Baroque architecture in Malta

Abstract

Baroque Architecture in Malta during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries poses a highly challenging field of research which has in recent years been taken up by a number of scholars who have contributed various publications on different aspects of this fascinating subject. As a direct result of such research work, it is today possible to give a clear picture of the origins and development of Baroque architecture in the Maltese Islands; of the patrons, designers and clients responsible for its diffusion and of its relationship to the existing new and not so new urban fabrics of the Grand Harbour towns, Mdina and the rural villages scattered in the Maltese countryside. The present contribution further explores, in this respect, the great impact on the Maltese built environment of the qualities of communicative force, dramatic effects, concern with collective values, spatial investigation and freedom of detail which are normally associated with the International Baroque movement in architecture, this phenomenon being instrumental in streamlining architectural practise in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Malta with events occuring in the main European cultural centres. The role of a number of architects, such as Romano Carapecchia and François de Mondion, involved in this process, whose contributions have been largely underestimated prior to the author's research carried out in 1974-75 is spotlighted within the context of the overall Baroque building programme initiated in 1722 by Grand Master Manoel de Vilhena who together with Grand Master Emanuel Pinto de Fonceca was one of the leading patrons of baroque architecture in eighteenth-century Malta.