Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Ball

Portraits in a new art book are arranged alphabetically, allowing for a majestic portrait of former British governor Alexander Ball to be closely followed by an irreverent caricature of presenter Lou Bondì.

“The mediocre is so important,” says Marquis Nicholas de Piro, flicking through his book, The National Portrait Gallery of Malta, at Casa Rocca Piccola, in Valletta, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. “Most of us are mediocre; only a few of us are geniuses.”

The book brings together about 2,000 portraits of people connected with Malta across a millennium of art and history.

It took Mr de Piro and his team, including photographer Peter Bartolo Parnis, over 10 years to complete their research

In that time, they visited hundreds of private collections, painstakingly obtaining permission to photograph portraits of – and by – both the great and the good and the relatively unknowns.

TV presenter Lou Bondì

“This isn’t just about the important people who made Malta,” he says. “This is an art book. What I wanted to find out was who painted whom – not only great portraits but also examples of naïve or unsophisticated art, which can be very interesting for a collector.” The result is an eclectic collection: from a portrait of Count Roger hanging in the Archbishop’s Palace to works by Edward Caruana Dingli and a painting of Giuseppe Calì by Temi Zammit.

There are also contemporary writers, actors and politicians – from Daphne Caruana Galizia to Norman Lowell – not all of whom, Mr de Piro admits, will be all too happy with their portrayals.

Bringing the works together, Mr de Piro says, was an exercise in both thoroughness and serendipity. A portrait of George Borg Olivier was found in a gallery in London; others were found wedged between mattresses in a forgotten room on the roof of an international artist’s Malta residence.

The book brings together about 2,000 portraits of people connected with Malta across a millennium of art and history

Together, as the author puts it in his introduction, they represent the “aspirations, pretentions and sophistication” of countless different eras of Maltese history.

The light the portraits shine on their time, in fact, is sometimes as important as their artistic merit. A view of the mountains in the portrait of an upper-class young girl, Mr de Piro says, is “pure snobbery”, designed to indicate that the family had land abroad; the significance of plumed helmets in a number of Knights-era paintings, however, even he is unclear on.

Helena Dalli

The author hopes his book can serve as a virtual stand-in for the National Portrait Gallery he believes Malta will never have. “The State would have to pay to commission or acquire all the works, so you’d need to be quite a wealthy State to do it,” he says.

Nevertheless, the release of the book acknowledges what Mr de Piro describes as a major revival of the art of portraiture in recent years.

“After the war, many people would just have their photograph taken. Now – partly out of vanity perhaps – it’s making a return. If you were to ask me for a hundred people who can paint a decent portrait, I could give you their names right now.” The National Portrait Gallery of Malta will be available from early November in all leading bookshops.