In his sixth article of this series on the Schranz artists, John Schranz, great-great-grandson of Giovanni Schranz, returns to Anton Schranz’s second son, Antonio. This article discusses his work, oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and photographs.

With his years of extensive travels along the eastern Mediterranean coasts and much of the Middle East, one could call Antonio Schranz stateless. He probably saw himself so. His response to the pull of ancient cultures, primarily as seen in his Greek and Egyptian works, provides ground for interesting reflection.

Many early 1800s paintings by travelling artists evoked Hellas’s gloriously restrained monuments: the Temples of Olympian Zeus or Jupiter in Aegina, the Theseion, Arcadia, the Acropolis... Onto that ‘Golden Age’ glow they then painted ‘the Greeks’, finely bedecked, at Arcadian ease, evoking the idyll, or grazing sheep in pastoral settings. Alternatively, res­ponding to Shelley’s “We are all Greeks!”, they painted them preparing for ‘holy wars’ against ‘the infidels’ – in the bloody War of Independence.

Dominic Cutajar, former curator of Malta’s Museum of Fine Arts, calls Antonio “the sole authentic Romantic artist” in 19th century Maltese art (the italics are Cutajar’s). In their few paintings featuring Greece’s ancient monuments, the Schranzes, though being Romantics, rejected the ‘romanticising’ that Greece elicited from many artists. Three 1832 Antonio oils show no adulation of Hellas’s Golden Age. His representations of ancient monuments elsewhere, however – those of Petra, Syria, Anatolia and, particularly, Pharaonic Egypt – transmit his awe at beholding bygone grandeur and mystery.

His Greek oils reject delicate, refined brushwork. A rough impasto renders crumbled, decayed monuments, suggesting realism... even impressionism, perhaps.

Antiquity’s debris crowds foregrounds with oppressive piles of sombre, sprawling rubble. Tiny, ramshackle hovels assembled from crumbled monuments take centre stage, threatening to collapse any moment; their rotten doors suggest impossible living conditions for children tugging at mothers, while on washing lines stretched between fallen ashlars of ancient walls an old woman hangs a tattered wash.

Antonio’s Greeks are as he saw them: toiling human relics, eking out a living, struggling to survive off an earth ravished by their Ottoman occupiers. His statelessness matching theirs, he sought to encounter them on equal terms.

Emblematic is a pencil drawing of myriad Greek houses crammed tightly, seemingly sliding precariously down a steep hill, his clinically fine, free pencil-work appearing feverish. An elegant, architecturally detailed drawing of one reveals its skeletal, fragile structure: criss-crossing, slats and poles, narrow, thin, disturbingly rickety. Fifteen thin poles keep the house standing, somehow bearing its roof’s weight, holding everything together. Each pole is fixed for stability in an upside down Corinthian capital; the capitals were salvaged from collapsed marble columns, remains of some Roman edifice.

It is this picture of scavenging and dour determination that Antonio’s Grecian works present. No utopia. No clarion call to arms. No tourist attractors. They testify to huma­nity’s grim perseverance.

A portrait Giovanni made in Corfu, with the war of independence raging, shows a warrior whose father, Markos Botsaris, a key revolutionary figure, died on the battlefield. Giovanni drew and etched Markos’s young son, armed to the teeth, his sword too big for him, pistols wedged in his sash, sitting defiantly on his father’s sarcophagus.

Dimitrios Botsaris became emblematic of the revolution; below the drawing, a poem in Greek has him chastising his father’s spirit: “Be quiet, father! Stop swearing and grumbling at the war’s slow progress! You are not forgotten: look, we Greeks rush to avenge you; soon we shall beat the tyrants.”

This youth would become the freed Greek nation’s Minister for War. His portrait – the only one known finished (i.e. not a sketch) from the Schranz brothers – attests to their sentiments for Greece’s struggle for freedom.

Antonio’s Romanticism is a ‘spartan’ one, heralding the revolutions that would soon shake Europe’s anciens régimes, launching Realism. His 1832 oils’ particular handling of ancient Greece’s monuments disappears in his 1842 Pharaonic Egypt watercolours – returning around 1850 in his photographs of Islamic Cairo’s monuments.

Antonio’s Cairo photos capture his feelings for this city – ancient, vast, pining for bygone glory... but living misery

His ancient Egypt is crystalline, limpid; everything seemingly scrubbed clean. Light gleaming from azure skies bathes the air through a frozen, clear atmosphere. Artists representing their Hellenic ideal waxed lyrical at Greece’s light; Antonio does that with Ancient Egypt: visibility is perfect, distances reaching for infinity remain identifiable. Clean bodies of colour meeting at precisely determined frontiers etch contours sharply, while interplaying pastel hues sing.

Sight stimulates a tactile sense: everything is sleek, like polished marble, smooth as silk, clean, fresh. Foregrounds do have stones, dust and sand – that’s how the ground was! – but Antonio’s treatment is different: stones and dust rarely dominate, and when they do, there’s a smooth cleanliness, with verdure bursting forth. The 1842 Castlereagh Egypt watercolours are alight, like his 1851 Allendales. They had to be – those monuments epitomise Pharaonic Egypt’s scientific and artistic innovations.

In stark contrast, Antonio’s oils of Athens’ monuments distil his experiences of his contexts. In those crammed Athenian foregrounds, cluttered with dilapidated accretions, the wind rippling the wash would billow dust clouds from the caked, dead earth – squalor, however, quells it. What worked itself out of Antonio onto these paintings is his sharing in the pain of the human condition. His Cairo photographs echo this.

One of the earliest photographers

Antonio’s photographic studio, opened around 1848, is Cairo’s first, 10 years before anyone else’s. Mohammed Ali, who launched important social and economic reforms, died that year; Ismai’l Pasha’s greater changes followed... 15 years later, however, in 1863.

Meanwhile, Cairo was not even a memory of its past. Its population was half what it was in the 1300s. Antonio’s Cairo photographs capture his feelings for this city – ancient, vast, pining for bygone glory... but living misery.

Discussing Cairo’s early photographers, Hélène Bocard finds Antonio’s “rigorously composed” photographs “very daring, clearly not made for tourists” – large, littered foregrounds, broken walls, stones, gravel, sand and dust dominate, making them non-commercial. Photographed from high points, mosques are distant and set high in the image; cacophonic, littered rooftops crowd the broad foregrounds.

Devoid of human presence, Antonio’s Cairo photographs seem strange: in his Grecian oils and Pharaonic Egypt watercolours, figures underline his vision: the former miserable, their doings drab, their existence beaten; the latter colourful, reclining languidly, blissfully contemplative. His Cairo photographs feature human absence.

Technology could explain this: 1840s exposure times were long. The shortest, for Collodion prints, exceeded four seconds. Passersby would become a flowing blur. People had to be posed. Antonio’s group of Cairo fishermen still manifests exposure problems: two blurred faces, blurred clothing, a vanished arm, while two long pipes, resting on the ground, avoid movement.

Antonio’s photos persistently capture empty, littered spaces without human presence. His 1847 Cairo lithographs, however, published with Lemercier et Cie, Paris, present a busy centre, throbbing with bust­ling crowds and mounted soldiers.

The exposure prob­­lem does, in part, explain his photos’ human absence – not, however, their extraordinarily extensive foregrounds, void and squalid. These speak a different language, inevitably recalling his 1832 Athens oils. But times had changed. In France, Realism had made its statement, with Courbet’s and Millet’s littered and cluttered ample foregrounds. Born in 1801, Antonio was indeed a Romantic; fed the zeitgeist by extensive travels in strife-torn territories, but he embraced the camera’s clinical eye.

Between his Cairo studio and an 1858 photo commission, Antonio opened another studio, with Giorgio Mitrovich’s nephew, Nicola Ardoino: Ardoino & Schranz, Photographers, 6, Strada Sant’ Ursola, Valletta. I was trying to identify a sepia family group from inscriptions on versos of other photos in my father’s art-nouveau family album; that verso appeared on one that had long been wedged there, meaning that my father knew them as relatives: his grandaunts, in fact, Giovanni Schranz’s daughters (and Antonio’s nieces) Adelaide and Elvira, born May 1843 and September 1845.

Ethnographer Evelyn Baluci dates the photo to the 1850s-60s, matching the two girls’ age. That find launched the search for Antonio’s photographic works, gradually unearthing a considerable opus – in the Getty Institute, in the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Collection, at the New York George Eastman Museum, and other collections. The inquiry led to what may be Antonio’s most interesting photographic ‘assignment’ – his and Antonin Proust’s journey to Mount Athos.

On May 9, 1858, with their Greek interpreter, Voulgaris, they left Constantinople for Halkidiki, a northern Greece peninsular region, home to the Mount Athos monastic state’s impressive, ancient monasteries, centre of Eastern Orthodox monasticism. Le Tour du Monde, the renowned weekly travelogue, published their journey: Voyage au Mont Athos, in which Proust studies, discusses and documents the community’s religious, artistic, philosophical and cultural practices, paralleling them with his own.

Woodcuts from Proust’s drawings and Antonio’s photos illustrate the text. Outstanding among Antonio’s are a sculpted wooden cross, the Iveron Monastery (later painted in oils) and a portrait of a Hegoumenos.

Proust also records the voyage’s trivia: dangerous, poetic, exasperating or hilarious. While sharing the profound experience, Proust’s unique text also sheds light on Antonio. Proust refers to him a number of times, such as when he amusedly quotes Antonio ironically challenging someone from the community on a superstitious statement. Another time, Proust expresses surprise at “Antonio’s ease in handling five or six languages, encouraging us to undertake research on a large number of the library’s books and documents”. Deploring the monks’ drab, faded vestments, “matching their sunburnt hands and faces”, Proust the artist adds, with tongue-in-cheek: “in that general monotony, I sometimes catch myself admiringly contemplating Schranz’s golden yellow, Nanjing cotton trousers, mercifully dispelling the dullness”.

Unlike Castlereagh’s, Proust’s journey emerges as one shared by artists – the reader is Proust’s companion, hearing his musings. Manet’s friend since childhood; Proust is an artist, journalist, author and later France’s first minister of culture. The hand doing the engaged writing heralds his future political involvement, berating England and Russia, that era’s power-mongering empires, for instrumentalising religion to deny Greeks the freedom their revolution had shown they deserved.

“Thirty-six when writing his travelogue, Castle­reagh lacked the scholarly depth of Proust, who was only 26 when he wrote his – and yet, Proust threw open his entire upbringing to Eastern Orthodoxy’s challenges: religious, philosophical, aesthetic and socio-political, while Castlereagh, often pronouncing himself bored, manoeuvred situations to satisfy his craving to be recognised as being superior.

Castlereagh’s travelogue engravings were made from Antonio’s watercolours, 1841 being early for photography. One wonders how Antonio’s encounter went with the famous artist J. F. Lewis, during the Castlereagh group’s five-month stay in Cairo. After leaving, Castlereagh commissioned a painting from Lewis; his written instructions said: “not including Mr Schranz”. This is surprising, as his letters show he greatly admired Antonio and his work. Castlereagh never acquired the painting. Exhibited 14 years later in London, it created a furore, with Ruskin calling it “one of the most wonderful pictures in the world”.

Researching that strange prohibition led me to an interesting discovery: up to 1903, Antonio’s paintings adorned Castlereagh’s room in the family home of his wife’s deceased first husband, together with portraits by Lewis. One was of Castlereagh; another – of Antonio, the only one known of him. Unfortunately that portrait is lost, it is said.

Coincidentally, a Proust drawing probably features a portrait of Antonio: two men on horseback ride past farmers picking hazelnuts. Both riders being evidently much older than 26, excludes Proust. The lean, dark rider, evidently much younger than Antonio’s 57, must be the interpreter. The portly, flamboyant one, looking the right age, is therefore probably Antonio. Aptly, it is the travelogue’s concluding illustration. We will never know with certainty. Antonio remains as elusive as ever.