Joe Zammit Ciantar: The false domes of the Gozo cathedral and other churches
Malta, 2019. BDL Books www.bdlbooks.com
As can immediately be noted by anyone admiring the skyline of Gozo’s magnificent citadel, the cathedral which dominates it lacks a dome. This is quite ironic since the other cathedral at Mdina, also designed by Lorenzo Gafà, boasts the islands’ most conspicuous and elegant dome, towering over the old capital’s ramparts. Both structures suffered extensive damage during the earthquake of 1693.
The reason for the lack of a dome has never been conclusively explained, but Gafà’s death in 1703 may have been a contributing cause. The contemporary De Soldanis claims that it was never built, owing “to the height of the church.” This left a round flat opening instead and the canons had the inspired idea of commissioning the painting of a trompe d’oeil ‘dome’; an artistic gem which has remained unique in the islands.
Such a dome is meant to deceive the eye into imagining the perspective of a cavity when viewed from below. The artist chosen was the scenographer Antonio Manuele from Messina.
According to Giuseppe Ingaglio, who says that a great number of such architectures survive, these deceptive domes were resorted to for economic reasons or when structures could not bear the load; many were indeed painted temporarily in expectation of the actual dome.
Ingaglio records 16 extant such domes in Sicily in such places as Palermo, Sciacca, Tusa, Agrigento, Naro, Mineo, Caltagirone, Ragusa Ibla and Avola. The well-known art historian, whose doctoral thesis was about these false domes in Sicily and Malta, writes that the artist was actually called Antonio Emanuele and known as Il Pepe or Pippi.
This ‘dome’, with a diameter of eight metres, has become a prime tourist attraction and is bound to attract even more visitors following its excellent restoration last year by PrevArti.
Gozo cathedral’s false dome has attracted a number of studies, the latest featured in a very smart richly-illustrated and full-colour publication by Joe Zammit Ciantar, who first wrote an article about it in The Sunday Times of Malta about two decades ago and has kept researching about it and similar ‘domes’.
The dome was completed in 1739 and restored in 1823 before its latest restoration in 2019. The artist painted an extremely ornate baroque dome consisting of eight (visible) sets of columns with composite capitals, surmounted by five sections with square and rectangular coffers and a lantern on top. The light mainly comes from the lantern and the left-hand side.
The central part of the lowest section contains a wide window which contains its star attraction: a gecko scuttling across the glass panes. The gecko, which has a rather too long and fat a tail, was, according to someone not quoted in the booklet, “drawn to cover up a blot of paint”.
Interestingly, Zammit Ciantar posits a possibility of a connection with the Serpotta family of artists, since serpotta could be the Sicilian word for a lizard or a gecko, although this link may not be all that clear.
What is certain though, is that artists have taken a liking to depicting geckos on faux windows. Zammit Ciantar mentions ones at the church of the Immaculate Conception in Qala and another one in the frescoed ceiling of the Order’s chancery, today the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. A third gecko has been painted on the white ceiling of one of the rooms in San Anton palace.
Two sepia designs in the Cathedral Museum archives indicate a connection with that master of flat-dome designers who was the Jesuit Andrea Pozzo; sketches and plans were easily available for artists who wanted them. Pozzo painted the first trompe l’oeil dome in 1685.
The second part of Zammit Ciantar’s book features descriptions of some other false domes in Europe, including Pozzo’s original one at St Ignatius church in Rome and in the Jesuits’ church at Vienna (where Pozzo lies buried), Ljubljana in Slovenia, L’Aquila (extensively damaged for the third time by the earthquake of 2009) Arezzo, Frascati, Montepulciano and Modena.