A Maltese visitor in 17th-century Brussels
Arnold Cassola: The Belgian memoirs of a Maltese intellectual, Giovanni Francesco Buonamico (1639-1680). Bank of Valletta. 2012. 78 pp. Giovanni Francesco Buonamico was a remarkable example of the Maltese intelligentsia who appeared in the 17th century...
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Arnold Cassola: The Belgian memoirs of a Maltese intellectual, Giovanni Francesco Buonamico (1639-1680). Bank of Valletta. 2012. 78 pp.
Giovanni Francesco Buonamico was a remarkable example of the Maltese intelligentsia who appeared in the 17th century at a time when the destruction wrought by the 1565 Great Siege was well in the past and the education of Maltese boys had been given a great boost with the creation of the Jesuits’ Collegium in 1592. He became a notable physician after having studied at a number of universities notably that of Aix-en-Provence, Cassola having strong doubts about the claim that he also studied at Louvain.
Buonamico was a man of many facets, with notable interest in areas like botany, science, poetry and even theology, and in his short life (he died when only 41 years old) he published learned treatises on a variety of subjects, most famously a treatise, written when he was still a medical student, on the new craze of the time, chocolate.
Cassola may have too high an opinion of Buonamico’s appreciation and knowledge of art
Most schoolchildren will know him as the author of an early poem written in the Maltese language, 16 eulogistic but elegant verses dedicated to Grand Master Nicholas Cotoner.
This slim volume is about a work by him that has never been published in its entirety, an account in good Italian (fortunately not of the florid kind so familiar in his day) of his voyages between 1657 and 1666 in a number of countries: the Low Countries, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and Sicily.
The manuscript in our National Library appears to be incomplete, lacking the accounts of Italy, Sicily and Greece.
In fact the material summarised and commented upon by Cassola is even more restricted. As the title of the present book indicates, it is mainly about Buonamico’s journeys in Flanders and in the Walloon areas of what is now Belgium for some months in 1660 and again in the last months of 1663.
In 1660 he visited the cities of Bouillon and Liège, whereas in 1663 he visited many more cities: Bruges, Ghent, Alst, Brussels, Malines and Antwerp. His comments about cities that truly interested him, such as Liège and Brussels, are fairly long and show how much he learned about the economy and way of life of the inhabitants. Considering he was a medical man, he says surprisingly little about hospitals and medical practice. He does have much to say, however, about the ill effects on people’s health in Liège caused by the mining industry and the use of coal to heat the houses.
He is very cautious in what he says about the politics of what was certainly a troubled region. He comments on Ghent, the city famous for having given birth to the emperor Charles V that it was notorious for citizens easily roused to violence and had the reputation of being “one of the most seditious cities in the world”. Charles V built a strong citadel there to suppress revolts.
Buonamico clearly enjoyed the fine buildings of cities like Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp but never goes into details of architecture, limiting himself to comments like contrasting the medieval architecture of Bruges with the much more recent architecture of Antwerp. He was much impressed by the huge royal palace and its large park and by the large cathedral in Brussels.
Cassola may have too high an opinion of Buonamico’s appreciation and knowledge of art, whose only mention of works by the great Rubens is about those in one of Brussels’ palaces. He could not have failed to see the three very fine paintings by Rubens in Antwerp’s cathedral, or the equally famous Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by the Van Eycks in Ghent’s cathedral, but he never mentions them, just as he never mentions the exquisite marble Madonna by Michelangelo in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges. On the other hand, he was fascinated by the many canals and bridges of Bruges and Ghent.
Cassola does well to reproduce as an appendix the original texts in Italian about most of the cities Buonamico visited. It would have been very useful to non-specialist readers like the present one if he had provided an account, even if just a short one, of the region’s overall history.