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Charlene Vella: The Mediterranean artistic context of Late Medieval Malta, 1091-1530. Midsea Books. 240 pp

This handsome volume comes with an important recommendation by a prominent British specialist in Renissance art history, Donal Cooper, who describes Charlene Vella’s book as “an indispensable vade mecum to the relevant monuments and artefacts”.

The author puts the period 1091-1530, Malta’s late medieval period, that faces not just the art historian but the medie-val historian of Malta with various problems, in a broad Mediterranean context.

Apart from being an impressive first large publication by a young scholar that confirms her early promise, it is also a tribute to her former professor and mentor, Anthony Buhagiar.

Prof. Buhagiar’s pioneering research of medieval art and architecture during his long career forms a series of publications. This is especially true of his substantial 2005 book on late medieval art and architecture.

Vella’s intellectual debt to Prof. Buhagiar is acknowledged not only in the staggeringly long list of his publications in Vella’s bibliography, but even more concretely in the repeated acknow-ledgements that on a matter she may be discussing, Buhagiar has been there before her. In many cases he is in (sometimes qualified) agreement with her... more rarely, he voices dissent.

Vella shows how in this period between Roger the Norman’s successful invasion of Muslim Malta, and the arrival of the Order of St John in 1530, Malta’s Latin Christian identity was “grafted... onto an essentially North African substratum”.

After their capture of Malta in 870, the Arabs appear to have destroyed its churches and may have left it largely or even completely unpopulated for a long period. By the 11th century, however, there was certainly an Arab Muslim population with a newly fortified old capital city, Mdina, which Vella refers to as the Civitas in her book.

Oddly enough, no remnants of mosques have been discovered so far. Islamic culture persisted even after the definite recapture of Malta in 1127, throughout Norman rule and under Frederick II (Stupor Mundi).

It was only when Muslims were expelled in 1327 and the Christian population was enlarged by the large-scale immigration of people from Celano in Italy that the islanders’ identity began to experience important changes.

Vella follows Buhagiar in thinking that before their expulsion, the Muslims lived mainly in the countryside where some were converted to Christianity by Greek-rite Christian monks.

An indispensable vade mecum to the relevant monuments and artefacts

The rural churches were largely troglodytic and were gradually replaced in the Early Modern period. Her view is that the Latinisation of Maltese Christianity started in the Angevin period, and was strengthened after 1282.

In the countryside, several small churches – some of which were to become the first parish churches – were built.

The Mdina cathedral registered its importance in ordering a bell from faraway Venice in 1370.

Early in the following century it commissioned a fine polyptych, depicting the life of St Paul, from an outstanding Catalan painter, Lluis Borassa.

Vella, following Genevieve Bresc and Buhagiar, attributes this work, which is one of the Mdina Cathedral Museum’s star attractions, to his workshop.

Much later in this century, the cathedral again accepted the excellent advice of commissioning finely sculpted marble holy water stoups from the outstanding Gagini workshop in Palermo, heralding the arrival of Renaissance art in Malta. A fine Virgin and Child in the Santa Maria di Gesù church in Rabat, and the dignified monument of Grand Master L’Isle Adam in the vault of St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta are both works by Antonello Gagini.

Vella is particularly interesting on some of the paintings painted for Maltese churches in the decades before 1530. Her account of the paintings in the 15th century church of the Annuncation of the Virgin at Ħal Millieri shows how controversial their authorship seems to be.

Her specialist knowledge of Antonello da Messina, his relatives and his entourage, makes her accounts of works like Salvo d’Antonio’s Salvator Mundi, which she considers to be Malta’s finest Renaissance painting, and Antonio de Saliba’s paintings, quite enriching.

Like Cooper, many readers must be looking forward to new publications by Vella on the school of Antonello da Messina, and on the Gagini workshop.

Vella goes into considerable detail regarding what is known about domestic and ecclesiastical architecture during this period, mostly following Buhagiar’s findings and opinions in his 2005 book and those of Godfrey Wettinger.

She shows how active the mendicant orders of friars, especially the Carmelites and the Domincans, were in building churches and priory buildings.

Readers should also be interested in what she writes about those prominent persons who built palaces like the one now known as Palazzo Falson and Palazzo Gatto Murina.

Vella thinks that their lives were as opulent as those of Sicilian nobles. People like Francesco Gatto were keen on their status, making sure their tombstones registered they were a miles, a knight.

In her lucid conclusion, Vella makes it clear that much still needs clarification as regards the history of architecture and the visual arts.

The number of scholars researching the fine arts in Malta has increased impressively in recent years, so it may well be possible that the coming years will bring about the fulfilment of what she desires and is working towards.