Giuseppe Briffa (1901-1987) is one of the major protagonists of Maltese 20th-century art. He was also the most significant artistic rival of his younger contemporary, Emvin Cremona.
The dichotomy in Briffa’s artistic oeuvres cannot be easily explained or understood
The two artists passed away within a few months of each other, but while Cremona was lavished with the tribute he deserved, Briffa was unfairly bypassed and today he is largely forgotten. He deserves much better recognition. He was one of the most important church artists after the death of Giuseppe Cali and Lazzaro Pisani, and therefore deserved to be studied and considered in a meaningful context.
Christian Attard, Ph.D candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Malta, produced an undergraduate dissertation on Briffa, which, to date, is the only important study of the artist. As Attard himself put it in a recent conversation, Briffa “deserves to be much better known. Like [Ganni] Vella, his reputation suffers from his not embracing any of the more modern sensibilities”.
These modern sensibilities were the various ‘isms’ that took Western art by storm in quick succession of each other, little or none of which left an impact on Maltese art until the second half of the 20th century.
This was, in fact, the tragedy of artists working on a small island in the Mediterranean during the torments of the 20th century. But they are nonetheless interesting in understanding the social background of the artists as well as that of the patrons commissioning their works.
Briffa’s father was a church decorator who allowed his son to mix colours for him, thereby introducing him to the world of art. He studied art at the Birkirkara Primary School under Giuseppe Duca, at the St Elmo School, at the Malta Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and after the World War I privately under Edward Caruana Dingli. He then proceeded to Rome to further his artistic studies.
A small number of works by Briffa exhibited in an intimate space at the Banca Giuratale, Victoria, focused mainly on a cycle of paintings produced for Ta’ Pinu Basilica, Gozo, which were later executed in mosaic.
Briffa received many commissions for Maltese churches, a good percentage of which came from Gozo. His first Gozo patron was the Convent of St Augustine in Victoria for which he produced, in 1932, two powerful choir pendentives which are among his finest works. Others followed, including those for other churches in Victoria, Ta’ Kerċem, Santa Luċija, Mġarr, Nadur, and of course, Ta’ Pinu.
These works reveal an artist who was an outstanding draughts-man, and made use of a stylisat-ion that animated most of his religious art.
However, this was not his only mode of expression.
A Self Portrait and a Dead Christ in this exhibition emphasise that Briffa could be extremely free in applying paint, and sometimes very impressionistic too, in the latter case very probably influenced by the Italian Macchiaioli.
The artist’s son, Alfred, reveals the largely unknown fact that Briffa also sketched en plein air in between his Gozitan church commissions, in which he used a more fluid style that distances them from his religious work. He was a better artist when freed from the constraints of official commissions.
From what can be seen in the paintings produced for Ta’ Pinu Basilica, Briffa makes use of a radiant palette, an almost incisive line delineating every contour, often strictly symmetrical compositions, an array of charmingly sweet figures filling most of the picture plane, accompanied by a lavish use of gold. So vivid and so positive; elements he intentionally meant to evoke for the context they were produced in.
The freshness of the Self Portrait and Dead Christ mentioned earlier are absent in the other paintings in the exhibition.
These two paintings left a great impression on me. The Self Portrait of 1939 is sketchily composed of only a few brushstrokes of various colours and reveals the confidence of the artist who looks at us with a satisfied smirk.
The reclining figure of the Dead Christ is a tremendously moving image, and is remarkable for many reasons. Among these are the yellow hue of the light that emanates from Christ’s halo and is the source of illumination in most of the scene; the harsh perspective used; the shallow perspective pushing Christ’s feet so close to the viewer; the bright red used for the blood emanating from his wounds and elsewhere in the scene; the presence of the crown of thorns in the bottom right-hand corner.
All of this is placed in a local context as can be seen by the blank wall of local limestone visible behind the figure. So simple, so beautiful, so evocative.
Also evocative of this other side of Briffa are studies on paper, bozzetti and drawings in this exhibition.
The dichotomy in Briffa’s artistic oeuvres cannot be easily explained or understood, but the nature of church commissions did not allow for liberty to be taken in brushwork and execution. But this also makes Briffa such an interesting artist, one who was able to produce works according to the nature of the commission – one who surely deserves our respect.