The old Mdina, Malta cathedral choir

Abstract

There is a widespread misconception that Malta before the Knights was a cultural desert. This was not the case. It has been one of the major concerns of my long academic career to prove it wrong. Research undertaken by my students have fine-tuned the evidence for a culturally informed Late Medieval Malta. It is now obvious that the Civitas, or Notabile, which we habitually call by its Islamic name Mdina, stood comparison, socially and culturally, with the city communes of the Kingdom of Sicily that included the Calabria and Salento regions of South Italy. Like them it had a culturally refined gentry, an administratively competent 'Universitas' (Town Council) and a politically powerful Cathedral Chapter. In spite of differences over rights and jurisdictions, the ‘Universitas’ and the Chapter distinguished themselves as informed patrons of the arts and made significant gifts to the Cathedral, which by mutual consent, was the city's most important building and symbol of its prestige. One needs only mention the great retable of St. Paul, which the ‘Universtas’ commissioned, in the early fifteenth century, from the workshop of Lluis Borassa, the most significant Late Gothic artist of Catalonia/Aragon. Paintings and other objets d'art were commissioned not only from the Kingdom of Sicily, of which Malta was a political appendage, but also from the more distant Venice, with which the island had good contacts, and from Catalonia/Aragon. The Mendicant friars, the Augustinians, the Franciscan Observants and Conventuals, the Carmelites and lastly the Dominicans, who started establishing houses in the late fifteenth century, were an added source of cultural enrichment and, to an extent, responsible for the introduction of a Renaissance sensibility which gave to the island the now academically accepted art historical significance of the southernmost outpost of the Quattrocento Renaissance.