Keith Sciberras

Jessica Borg

Francesco Zahra

Joe P. Borg

This book celebrates the 300th-year anniversary of Francesco Zahra's birth in 1710 and seeks to show the extraordinary range of the artist's output. Zahra was Malta's most important native painter of the mid-18th century and his style wonderfully captured the spirit of the Late Baroque. He was extremely prolific and could handle the brush with a fascinating ease, thus furnishing Maltese churches with hundreds of paintings, large and small. His extraordinary creative spirit also ensured that his pictures breathed the compositional freshness of mature artists. Francesco Zahra produced various designs for church furniture, marble altars, silver artefacts, liturgical vessels and other objets d'art that still survive scattered around the island. Zahra's output can be divided into a number of phases and this book seeks to trace such evolution and development. It also seeks to re-evaluate some of the most important works of his oeuvre. Zahra's early style is his weakest and was largely dependent on the works of his first tutor Gio Nicola Buhagiar (1698-1752). The 1730s were largely dominated by the artistic affinities of these two painters and there were instances when it was difficult to tell them apart. Zahra reached his early maturity by 1740 when his art started to depart from the manner of his tutor. By the mid-1740s, Zahra was the most important native painter on the island, only to be challenged by the arrival of the Frenchman Antoine Favray. Zahra's interest in proper disegno and in the work of Mattia Preti and Favray made him modify his style and - by the mid-1750s - adopt a more solid approach. His figurative forms changed and the general atmosphere of his works became more sophisticated. Francesco Zahra marked Maltese mid-18th century art with his timbre and distinctly shaped the character of religious painting. His decorative appeal and theatrical manner complemented the context of the period and made him one of the most fashionable of the Baroque painters active in Malta.

His Life and Art in Mid-18th Century Malta

Francesco Zahra 1710-1773

John T. Spike

Erik Harrington

Mattia Preti

A Brush with Passion: Mattia Preti (1613-1699) is the first major exhibition of his art held in the United States and one of three international venues recognized by the Preti Quadricentennial Committee in Italy, of which our own Dr John T Spike is a member. Taverna, the artist’s birthplace in Calabria, and Valletta, Malta, where Preti lived for forty years as painter to the Knights of Malta, will also host exhibitions with works from their respective countries. Mattia Preti is celebrated as the last and most enduring proponent of the passionate, contrasted style of the painter, Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1571-1610). In many ways, Preti’s life followed in Caravaggio’s footsteps, although with a happier ending. As a young man, Preti made his way up the Italian peninsula to study painting in Rome, arriving around 1630. He quickly fell under the spell of Caravaggio, similarly seeking emotional intensity and wrapping his canvases in pervasive darkness that evokes the impenetrable nights of those candle-lit times and the hidden depths of the human soul. Preti’s paintings underwent a significant development in the mid-1640s, when he immersed himself in studies of the Venetian Renaissances, especially Titian and Paolo Veronese, in search of more colors and a grander theatricality in his compositions. The exhibition A Brush with Passion: Mattia Preti (1613-1699) features a prime example of this new direction, the ‘Banquet of Herod’ in the Toledo Museum of Art, which is one of the artist’s masterpieces. Fiercely self-reliant and incessantly inventive, Preti followed Caravaggio’s restless path leading first to Naples and then beyond to Malta. His paintings on the vault and for most of the altars in the Church of St John in Valletta earned him a high title in the Sovereign Military Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. His last four decades were dedicated to commissions for the Knights and the leading noble families of Europe. These paintings have found their way to the world’s museums and for which Preti’s anniversary is being commemorated.

Mattia Preti (1613-1699) : Paintings from North American Collections in Honor of the 400th Anniversary of His Birth

A Brush with Passion

Keith Sciberras

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