I refer to the Gozo feature ‘Important document found in St Augustine Priory’ (The Sunday Times, August 7).

I congratulate Paul Cassar, an MA candidate in my department, for documenting – through archival research – the attribution to Preti and bottega of the altar painting of St Augustine with John the Baptist and William of Aquitaine.

The document confirms what I have long said and written on the painting. In my article ‘Paintings in Gozo’ (Gozo – The Roots of an Island, Charles Cini ed., Malta 1990), I discuss the painting, after the Preti and bottega altarpiece The Virgin of Mercy with Souls in Purgatory (at the Collegiate Basilica of St George) commissioned the noble Giovanni Gourgion. I had said:

“Giovanni Gourgion also extended his munificence to the priory church of St Augustine to which he donated yet another painting from the workshop of Preti. This is the altarpiece of St Augustine with St John the Baptist and St William of Aquitaine, which is said to have been commissioned in 1690. It is a work worthy of attention but the unsatisfactory state of preservation and successive layers of dark varnish make a critical evaluation difficult.

“It is possible, nonetheless, to detect the hands of assistants… St Augustine, and St William of Aquitaine are… well modelled and competently executed and might have been painted by the master.”

In a subsequent article, ‘Painting in Gozo: Patronage in a Small Island Community’ in Essays on the Knights and Art and Architecture in Malta (Malta, 2009), I had commented:

“Of... interest but still unstudied is the altar painting of St Augustine with SS. John the Baptist and William of Aquitaine... donated... in 1690, to the convent church of the Augustinian friars...

“The painting was again commissioned from Mattia Preti, but there is a greater bottega intervention.”

The painting is largely a bottega work.