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Albert Ganado, Joseph Schirò and Claude Micallef Attard: The Brocktorff Mapmakers. BDL, 2012.
In its short life, the Malta Map Society has already distinguished itself by setting up three excellent exhibitions about the island’s rich cartographic heritage, as well as organising a very significant international symposium.
Its latest exhibition, which closed down early this year, was dedicated to the cartographic activity of the Brocktorff family and managed to bring together an impressive 138 maps and plans drawn and lithographed by the family in the 19th century. The good news for those who might have missed this exhibition, which was not as advertised as well as it could have been, is that the society has published an excellent, professionally produced catalogue which will also be able to reach collectors and experts beyond our shore and survive in time as a tribute to the abilities of the Brocktorff family of artists.
The first Brocktorff to settle on the island was Charles Frederick, a native of Schleswig-Holstein who came over around 1810 with his Sicilian wife, and who set up a thriving business in vedute which found an extremely responsive market among British officers stationed on the island and some proto-tourists brave enough to travel in those days.
In between his pictorial activities, Charles also found time to father five children. All his four boys, Federico, Luigi, Giuseppe, and Leopoldo, were to follow in his artistic footsteps. The cartographic activities of the five Brocktorffs is rather less well-known than their works in watercolours and lithography and this is what the Map Society has brought together for the first (and very probably the last) time to the appreciation of Melitensia lovers.
The introduction by Dr Albert Ganado, the doyen of afficionados of all things Maltese and the world authority on maps of Malta, is a brilliant, concise and, at the same time, exhaustive account of this gifted family. Future scholars will certainly be hard put to add on to it, in the absence of some serendipitous discovery.
The setting up of the exhibition was in itself a massive task that thankfully led to more discoveries as the work unfolded and progressed. What had been originally a small exhibition of about 40 or so exhibits ballooned into a presentation with well over three times the number. Maps in Arabic, Turkish and Ethiopian turned up, as well as maps of Sicily, China, Cyprus, Canada and England.
Many of these are unique examples and it is to the credit of the society that they have been unearthed and duly studied and recorded for all succeeding times.
Each map and plan is fully described and contains extremely interesting historical and cartographical information which is a mine of details for the expert and the general reader.
All the 138 maps and plans are presented in a sequence that reflects the dates of birth of the respective family members, from those of Charles Frederick to Leopoldo, the youngest one who died in 1886.
The curators have been able to muster nine maps or plans by Charles Frederick, 14 by Federico, 23 by Luigi, 41 by Giuseppe, one by Leopoldo and 15 so-called Brocktorff-related.
Each map and plan is fully described and contains extremely interesting historical and cartographical information
And what an eclectic collection it turns out to be. In addition to the obvious local maps, there are maps of Palestine, Sicily, Naples, Crete, Alexandria, China, Carthage, the voyages of St Paul’s, Messina, Rhodes and other places. There are more ‘unexciting’ examples of, say, proposed waterworks for the Five Cities, harbour extension, the aqueducts of Malta and even sanitation systems for Sliema.
What first catches the eye is, of course, the sheer aesthetic beauty of most of the items, even though they were made for direct practical purposes, and it goes to show that even draughtsmanship can reach notable artistic heights.
But, even more interesting and lasting in value and surely something that will repay any reader with little artistic interest are the biographic, historical, social and economic, concise, explanatory details the editors have compiled relevant to each item and which will guarantee endless hours of attentive analysis and a source for future researchers.
Just a few teasers will serve to whet appetites. Two maps lead to the explanation of the four gibbets with the remains of the Delano piratical crew, shown at Ricasoli Point, which, in the early 1820s, became quite a macabre attraction for some time.
The map of Malta and its Dependencies, published in issue number 13 of the Malta Penny Magazine, is accompanied by a potted history of this charming publication, which was the brainchild of the Swiss missionary Matthaus Weiss.
The 1840 map of the newly-excavated Ħaġar Qim complex is accompanied by an account of the early investigation, while the ground plan of the Mosta Rotunda has an accompanying text to explain the original attempts to build it as well as architectural observations.
The map showing the nine-day wonder of the volcanic Graham island that appeared in the Sicily channel is completed by its travailed history, short as it was.
There are countless other details which will be discovered by the leisurely reader. Perhaps the only fly in the ointment is that the size of the pages do not do full credit to the maps and plans, but a larger-size production would have had an almost prohibitive selling price.
The corpus of the Brocktorff may not have been as artistically fine as that of the Schranzes and it often lacks the elegant draughtsmanship of Michele Bellanti, but the exhibits here presented give witness to the assiduous work of a most significant family of artists.