The exhibition of the Schranz artists’ works at Fort St Elmo, Valletta, opens on Friday. The exhibition, entitled The Schranz Family of Artists – A Journey of Rediscovery, celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Schranz artists’ family’s arrival in Malta on July 17, 1818. It is organised by Heritage Malta in collaboration with the Schranz family and the Schranz Bicentenary Committee. In this concluding article of his series, John J. Schranz sets the ground by focusing on the context in which the Schranz artists lived and worked.

Rev. Antoni Pons y Mercadal (1791), Anton Schranz’s first commission in Menorca, completed on October 24, 1791, eight months after his February 1791 arrival there.

A better understanding of the Schranzes’ work – as with that of all artists – necessitates a sense of the context they operated in. For too long they were considered in a narrow, constricting frame assembled mainly of features extracted from (or related to) British naval personnel in Malta. That does account for much (though far from most) of Giovanni Schranz’s work, as well as some (certainly not most, as the impression long was) of Anton Schranz’s work in Menorca. The 1987 Mdina Cathedral Museum exhibition catalogue certainly started unlocking the doors for a rethink on this. More recent research threw them wide open.

The exhibition title heralds this widening of context: The Schranz Family of Artists: A Journey of Rediscovery. A broad sweep over their times’ momentous upheavals may enable viewers to see their work within a wider, more revealing frame.

Faced by the Industrial Revolution’s stark, grim(y) reality, art sought new aesthetic criteria in nature: its beauty, majesty, the awe of the sublime it often inspires, coupled with contrasting, oft-attendant experiences of trepidation and horror, dethroning the Enlightenment’s orderly world view. In art, Romanticism appeared around the 1760s, which happens to be the decade when Anton Schranz was born. His date of birth, May 14, 1769, points at what would follow for him and his family: it preceded by three months the birth of the man who can be said to have made the times: Napoléon Bonaparte, born on August 15, 1769. By the time they were 20, the unthinkable had happened: the revolution opened the floodgates of change.

Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, Napoléon Bonaparte en 1792, one year before his brilliant Toulon victory.

1791, January: Napoleon started consolidating his army career; Anton Schranz was shipped with his Swiss regiment from Barcelona to Menorca, to defend the island against a potential invasion by revolutionary France. Nearly upon arriving, he obtains an important commission – a portrait.

1792, August: Napoleon is known to have witnessed the attack on the Tuileries, where a Swiss regiment, fellow to Anton’s, was massacred defending the empty palace, trying to prevent the revolutionaries discovering that Louis XVI had just escaped; the handful of survivors were butchered in prison the following day.

1792, September: Anton obtained an honourable discharge from his regiment, to launch his artistic career in Menorca.

1793, December: Napoleon’s triumphant victory over the combined British, Spanish and Neapolitan forces in the siege of Toulon launched his ascendancy.

Nine months later, September 1794: Anton married Isabella; their first son, Giovanni, was born in November; Anton starts forming his dynasty of artists on that remote, idyllic island – oblivious of the maelstrom that an irresistible rise to fame would soon unleash, 300 kilometres away.

The frontispiece of Description de l’Égypte; the engraving is inscribed Fac-simile des monumens coloriés de l’Egypte. D’Après le tableau de C.L.F. Panckoucke. Panckouke was the 1825 2nd edition’s editor. (The spelling is that of the original.)

Presaged by the English and American revolutions (1688 and 1776), the French Revolution irrevocably set in motion a worldwide tidal wave of sweeping changes. Spain, where the Inquisition still wielded immense power, shared a border with France; its king, Charles IV, whose title was ‘His Most Catholic Majesty’, immediately experienced its might: with his son Ferdinand, he became Napo­leon’s “luxury prisoner-guest” in Paris. Portugal’s Maria I escaped to Brazil with her 15,000 courtiers and the vast Portuguese crown silver, days before Napoleon invaded Portugal. Those erstwhile colonial powers’ long-coming collapse saw all their South American colonies rebelling for freedom – secular individualism’s winds of institutionalisation fanned their resolve for constitutional, parliamentary government.

Confronted and belligerently defied on the European theatre of war – and beyond – by the power determined to become the vastest empire, Napoleon’s self-crowned imperial visions of greatness fanned his ambitions disproportionately. The fervour his exploits generated started going sour. The backlash was strong; Beethoven’s dramatic act epitomises art’s response to abuse of power: so vehemently did he scratch out his dedication to Napoleon from the Third Symphony (Eroica) cover that the quill tore the sheet. Those rousing times’ mercurial fortunes were built, sadly, on military and civilian corpses of between 3,250,000 and 6,500,000 dead – 350,000 from cold or starvation in the Russian Campaign’s disastrous retreat.

The fiery and heady (though utterly deadly) decades of land and sea warfare on a scale so grand as never seen before ended with the Battle of Waterloo. The revolution’s dreams, embarrassed by Napoleon’s imperial aspirations, betrayed by a flurry of treaties and buried by the Congress of Vienna, saw Pax Brittannica steadily take over. The former great coloniser, Spain, was in utter disarray – and it was at this point that Anton translocated again; sensing what was coming, he moved to Malta. Other monarchies and empires did not collapse immediately: sustained by the Congress’ embrace, they started reaffirming their grip, gradually finding their feet again.

Their lives ran in tandem with Romanticism

The flame had been lit, however. Ancient foundations shook. After 400 years, Greece challenged the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ Ottoman Empire, as other vassals did: Albania, Serbia, Egypt; the European powers waited, observed or intervened, depending on shifting allegiances. In 1830, France revolted again. More resoundingly came 1848: the Year of Revolutions. Hardly a corner remained untouched. Uprisings and wars of independence flared everywhere – from Sicily to Denmark, Ireland to Habsburg Austria, Hungary, Germany, Canada, across South America… and more.

Upper work: Stone Breakers, 165 x 257cm (a copy). The 1849 original, by Gustave Courbet, leader of the Realism movement, was destroyed in World War 2. Lower work: Though the detail’s subject is the same, Anton Schranz’s Menorca work (c.1799) is clearly in the Romantic tradition.

The tremor spread eastwards, where Britain’s Trojan horse, the British East India Company, deployed its private army of over a quarter of a million men (double Britain’s army) against small city States that dared try to stop its lucrative far eastern trade from fleecing them. Its struggling French counterpart, meanwhile, tried (unsuccessfully) to rival it. Strife and unrest were everywhere; in many territories, even slaves arose forcefully enough for wars to be declared upon them.

Freed of the belief that what unites peoples is monarchy, awakening minds feasted on boundless outpourings of Romanticism’s intellectual, artistic, musical and literary exponents: Verdi, Rossini, Wagner, Grieg, Weber; Nabucco, William Tell, Tannhaüser, Peer Gynt, Der Freischutz, the Grimm Brothers’ writings, Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poems, Delacroix’ Liberty Leading the People… all manifest nationalism’s foundations. The worldwide Year of Revolutions irrevocably led to nation States in the long run; it would take years, however. Curbed as it was again by monarchies’ and empires’ sheer clout, its short-term aspirations were profoundly frustrated, aggravated by disenchantment with the Industrial Revolution, giving birth to Realism.

Before that, however, two important events fired and fanned public interest. The 160-strong scientific team of savants, scholars and scientists who had accompanied Napoleon’s failed Nile campaign (and discovered the Rosetta Stone, enabling the reading of Egyptian scripts) suddenly opened Europe’s eyes to Egypt’s wonders of Antiquity.

After 28 years of work, together with 1,600 artists and 400 engravers, they published the huge volumes (34 in the second edition, two of them 1m x 81cm in size) of Description de l’Égypte. Ten volumes consist of 894 plates from 3,000 drawings. The magnificent opus enthused Europe and beyond. Two years later, in 1831, Greece won its War of Independence (though its infighting dragged on). Its freedom thrilled Europe: the womb of European culture, for many still Ancient Hellas, was reborn.

Details from (left) Claude-Joseph Vernet’s La Tempête (1759) and (below) Giovanni Schranz’s Wild Waves in Grand Harbour (undated, circa 1830?).

A movement of peoples got under way: intellectuals, artists, poets, historians, musicians (very few, Felicien César David and – later – Gustav Holst were two)… a wave very different to the centuries-long, vast mobilisations of armies, territorially motivated and bellicose. The objective now was culture and art. It was also anthropological, reinforcing emergent nationhood by experiencing otherness, seeing it, recording it in drawings, paintings, travelogues, living what had been heard of but never seen or felt.

In spite of lawlessness, skirmishes and wars (burgeoning with the Eastern Question in the weakening Ottoman Empire’s subjugated territories), they travelled extensively all over Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Greece, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and eventually the Ottoman Sultan’s seat, Constantinople, its exotic sophistication exerting its fascination.

In this context are the Schranz artists located. Their second home, astride the world’s oldest sea route, had become the base of the world’s biggest empire’s navy, especially after the Suez Canal opened. Other than his 1791 arrival in Menorca and his 1817 move to Malta, no evidence shows Anton travelling; he was, it seems, a settled man. Unlike him, his artist sons and daughters were restless travellers – Giovanni (until his marriage), Antonio, Giuseppe, Margherita, Francesca, even their mother, Isabella… as well as Rinaldo and Costantino, of the subsequent generation, though they died young. They were all constantly on the move, as so many then were.

Their lives ran in tandem with Romanticism. The shores of their two idyllic island homes were caressed by mirror-calm seas and sculpted by the fury of roaring waves infused with corpses, victims of mankind’s daring wanderings and terrible wars. Across those waters, their travels took them to lands that had cradled man’s yearning for knowledge and invention.

Could they have painted differently? Perhaps. That, however, was their journey. Ours is to revisit it… rather, to try to.

The cover of the Eroica score (Symphony No. 3), showing Beethoven’s angry deletion of Napoleon’s name from the dedication.

Still Life with Apples, Süleyman Seyyid Bey (1842-1913), one of Giuseppe Schranz’s soldier-artist students at the Imperial Military Academy of Art, Constantinople. In 1862, Schranz and his colleague Pierre Gués awarded him a scholarship to study painting in Paris.