Archive | September, 2020

Malta 3: Stone Age – Postmodernism 1

13 Sep

What have the Centre Pompidou, the new Bridge in Genoa and the Maltese Parliament House in common? All extraordinary, for sure and beautiful at second sight …

Right! Architects may come and architects may go …  Renzo Piano … forever  everywhere whether you like it or not.

Parliament House, another limestone fort

The genius of it: the windows! Let the light in but not the sunshine. Nickname them any way you like, curse the cost, but in a sunshine country that’s a deal.

Majestic King’s Gate and the Royal Opera House, badly damaged or almost completely destroyed in 1942 (by youknowwhom) now re-thought and re-made by Enzo Piano. Not without controversy, but …get used to it.

The massive gate, a bastion, seen from inside

One side of the gate, futurist and apparently designed to withstand a 15th century “bombard” cannon attack.

The remains of the Royal Opera House now fitted for open air concerts (by Renzo Piano), in front Jean de la Vallette who repulsed the Turks’ attacks and gave the capital its name.

In the middle of the dry, sundrenched  countryside of Gozo: The Basilica of the Blessed Virgin of Ta‘ Pinu.

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The busdriver gave us 10 minutes to go and see the church. I hopped off, the others stayed on under the scorching sun looking at the basilika from far away.

 A short lone pilgrimage across the large forecourt to the huge church,  quick photos right and left. 1920s Neo-Romanesque!  The newness, the clear lines, the unequivocal imagery, they calm your mind, clear your perception, open you up spiritually.

“Hearken!” The softest whisper touched my ear. I looked around. No one there, just a few statues along the way. The sun blinded me and I could feel the sweat running down my forehead. Before I could  take another step the voice went gently on: “Go into my church and recite a Hail Mary .”

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“Is that you, Mother Mary?” I asked never having been able to reconcile myself to the fiction of the Virgin. No time for discussion, I still had 9 minutes left. “In what language?” was I about to ask not knowing the prayer in any. “Can I recite it in Latin, please?”

Inside the church I stopped in front of a marble angel that was sitting mindfully in an attempted lotus position as if floating in the air and chose him as my intermediary.

“Ave Maria, gratia plena, ehm, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis,ehm dunno, pecca …,  boh, nunc et in hora mortis, ehm, amen.”

I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I’d left out the bigger part of it.  “Go home and do something  good!” The sweet voice breathed in my ear. “Do something … good!” – What can I do? my humble self, what good?

“All I can do is teach,” I proposed helplessly, “ I can teach German!”.  

Silence.

“Mother Mary?” I felt a touch of wind on my cheek and heard an almost imperceptible wheeze.

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Then … nothing. Back at the bus I thanked the driver who had just finished his cigarette and hopped on.  (When I got home I found that the Board of Education of Latium had changed my working conditions from bad to worse … I should have promised Mother Mary to build her a church!)

Which brings me to:

The Inquisitor’s Palace undramatically tells you what kind of treatment was reserved to heretics in the roughly 200 years (end of 16th century – end of 18th century). Below: the chapel, the confessional, the inspiration, the courtroom.

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Here’s what you got for owning prohibited books, practising love magic, for heretical talk, apostasy to Islam, infringement of abstinence, abuse of sacramental oil, sorcery, bigamy (for women mainly):

hanging on a rope with your hands tied behind your back causing dislocation or bone fracture

pressing your ankles in the stringitore

or the cavaletto, you “ride” on it with the tormentors pulling at your legs. For justice’s sake the torture was timed by a sandglass. (center right on the table)

If you were “lucky” you could be condemned to vegetate in a dungeon for a couple of years fasting on dry bread and water, taking the Holy Comunion and reciting the rosary every Saturday. You could leave some graffitti on the limestone walls drawn with your fingernails so 20th /21st century tourists could be appalled by the horror of what human beings inflict on one another.

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The door that opens mainly to let people in, a human hand is always a touching picture, a rose and at the bottom, the lines that count the days.

Not that we have changed a great deal nowadays:

Monument to the Fallen of the Great Siege: a Memorial to Daphne Caruana Galizia

A journalist and an anti-corruption activist, a modern heretic ?

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Left: “I cannot bear the thought of injustice, still less the reality of it. It’s true that life is unfair and that much of it can’t be helped, but where I can do anything to avoid unfairness or to set it straight, then I will.” Right: Investigative journalist assassinated 16th October 2017 “She was killed because she mattered”

“The brave die never, though they sleep in dust: Their courage nerves a thousand living men.” Minot J. Savage

Next time, not so sad, the highlights from the stone age

cheers Gerburg

Malta 2: Who on earth is …?

7 Sep

… Mattia Preti?

If you don’t know him, relax, there is at least one more person in this world who didn’t either but if you want to broaden your cultural horizon beyond Caravaggio, go to Malta and visit St Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina and St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. And you’ll see. Here there are a few examples of Preti’s around 400 paintings, frescos, votive paintings in Malta alone.

Caption to the pictures below: The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Chapel of the Langue of Italy, The Allegory of the Triumph of the Order of St John, the ceiling in the Co-Cathedral in Saint John, underneath The Conversion of Saint Paul (one in the Co-Cathedral, one in St Paul’s in Mdina; dramatic, remember from Saul, through blindness, to Paul, you better believe it)

Malta, unfalteringly Christian since the Apostle Paul’s shipwreck, has 365 churches, and in this 4th densely populated nation that makes it 1165 inhabitants per church. (901 inhabitants per church in Italy, Malta can’t beat that). They look self-assertive, awe-inspiring  and quakeproof, elegant baroque outside, overwhelming baroque inside.

St Paul’s Cathedral, Mdina; St Paul’s church, Rabat with the marble sphere in front; underneath Church of St Paul’s Shipwreck in Valletta; bottom left: some church in Paola; middle: Cathedral of the Assumption in the Citadel of Victoria (Gozo island); and the rather new not baroque Basilica of Ta’Pinu which I’ll tell you about next time (on Gozo Island).

Overwhelming inside is St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta

My poor pictures – chosen with a great deal of ignorance and taken with superficial camera settings because the heat was wearing me down – my pictures can’t express the impact that the interior of the cathedral has on your eyes, on your senses.

Look at the floor, into the Chapels of the different “langues” of the Knights, look at the ceilings and look at the walls, and learn …

… and learn, for example, how salvation was brought to the poor souls of the slaves all over the world.

And if you have managed to steer clear of getting struck by the Stendhal syndrome, walk into the Oratory and get carried away by the highlight of the tour: the two Caravaggios. almost hidden in the oratory.

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The Beheading of St John the Baptist (who could have minded his own business instead of moralising Herod Antipas, the old lecher compliant of both, his second wife and dancing stepdaughter. In the end, as usual, it was the women’s fault.)
Saint Jerome writing (probably translating, probably the Bible, probably from Hebrew to Greek, the geek)

My roommate from Poland was awestruck by the red colour in the pictures and we wondered how it was produced in Caravaggio’s time. Flowers maybe, insects, who knows. In any case, they must have needed loads of them.

The end: Why hundreds of pictures by Mattia Preti and only two by Caravaggio? Clearly, the hotheaded genius didn’t last long in Malta, he got into a brawl with a knight of a superior rang and had to flee to Sicily.

Now if I got you interested in all that, look it up on the internet, the fotos are much much better. See you next time, I’ve got something mystical to tell you

Gerburg