Cottonera fortifications’ paintwork in peril

The Ministry for Resources and Rural Affairs has received the considerable sum of €36 million spread over seven years from the European Union for the restoration and rehabilitation of the fortifications of Valletta, Birgu, Mdina and the Citadella, but not for those of Cottonera-Santa Margherita. Will these fortifications not be repainted but just be left as stripped, naked stone?

A large area of sanguine paintwork and plaster still remains in situ 10 courses below the top of the curved face of St John’s Bastion. This paintwork is probably British over-painting of the Knights’ own layers of red and yellow ochre paintwork on this bastion.

This dark red British paintwork is visible on 19th century photographs that record it also on the fortification wall to the left of Porta Reale (the British built 19th century City Gate), and this dark red paint covered the entire upper storey of Porta Reale. Charles Frederick de Brockdorff’s watercolours from earlier in the 19th century indicate that the earlier Porta San Giorgio entrance to Valletta was painted at times yellow, at times white.

Has the in situ British and possibly earlier Knights’ paintwork on this bastion been investigated by the Restoration Unit? Has the paintwork been analysed in a laboratory to determine the pigments and the medium employed? Could it be that the Knights period yellow ochre paintwork lies beneath the later British paintwork on this bastion? Is this paintwork going to be restored to this bastion, or is it going to be stripped off, as some workmen on the scaffolding have indicated?

If it is going to be stripped off by the Restoration Unit and not restored, then restoration is not happening, and we will be left with a naked stone bastion. This would be the destruction of heritage.

The restoration of this paintwork is important, because the recent rapid loss through the stripping off of the layers of Knights’ and British paintwork from the façades of heritage buildings throughout Malta means that many are no longer aware that the exterior of important buildings such as the Grand Masters’ Palace, the Knights’ auberges in both Birgu and Valletta, important gates such as Porte de Bombes, Floriana, or St Helen’s Gate and the Żabbar Gate, Cospicua, and the Hompesch Arch, Żabbar, as well as fortification walls and coastal watchtowers were painted under the Knights and under the British.

If the former layers of paintwork on St John’s Co-Cathedral and on the Palace are any guide, the paintwork applied by the British in many cases followed in the tradition of paintwork established by the Knights for the building, in the case of the Palace, yellow for 30 or 40 years followed by red, often with white detailing for the next 30 to 40 years, from the start of the 18th century into the 1930s.

These same questions apply to the layers of yellow ochre paintwork and plaster that still cover large areas of the outer face of St Peter’s Bastion by the Greek Gate at Mdina. I think this is probably Knights period paintwork, at least at the level closest to the stone, but has the necessary laboratory analysis been carried out on this paintwork and plaster before the Mdina fortifications are restored?

Remains of paintwork on these fortifications should be photographed as they may disappear in another so-called restoration and be lost for good, along with the possibility of our understanding what the fortifications actually looked like under the Knights and under British rule and establishing through laboratory analysis the chemical composition of the paintwork and sealant and plaster-mortar used.