Roamer's Column

It has been one of my pleasanter experiences, late in life though it came about, to meet Professor Mario Buhagiar, Dr Keith Sciberras, and Fr Gino Gauci, who toil at the University in the History of Art Programme within the Faculty of Arts. From them I learned quite a few things about art history and the cerebral fascination it holds for those who place it in its immediate relationship with the history of thought, power, politics and religion (during the Renaissance the four went hand in hand) and in the context of the inevitable tensions that arise between this quadrilateral of human ambitions and aspirations.

From Fr Gino I learned how to 'read' an icon, from Keith Sciberras the time-lines of Western art, Caravaggio and Bernini, from Mario Buhagiar the marvels of mosaic art, paleo-Christian art; and from each, much else besides.

I had some idea of the subject through fairly wide but ill disciplined and far too eclectic reading, which forbade me reaching an informed synthesis of what I gleaned from the pages of so many different books. I knew, as everybody in his teens got to know, that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for Julius II, but I was unaware of the nitty-gritty that was entailed in the art of fresco painting, or that Michelangelo had little or no experience of this art form, or indeed that he stood up so bravely to the powerful warrior Pope who had a penchant for foul language when he deemed an occasion warranted expletives. Few fooled around with Julius and got away with it. Not the Baglionis in Perugia, not the Bentivoglio family in Bologna, not even the Medicis in Florence.

Nor, for another example, did I know just how much Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo loathed one another. It was one for the books when both were commissioned to fresco a wall, one opposite the other, in the Council room of the Piazza Signoria. What amounted to a competition that caught the imagination of the city came to naught, alas.

As things turned out, Michelangelo applied not a brush of paint to his project, The Battle of Cascina, a mass of writhing male nudes. Da Vinci's effort, The Battle of Anghiari, a frantic equestrian thrashing around, turned out to be a humiliating failure. Both artists created cartoons for their respective wall. These were masterpieces in their own right.

I had heard of and admired Cimabue (but never knew this was a nickname for 'Oxhead' and that his real name was Giovanni Cenni di Pepi), ditto Giotto di Bondone, Raphael, Donatello and that extraordinary company of artists, architects and sculptors who transformed Rome into an 'eternal city' thanks to the patronage of the great, the good, the bad and the powerful; knew something about Caravaggio, had some idea of early Christian painting, but the knowledge was all somewhat wishy-washy. Mario Buhagiar, who is the head of the Art History department at the University, Keith Sciberras, Fr Gino Gauci and Paul Cassar pointed me in the direction of further study, an occupation that is turning out to be delightful.

But if I was fair to poor on the European front, my introduction to art history on the home front was something else again. It is a cliché worth repeating to remark that Malta is packed with an array of artistic and architectural masterpieces, from our Neolithic temples to the baroque triumph that is St John's, to Caravaggio's Beheading and St Jerome and, later, to Mattia Preti's transformation of the ceiling to our rosary bead of churches and chapels, among them Tad-Dejr in Rabat. Let us stop here for a while.

Wealth of a nation

A sort of digression is in order. If you walk up to the first landing on the staircase at the Fine Arts Museum in Valletta you will come across two sculptures by Sciortino. The one on the left is a straightforward representation of General Bolivar; on the right-hand side of the landing is a nude on horseback in the jungle; if you look closely, the poor horseman is being assailed by serpents and there is clearly no way out for him.

Continue up the stairs and you arrive at a third work by the same sculptor, this one, Rhytmii Vitae, is totally different in style, a man and a woman joined at their backs, the man standing upright his arms stretched out, the woman altogether more sensuous executing a dance movement associated with jazz music, her arms along his. It has style.

However, I had not gone to see these works but to take a look at one of the earliest mural paintings dating back to the late 14th century and of which there are analogous copies in rock-cut dwellings in Sicily. The painting, in a Siculo-Norman artistic style, had its origins in Tad-Dejr at Rabat. For reasons that are unfa-thomable, it was decided by the authorities during the Seventies that this quite extraordinary visual representation of a Golgotha scene with Christ crucified as its centre point and on either side the Virgin and St John and the Archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin that she would be the Mother of God, should be 'lifted' from Tad-Dejr using a dicey method to achieve the transliteration and placed inside the Museum of Fine Arts.

I understand that an international NGO, ICOMOS, was brought into the act, its leader a man called Giantomasi. He was, from accounts I have heard, horrified at the thought of what was being contemplated and warned of the damage that would result if the effort was made to remove the wall-painting in the form of a niche from its centuries-old and natural habitat. Mr Giantomasi, it needs to be added, is now a world authority on the restoration of wall paintings.

Not surprisingly given our penchant for knowing better than the experts from whom we seek advice, Mr Giantomasi's warnings were ignored. The wall painting, which was still in an excellent condition, finally left the surroundings it had inhabited for more than 600 years and was carted off to the Fine Arts Musuem. A place had been prepared for it up the stairs, turn to the left and left again into Hall 2.

It was a disaster and is a disaster for all to see. Large patches of the mural no longer exist. The face of the crucified Christ has more or less gone. We see the outline of his body but areas of the body no longer exist. The Virgin and St John are there by intimation rather than representation. The mutilation makes a sorry sight.

End of digression.

Passing on that wealth

When it was first published I bought Buhagiar's Iconography of the Maltese Islands 1400-1900, a scholarly work he has since described as "a coherent first attempt at coming to terms with the history of the visual arts in Malta". In 2002 "cautioned that new research would inevitably necessitate modifications and revisions". His hope was that "it would serve as a stimulus for specialisation in the several art historical disciplines" and that future studies would "crystallise in a comprehensive scholarly history of art in Malta".

This objective, he admitted in a copy I have before me of the University of Malta's Annual Report for 2002, but what had happened since then was the introduction of classes in the history of art at the University and the creation "of a better concerted and more scholarly-oriented research programme".

This research has entered into a new and serious phase with two excellent Patrimonju publications, the first recently published by Keith Sciberras on Roman Baroque sculpture for the Knights of St John. The second is in the process of being published, Mario Buhagiar's mammoth effort (nearly 30 years' research has gone into the work) at a reinterpretation of the Art History of the Maltese Middle Ages.

The author's sweep will take in the 12th century urbanisation of the countryside and "the early development of an architectural language that remained current well into the early modern period", a language based in the main on influences from the Latin West with Greek artistic influences moving in parallel, occasionally conditioning one another.

Over-arching both was the slow post-Muslim Christianisation of the islands, with cave churches in abundance, wall-icons that may be seen as the precursor of what was to become a deep Maltese love for the decoration of their churches. And beyond that, of course, the impact of the Knights on the island's art history and its transformation into a Baroque centre of considerable standing.

The Art History Programme at the University has a pleasant dynamic. This does not mean students find their course of studies a piece of cake. The briefest visit to their lecture room confirms the extensiveness of what they have to ingest and, later, must regurgitate in words and writing. Some of what they learn has nothing to do with the lecture room. It is on-site experience gained by visits to art centres all over Europe.

It is to the credit of Professor Buhagiar that he has organised a number of these study tours that have taken students to Ravenna, Madrid, Toledo, Salamanca and Avila, to Alsace-Lorraine, to Perugia - Arezzo, Assisi, Loreto, Urbino, Gubbio and Spoleto. Nor is it a jolly they go on. It actually is hard work for them as they are harried and hurried from pillar to post to gasp at a Grünewald or stare with awe at the frescoes of the basilica at St Francis, gawk at El Greco or gape at Velasquez as they limp through the Prado. An art history student's life is packed with culture - and weariness.

As these leave the campus for the workplace, does it cross the mind of any of them to take their knowledge on to Higher Things? Probably, for they are potentially the next generation of art history scholars. But do any of them actually become art history teachers at our schools to our youngsters? It would be nice to think they do but I fear that there are not many openings waiting to receive them in our primary and secondary schools.

There is a lacuna of vast proportions to be filled. I write off the cuff but am almost certain that most schools, if not all, have nothing in their curriculum to excite young boys and girls into learning about early Maltese art history. It certainly was not on my school's curriculum in 1945. There is so much to be learned. It is no longer good enough that children leave school without a sense of our cultural wealth pleasantly embedded in their young and impressionable minds.

It is the new generations, now that so much fresh knowledge about architecture, the visual arts, colonial history, social and political history is coming on to the market, who have to raise the banner of new learning. They will not do this if schools fail to pass on knowledge, not information, to their charges from an early age. For schools not to fail, the education ministry should create a school version of the History of Art Programme. The University will no doubt be delighted to help, not least because they will receive first year students for whom Preti will not be the plural of priests, nor Caravaggio the name of a model for an Italian car.