In the 18th article in a series on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius highlights the life and works of Anton Inglott

The death at a very young age of Anton Inglott (1915-1945) deprived Maltese modernism of what would have been a leading protagonist, just on the eve of its birth. His ill-health conditioned most of his life.

The Raising of Lazarus

His prodigiously fast artistic maturity could have been due to a self-awareness that fate had bestowed upon him a short time frame in which he could express himself artistically. His very introspective output reflected this in his choice of restrained, almost monochromatic, palette that radiates an otherworldly aura of sobriety, asceticism and spirituality. 

By 1937, Inglott had completed his studies at the Malta School of Art, to which he had enrolled when he was just 15 years old. The school’s 1938 painting competition declared Willie Apap as the winner and the recipient of the much-coveted scholarship to Rome’s Regia Accademia. Inglott was disappointed that just two points separated him from his artist friend and that his dream was about to be shattered. The rules of participation declared an age limit that would have prohibited him from trying again his luck at winning the elusive scholarship in the future. 

Thanks to a subsidy from the Agnese Schembri bequest and  the probable enterprise of his tutor, Edward Caruana Dingli,  who must have realised that the loss of such a pure talent would be a huge shame, Inglott now could pursue artistic education at the Italian institution of his dreams, joining a Maltese contingent of young artists that would eventually include also his best friend, Emvin Cremona, Willi Apap, Esprit Barthet, Victor Diacono (the recipient of the scholarship for sculpture for that same year) and Carmelo Borg Pisani.

His early weeks in Rome were emotionally taxing for the young Inglott as the separation from his fiancée and future wife, Mary Pitré, was a bitter pill to swallow, smitten by her as he was. Besides, his tutor at the Regia Accademia, Carlo Siviero, was not that forthcoming and quite unfriendly. He had come to regard Maltese students with some scepticism. This had its roots in the unruly behaviour of a former Maltese student. Edward Caruana Dingli himself had to take the trip to Rome to convince Siviero that indiscipline was not a general Maltese student trait. The Italian tutor’s frigid demeanour thereafter mellowed and Inglott became one of his favourite students.

Flowers in a Vase

Siviero was a very strict academicist who did not accept the flourish and ‘excesses’ of modernism that had been altering the scenario of most of Europe, particularly France. Italy was not immune to modernism as futurism, preoccupied with movement, and arte metafisica, seeped in timelessness and stillness, were indeed early 20th-century Italian movements promoting a break from the past. The aesthetics of arte metafisica influenced the Scuola Romana and the Novecento movements by embracing the Renaissance as the yardstick for artistic development. 

The stillness and the mood of suspended time of Giorgio de Chirico’s desolate landscapes, Giorgio Morandi’s ‘silent’ still lifes and Felice Casorati’s ‘return to order’ (especially in his portraiture oeuvre), can be identified in Inglott’s body of work; especially so as regards his sacred art, which developed, in the Maltese 20th-century context, into the supreme example of the genre.

The artist’s dwindling health compelled him to delve more into art

Giuseppe Calì and Lazzaro Pisani enjoyed the lion share of Church commissions from the last decades of the 19th century up to the late 1920s. For a while, Giuseppe Briffa and Gianni Vella appeared to be the obvious candidates to succeed them.

Women Sitting While Holding Children (from the Wartime series of drawings). Photo: Lionel M. Cassola

However, Inglott’s subdued palette and the suspension of figures in a dimension bridging heaven and earth created an introspective, metaphysical unreality conducive to contemplation, which had no precedents in the history of Maltese art. Inglott had raised the bar of spiritual artistic expression to absolute levels.

Anton Inglott (1915-1945)

The Raising of Lazarus, The Nativity Triptych in the national collection and his ultimate masterpiece, The Death of St Joseph, at the Msida parish church, all demonstrate a mystical illuminatory light emanating from within. The Raising of Lazarus is an ultimate defining masterpiece of Maltese 20th-century sacred art. Lazarus, a great friend of Jesus, is generally assumed to have been still a young man when he succumbed to an unspecified illness. This painting augments the narrative power of the biblical episode by integrating the shadows of both protagonists. A nimbus envelops the risen Lazarus, suggesting a spectre that is in-between states as he walks, summoned by Jesus, to a renewed life outside the tomb. Christ’s looming shadow demands that his friend’s soul be restored to the mummy-like body that had been decaying for four days.

The poignancy of the painting could be an autobiographical expression of Inglott. His health was relentlessly waning along the years due to diabetes, which had no cure. This could be a prayer for release from his disease, an entreaty for delivery from his fate; that he would be spared from an early untimely death that would destroy his plans of marrying his sweetheart and having a family as well as the dreams of becoming a famous artist and living to a ripe old age. Sadly, that was not meant to be. 

Still Life with Books and Candlestick

Health had troubled Inglott from his teenage years. His last year of studies in Rome was marred by a deterioration in the diabetic symptoms. He had to hurriedly return to Malta in May of 1940, on the eve of the imminent entry of Italy into the drama of World War II. 

The artist’s dwindling health compelled him to delve more into art, as he was living on borrowed time. His sacred art became more austere and metaphysical, bathed in a perennial penumbra of dusk or dawn. Inglott restrained his palette even more, in a process of progressive chromatic elimination, thus increasing the contrast in the dualities between light and dark, between the temporal and the transcendental. He adopted this palette choice to other genres, particularly to his still-lifes, maybe as an artistic statement regarding the inherent spirituality of the whole of God’s creation.

The wartime stench of death, the incongruence of life in the rock-hewn shelters and his ill-health, which involved his hospitalisation on various occasions, are the themes of a series of evocative drawings that bare parallels with Henry Moore’s famous series of London shelter drawings. However, Moore worked from memory in his series, while Inglott’s drawings have an immediacy of bearing witness to human tragedy and sickness and documenting life happening in real time.  

People in a Shelter (from the wartime series of drawings). Photo: Lionel Cassola

Although in Rome Inglott might have come across the divisionist and symbolist work of Gaetano Previati (1852-1920) and maybe even that of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), the Maltese artist travelled to Tuscany and Umbria to study Giotto and Cimabue and the monumentality of the figures in their paintings. This same monumentality is evident in Inglott’s ultimate masterpiece, The Death of St Joseph. The Msida parish had commissioned him to decorate the main apse of its parish church, dedicated to the saint. 

Nativity Triptych. Photo: Europeana.eu

Tackling such an enterprise, knowing that his days were numbered and that this commission would probably be his swansong and monument to posterity, emboldened the artist to persevere.

Inglott devoted all of his creative force and stamina into the execution of what is probably the greatest piece of Maltese 20th-century church art. The references to Giotto, the intense spirituality of the apocryphal account, beating all odds amid his steadily failing health to see the commission through, all of this and much more went into Inglott’s final testament.

He died on August 15, 1945. His daughter, Bernadette, was barely four months old, the artist having married his sweetheart on June 1 of the previous year. Maltese art lost one of its shining beacons.