St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta will display its spectacular set of Flemish tapestries together for the first time after the planning authority approved the extension and refurbishment of the cathedral museum.
The major extension works will include the construction of a new Tapestry Hall and Caravaggio Centre with a new entrance and exit from Merchants Street, as well as the rehabilitation of underused spaces at basement level.
According to the cathedral foundation, the extension will address conservation stress caused by the number of visitors to the cathedral, which currently receives half of all tourists visiting Malta.
Most significantly, it will also allow the museum to properly display the set of Flemish tapestries, presented as a gift by Grand Master Ramon Perellos y Roccaful upon his election in 1697, which have been described as among the most influential Baroque tapestries in the world. Due to space constraints, only a third of the tapestries – which form a complete cycle – are currently displayed. Moreover, the tapestries cannot be enjoyed from an appropriate distance and some are obscured by other artefacts.
The extension, which has been under discussion in various forms – including underground – since 2008, was met with staunch opposition from, among others, Flimkien għal Ambjent Aħjar (FAA), which highlighted the bulk of the new building on Merchant’s Street and the visual impact it would have on Valletta’s urban environment.
The new three-storey building will obscure the side view of the cathedral from Merchants Street and take up a portion of the open space known as Great Siege Cemetery.
Mepa had suspended a decision on the extension last August after concerns from Unesco, but a subsequent advisory mission from the International Council on Monuments and Sites noted that despite the “inevitable” impact, the project’s benefits far outweighed the disadvantages.
The advisors made a number of minor architectural recommendations, which were all taken on board by the project architects.
During a planning authority hearing yesterday, which approved the extension with three votes against, FAA coordinator Astrid Vella insisted that other solutions could have been found to retain the tapestries in the cathedral itself, for which they were designed.
The cathedral foundation, however, said that this would have been impossible to do without obscuring the cathedral’s own distinctive features and risking damage to the tapestries themselves.
Concerns had previously also been raised about the relocation of the bones of knights who fell during the Great Siege, supposedly buried on site.
The foundation insisted, however, that contrary to public perception, the ‘cemetery’ was simply a monument and not an actual burial ground.