L’Isle Adam’s Graduals at St John’s

Theresa Zammit Lupi: Cantate Domino: Early Choir Books for the Knights in Malta, Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, Malta 2011, 184 pp. (hardback).

Theresa Zammit Lupi’s book is a first in Malta. The book she has written may be considered as an anatomy, the dissection of the choral books which she has so thoroughly studied. This serves one purpose.

The results of her study also provide the raw material for the proper preservation of the magnificent collection of illuminated liturgical manuscripts, also called L’Isle Adam’s Graduals, found in the Conventual church of St John.

The book is essentially divided into four parts. The first part is the historical background of the graduals, which is a must to put them in their historical context. She bases her chapter on the seminal work done by Isidoro Formosa and that of Martina Caruana.

However, Zammit Lupi also added her training in conservation in the chapter and she discusses the changes, vicissitudes and interventions which the books went through and the effects these have had on their present condition.

She next delves into the manufacturing techniques of the text block and the manufacturing techniques of the sewing and the binding. In these two chapters some surprising but fascinating details clearly come out. Zammit Lupi shows she has gone through the volumes with a fine toothcomb and in a very rigorous and academic manner.

Details have the habit of not showing up easily, even though they would have been staring at you in the face all the time. The fact that she managed to find, for instance, evidence of a split nib in the script, or a mistake in the ruling, clearly shows she must have gone back and forth hundreds of times.

The more one reads the more one realises that direct intervention on the volumes would possibly do more harm than good as the chances of losing valuable bibliographical data increase exponentially.

The use of sand for drying ink has been known for a long time but it is very rare that one still finds drying sand still attached to the ink, and cleaning, using either dry or wet cleaning methods, would surely remove what is still remaining.

In some previous repairs on the manuscripts, pricking marks that were used for ruling, were mistaken for damage and were thus ‘restored’.

Zammit Lupi should be given a lot of credit for her perseverance in working out the puzzle of the melis­ma numbers that were written down as annotations at the side of the melismatic syllables in the music. To add to the confusion, they were sometimes written in Roman and sometimes in Arabic numerals.

Her success is even more significant given that she was faced with blank walls when musicologists around the world kept telling her that they had never encountered such numbers before.

In the chapter on visual analysis and historical considerations, Zammit Lupi faced the difficult task of giving an attribution to the L’Isle Adam illuminations.

This was particularly difficult as although one finds distinct different hands in the execution, there was still uniformity in the layout and general composition.

This is hardly surprising given that all Scriptoria would have consisted of more than one person working on any given manuscript.

Zammit Lupi safely attributes the production of the illuminations to the followers of the French illuminator Jean Pichore rather than to Jean Pichore himself, as the same patterns found in the manuscripts have been copied and used by many others until the end of the 16th century.

She was confident, however, to attribute the 1582 changes to the Dominican friar Fra’ Bisignano, who did the Royas Graduals at Mdina, which are signed and therefore documented, and the Verdalle antiphonals which are found at St John’s church.

I am sure that not all the fragments of the L’Isle Adam graduals that were reutilised as bindings, especially in the Notarial Archives have been thoroughly studied, and it would not be impossible to find the elusive signature or monogram that would give the documentary proof needed for the authorship of the L’Isle Adam Graduals.

The book is a masterpiece of Maltese book production. It has splendid photography, perfect editing, and the overall layout and chosen size of the book show that a lot of thought and work have gone into its production. Proofreading was not deficient either, as I did not manage to find one mistake in the whole text.

The only feature I would criticise is the use of endnotes. It would have been better if they were inserted as side notes as the aesthetics of the page spread would not have been disturbed or compromised.

No politician, town planner, conservation architect, conservator, and all those in any way involved in the preservation and conservation of our national patrimony can afford to be without this book.

If we bear in mind the extent of possibly hidden information found in artefacts like we have now learned and witnessed in this book I am sure we will finally see reason and we will tread very carefully instead of rush in so foolhardily to ‘restore’ things.

If and when this happens then we can truly say Cantate Domino.

Mr Schirò is head of Conservation at Heritage Malta. He is also the honorary secretary of the Malta Map Society and is co-author with Albert Ganado of the German Malta Maps catalogue published by BDL in 2011.