The 21st century has been unkind to a considerable number of local 20th century artists. Some of them have been largely forgotten due to no fault of their own. Their oeuvres, in many cases, have been dispersed without proper cataloguing, and attempting to locate individual works is a near to impossible feat. This is especially true for artists who lived for long periods of time away from these shores, due to their professional commitments or life decisions.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, as the work of 20th century Maltese greats like Willie Apap and, to a lesser extent, Giorgio Preca, embellish Maltese collections, even though the two artists chose to live in Rome for most of their adult life. However, posterity wasn’t all that kind for Maltese 20th century artist Oscar Testa.
Testa was born in 1909, the same year as his colleague Giorgio Preca. He studied at the Regia Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, the institution of choice in the first half of the 20th century for Maltese art students to further their studies. Testa had won a scholarship to study at the academy when he was 19 years old, specialising in the sacred art genre, in portraiture and in restoration techniques.
City Square (private collection)One can mention Umberto Coromaldi (1870-1948) and Alessandro Battaglia (1870-1940) among his tutors at the academy. When he was young, Coromaldi became acquainted with the famous Italian artist Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) to whose studio he was a frequent visitor. Mancini was one of the leaders of the Italian Verismo, a movement that propagated a realist aesthetic. Coromaldi, besides the Mancini influence, showed some adherence to divisionist and impressionist motifs and a preference to rural themes, as can be seen in his landscapes of peasant life.
Battaglia, in his earlier years, was a member of a group of Italian artists who shared ideals of a non-academic return to landscape painting; it was one that sought a revival of landscape motifs, much in the same vein as Coromaldi.
All of these influences were passed on to Testa, who was to later produce a number of serene landscapes of a Barbizon School genre-sensibility and a return to a pre-industrial arcadian, rural bliss.
On January 5, 1937, Testa married his sweetheart Mercedes l’Eltore, who incidentally was the cousin of Eugenio Pacelli who, in 1939, was elected to the papacy as Pope Pius XII.
Rome was to be the Maltese artist’s home away from home for most of his life. World War II prevented him from returning to Malta for various reasons, but he missed his relatives who, during those bellicose times, he was prevented from visiting.
Testa was deeply interested in the history of Rome and the Vatican City, and many times offered his time and knowledge to act as guide to Maltese relatives and guests, thereby enthusiastically demonstrating his love and admiration for the Eternal City.
Portrait artist and art restorer
Testa was also a very valid portraitist, gaining popularity and the patronage of the Pope himself, besides a number of aristocrats living in Rome, who all commissioned portraits from him. One of these was Fra’ Ludovico Chigi della Rovere-Albani, who was prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta from 1931 to 1951.
People still acknowledge him as a fine art restorer even to the present day, a term which is paradoxically reductive to his stature as a fine artist in his own right
The Maltese artist’s skills at restoration were considerable, and thus he was instructed to rehabilitate a number or works in the Apostolic Palace itself as well as in numerous churches and other prestigious venues like Villa Borghese, whose crowning glory is, besides the Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculptures, its collection of paintings by Caravaggio, some of which Testa was commissioned to restore.
Riverscape (private collection)This must have been a very humbling experience for him, to actually touch and have such a unique opportunity to survey masterpieces of world art from point blank. This established him as a restorer of high renown, a label that reductively defined him throughout his life and which led to many restoration commissions of paintings by other giants of world art.
In fact, people still acknowledge him as a fine art restorer even to the present day, a term which is paradoxically reductive to his stature as a fine artist in his own right. His career as a restorer spanned almost 50 years of his life, from 1930 up to his death in 1979. His career as an artist was concurrent with this. Along the years, he was commissioned by ecclesiastical authorities of various Italian towns and villages to adorn churches and chapels with his sacred art, some of it of considerable dimensions.
Commissions in Malta
Every time he visited Malta, commissions for paintings and restoration work never abated. Examples of his paintings are his Crucifixion tableau for the Floriana parish church together with a cycle of another six paintings for this same church, a painting of St Anne for the Sacro Cuor parish church in Sliema, and an Our Lady of Sorrows altarpiece for the chapel at the Addolorata Cemetery. He also carried out important restoration work in the church of St Paul’s Shipwreck in Valletta. The church museum highlights his key work in this regard.
He also designed the marble pulpit for Nadur parish church, an intricate work in marble, a tapestry of different biblical narratives of redemption and salvation. Testa was personally responsible for sourcing the marble from Pietra Santa in Italy, which entailed numerous trips to Italy and back.
Male Nude (private collection)Stylistic influences
In his art, Testa was a traditionalist, not much influenced by the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism. The artists of the Italian Scuola Romana and the Novecento movements, very prevalent during the years of Testa’s life in Rome, embraced and were influenced by the great wealth of Italian art, especially that of the Renaissance. They refrained from the ultra-unorthodox that was a signature of the first-generation Italian futurists who preceded them during the first decades of the same century as well as the second-generation futurists and their aeropittura and glorification of fascist Italy.
Artists like Felice Carena, Mario Mafai, Fausto Pirandello and Felice Casorati reinterpreted such classical themes as nudes and landscapes in a poetically representational manner. Testa was obviously aware of these new sensibilities, and his nudes, very solid and academic, do possess the sense of proportion, composition and admiration of the human form very dear to the protagonists of the two Italian 20th century movements.
Testa’s landscapes owe a lot to his tutors at the Regia Accademia, Coromaldi and Battaglia, who harboured a realist mentality in awe of the great Italian artists of the 19th century, such as Antonio Mancini and Giovanni Fattori. However, they also demonstrate, besides the Barbizon school influence mentioned previously, a dreamy languor that one finds in Nazarene paintings.
Malta’s 19th century was dominated by artists richly endowed with a Nazarene and Purist sensibility, such as Giuseppe Hyzler, Michele Bellanti and the Busuttil family of artists, besides the young Giuseppe Calì and Lazzaro Pisani. The latter two artists, together with the Italian Attilio Palombi, were securing the lion’s share of Church commissions. The teenage Testa must have been fascinated by the 19th and early 20th century art of his own country, considerations that one has to take into account when attempting to categorise in some way Testa and his artistic development.
Oscar visited Malta regularly and remained close to his mother Assunta, who lived in Valletta, his siblings, and, in particular, his cousin Anthony Roger Grech. Oscar Testa died at his house in Rome on April 26, 1979, at the age of 70 and is buried in his wife’s family grave at Verbano cemetery, in the vicinity of the Eternal City. He has left a legacy that deserves serious study and wider recognition, besides careful documentation of individual works. A dedicated retrospective exhibition would indeed celebrate him as an artist worthy of more renown.
The author would like to thank Oscar Testa’s relatives Marbeck Galea née Grech, Josephine de Gray née Grech and the late Rina Mamo née Grech, for some of the information included in this article.