Having Valletta designated as the European Capital of Culture in 2018 is the realisation of a dream I have nurtured for most of my life. I am grateful to all those who have worked so hard to make this dream a reality, from Culture Minister Mario de Marco and everyone else involved, including, for a very welcome change, the opposition, also on board pulling the same rope with the same aim.
It is the apolitical politics of art that should ignite the spark that will set us all working towards Valletta 18 and beyond- Kenneth Zammit Tabona
We all collectively believe that this designation is probably the greatest thing to happen to our cultural development since the coming of the Knights in 1530.
Being who and what I am, I suppose it was inevitable that my cultivated and informed sense of romanticism craved a Valletta that was more alive, more pristine and more dynamic.
Over the years, we have experienced a renaissance taking place in our capital city, as more and more of us realise its unique worth. It is now a given that once the EU decided to accept Malta’s bid, which will be formalised next May, the real work kick-starts to bring this unique little city, surrounded as it is by massive fortifications and water, into the 21st century without traumas.
It is also a ‘now or never’ situation as far as the establishment of cultural infrastructural lacunae are concerned, shortcomings which any of you who read this column regularly need not be reminded of yet again.
What do I perceive as the benefits and spinoffs of this golden opportunity? For one thing, I strongly feel that art and culture should be apolitical while providing a very strong and unequivocal political statement. This may well sound like a contradiction in terms. However, it is a reality that would be best illustrated by a book that I am sure many of you have read, Irving Stone’s The Agony And The Ecstasy, which was later made into a film starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as the mercurial Pope Julius II Della Rovere. This book, which is partly true and partly romanticised, portrays the battles between the strong-willed artist and the equally strong-willed patron.
Michelangelo the great genius, the performer of miracles in marble and of frescos that are, in scope, unprecedented and still unsurpassed, was engaged in a never-ending battle of wits with a pontiff who was far more of a renaissance condottiere than a spiritual leader.
Della Rovere was a man who was determined to outshine his predecessors and to create an impossible benchmark for his successors and commissioned Michelangelo to undertake the creation of his tomb, which, if I remember correctly, was to have consisted of no fewer than 40 statues of which only Moses was completed. The rest is history.
It is this synthesis between money and power balanced out with artistic genius that gives birth to apolitical art that is of top quality that also gives out a clear political message about the person who commissioned the work. Sometimes, we actually forget who the artist was as in the case of our own Manoel Theatre, for instance, where it is for us of paramount importance that, in 1731, Grand Master Antonio Manoel de Vilhena commissioned it. It is his arms and not Carapecchia’s that we see stuccoed and painted, embossed and embroidered wherever we look.
It is Grand Master Manuel Pinto with his five crescent moons whom we remember when looking at Andrea Belli’s finest achievement, Auberge de Castille. When in St John’s Co-Cathedral, it is obvious that we are engulfed in a gorgeous phantasmagoria of extravagant heraldry, which, from every corner and from every nook and cranny, proclaims the greatness, fame and glory of the greatest chivalric order in world history.
That Gerolamo Cassar, Caravaggio and Mattia Preti and a host of other artists had a hand in it is very important but that was not why this conventual church came to be what it is today. St John’s is a grandiose political statement; pure and simple.
This is the spirit of V18. To start with, we must lift Valletta out of the abyss it had fallen into during those depressed post-war years and create a Centro Storico that will radiate all over Malta and Gozo. There are various restoration jobs currently going on. These should keep within the spirit of and respect the atmosphere of Valletta, which is as Baroque as Bach, Vivaldi and Handel.
We must not forget that Valletta is also a living city and not just a museum with people in it.
Therefore, wherever possible and with best possible taste, contemporary and modern interpolations could happily exist with the curlicues, columns and pediments of Valletta.
We have to be very careful to ensure that juxtapositions like this will always harmonise with what has existed since Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette laid the foundation stone of the city that bears his name in 1566.
Therefore, it is the apolitical politics of art that should ignite the spark that will set us all working towards Valletta 18 and beyond.
It is now that the real work will begin. In these five short years we have to symbiotically transform the ambience of our capital and make it the cultural mecca of the central Mediterranean. This has never been possible since 1798.
It is through EU membership that we are once again hosting the great concert of Europe, just as it did when the representatives of the eight langues of the Order did while Valletta was being created.
It is now possible to bring the culture of central Europe down into the Mediterranean and, once again, let it fuse with ours.
I am confident that the V18 vision is fully shared by all those who really love their country irrespective of colour, race and creed or, in Malta, political belief: people who are as passionately dedicated to seeing Valletta rise like a phoenix from the doldrums in which it has been becalmed since the war.