Paintings in Gozo - a concise analytical history

Abstract

The only significant work of figurative art to survive the turmoil of the Late Middle Ages in GOZO, is a limestone relief (58.5 X 53 cm) of two standing male saints, possibly Peter and Paul, which since 1983 has been on display in the Folklore Museum in the Castello. It is said to have been found, in apparently unrecorded circumstances, in 1908 at Xlendi Bay where it might have belonged to a church that stood in the neighbourhood at an unknown period. The stone is mutilated by corrosion and ill-usage and is difficult to date, for while the iconography is in a Byzantinesque idiom, the surviving two letters of an inscription (SA[ncti) in the left hand corner, which presumably contained the names of the two saints, are in a Latin script which looks suspiciously late. Analogies may be drawn with wall paintings in post-Muslim Sicily, such as the ones discovered in 1952 in a Byzantine oratory in the underground cemetery of S. Lucia at Syracuse and, outside that city, to those surviving in several rock-cut churches in the surrounding countryside.