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Cynthia De Giorgio: Mattia Preti: Saints And Heroes For The Knights Of Malta, Midsea Books, 2014. 144 pp.

Mattia Preti’s 40-year-long stay in Malta is undoubtedly the most significant such residence by an artist. Not only was he to introduce the late baroque style of painting in Malta, but his prolific output reached almost every corner of the islands and thus made sure that the Maltese would get this style into their DNA.

Cynthia de Giorgio’s Mattia Preti: Saints and Heroes for the Knights of Malta is the latest publication to hit the market, and it continues in the fine manner of the best of the previous books, helped in no small way by the excellent photography of Joe P. Borg, who has been making a great name for himself by the high standard of his output.

Although de Giorgio, who is the curator of St John’s Co-Cathedral and Museum, says that she has set out to study the iconography of the saints and heroes of the Order as depicted by the artist between 1658 and 1698, the scope of the book is really much wider.

This is because this covers the greater part of Preti’s output, and so the book ends up being an assessment of almost his entire local oeuvre and certainly his most significant work.

It also makes sure that it gives particular importance to the glorious frescoed ceiling of St John’s, which Preti painted free of charge in gratitude for his acceptance into the Order, an aim he had been pursuing since November 1641.

One bonus of the publication is that it is accompanied by a large poster of the vault for the reader to lay out in front of him and cherish at leisure.

Each very exhaustive and authoritative entry gives the history of the painting

A good bonus is an excellent, concise biography of Preti which succeeds in explaining the milieu of the artist and which, for many, will by itself justify the cost of the book. And then there is also a very clearly-written account and explanation of the development of the cult of saints in Catholic Europe.

Saints and their iconographic depiction in Catholic churches became a very important means of reinforcing the faith. The Counter-Reformation stressed that artists were to have a leading role in the fight against Protest-ant minimalism.

By Preti’s time the baroque style had mellowed and developed, while the new cult of saints reached a climax with the canonis-ation of five saints of the Counter-Reformation in 1622.

The vault paintings of St John’s were indeed a superb visiting card by Preti, in which he showed his mastery of his particular approach to the fresco medium, also his profound understanding of the new Council of Trent directives.

It is ironic that while the vault of St John’s was Preti’s first great commission in Malta, the last major commission was to be the refurbishment of the oratory which was finished in 1685.

Of course, he had carried out numerous commissions in the meantime and he continued to work almost till his very death in 1699 with the help of a very active bottega.

Preti was predominantly a religious painter, and only less than a handful of his secular paintings survive. De Giorgio excellently sums up his oeuvre and calls him “a philosopher-artist who realised in pictorial terms the religious fervour which the Counter-Reformation Church wanted to portray”.

The second part of the book consists of an anthology of Preti’s saints and heroes, which lists in chronological order 69 of the paintings that depict these subjects.

Each very exhaustive and authoritative entry gives the history of the painting, an artistic assessment and lush details and legends connected with the particular saint’s life. It is a section that will be often delved in by critics, not to mention students of the history of art.

The final short section is an account of the history of the restorations that the vault paintings have undergone since the very first one in 1868 by Ignazio Cortis – a disastrous one indeed, whose extraneous interventions were removed by Cesare Brandi between 1959 and 1962.

The latest minimal interventions by Giuseppe Mantella, which started in August 2012, have revealed the original vibrant colours and brush strokes.