authorities turned up en masse. Archbishop Michael Gonzi blessed the monument and the distinguished assembly included the Governor-General, Sir Maurice Dorman, representing Elizabeth I, Queen of Malta, Giorgio Borg Olivier, Prime Minister, the British High Commissioner to Malta, Sir Geofroy Tory (who died on July 18 this year aged 99), the first Italian Ambassador to Malta, Antonio Dazzi, and the president of the Circolo Dante Alighieri, Ernesto Stilon.
The gathering seemed to emphasise that the armistice between the UK and Italy had really morphed into a fruitful peace that looked towards a new future.
This must have represented a moment of intense catharsis for Apap. His younger brother, the equally gifted painter Willie Apap, had been imprisoned and charged with high treason by the British authorities for having aided the Italian war effort during the last conflagration – the prosecution had sought the death penalty.
For two years, Willie had lived in a prison cell, in the shadow of the gallows, but jurors had finally acquitted him. Ċensu and Willie shared the same anti-colonialist creeds but with a difference.
Willie believed in being militantly idealistic while Ċensu found it in him to be more pragmatic – he canonized Dante but also fashioned portraits of the royal family and of British politicians, servicemen and aristocrats.
I do not wish to sound controversial but I would disagree with those many who consider the Tritons fountain to be Apap’s masterpiece. Without detracting from the absolute qualities of the fountain, I would still opt for the Dante monument as Apap’s most inspired moment.
The Tritons have little interior about them and, rightly so – they are pagan, powerful and playful, bizarre freaks undecided whether to be men or fish.
On the other hand, the Dante figure abolishes barriers between exterior and interior – both become irrelevant. The memorial is for a unique spirit which, more than most, transcended space and time.
Apap went for elegant severity, well determined that severity had to dominate over elegance. The artist related well to politicians and plutocrats. How much better he related to the chanters of the spirit.
Another source of preference I find is the fact that, possibly without being aware of it, Apap was here sealing in bronze a testament to Art Deco aesthetics, taking Ivan Mestrovic, Lee Lawrie, Leonardo Bistolfi, Paul Manship, Eugenio Baroni, Rodin himself perhaps, as far as they could possibly go: monumentality of the mind, rather than of the body.
Yet, with his Dante, Apap imprisoned their lessons in a jacket of spirituality and gravitas that the others did not always apprehended. One step ahead and there is Manzu’s tormented, deeply religious irreligion.
Over the years, time and neglect started taking its toll on the bronze, to the point that its integrity had recently become problematic.
Thankfully, the Fondazione Roma Mediterraneo commissioned the expert bronze restorers Sante Guido and Giuseppe Mantella to reverse the trend and inhibit further damage. This they have now done and Apap’s masterpiece can look forward to inspire and awe future generations.