I find it hard to think of a Sunday morning more pleasurably spent than in the lovely Church of Santa Caterina d'Italia in Valletta listening to some good music. For well on to three years this church has been the venue for chamber music performances that have gained, quite rightly, a large and loyal audience.
The raison d'être is not just to have a venue, there are plenty of those, but to raise funds for the restoration of the church's interior. While the exterior was beautifully restored about six years ago the interior with its lovely paintings, exquisite sculpted decoration and the magnificent grisaille of the dome remained untouched.
The first phase of restoration, the Preti altarpiece, has now been restored to its former glory; or almost, as there is a bone of contention about a "pentiment" that, despite the restoration, still all but ruins the otherwise flawless balance of Preti's genius.
The restored painting was temporarily on display during a concert at St Catherine's prior to its being stored at the Museum of Fine Arts until the rest of the interior undergoes much needed attention as finally the colossal sum required has been put up by a major sponsor and I will not steal their thunder by revealing who it is.
It must have been many years ago now that between the head of the martyr and her executioner two heads appeared in the black night sky.
Preti had in fact already placed a stone bridge and the lighthouse of Alexandria there, so it was obvious that these heads were superfluous. In Erminia Corace's treatise of Preti the repro shows the unrestored painting and the angels can just be made out.
One would have thought that these Preti rejects would have been painted out by the restorer, however, I have been informed that the present school of thought regarding restoration believes that a painting's vicissitudes must be shown too.
Therefore, as the two heads are part of the painting's past there they must remain. Frankly were I Mattia Preti, I would rise from the grave and haunt the restorers till the heads that I had removed are obliterated once more.
With the same reasoning, should Michelangelo's Pietà not have been restored after Laszlo Toth attacked it with a crowbar because the attack was part of the statue's history? Or should the statue have been mended in a way that shows the cracks? Leaving the angels there is tantamount to that. The wishes of the artist are to be respected.
Anyone with the slightest artistic inclination can tell that the two offending heads upset the symmetry of this gorgeous painting.
They not only detract but also distract as all through the concert my eyes kept returning to that fatal gap between the saint and the executioner wondering why these heads had been left there. To be fair the restoration job is superlative; the gleaming armour, the tears rolling down the cheek of a bystander, all of which were never evident in the unrestored version show us a Preti at the height of his expressive and creative genius. So please, nobody is in the slightest bit interested in the ghostly heads that mar an otherwise splendid job, and therefore, they are to be consigned to oblivion which is where the artist had sent them all those centuries ago.