Caravaggio, Preti and the Knights’ Painters

Caravaggio’s fifteen months

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio killed a man in Rome in May 1606 and fled south. He was in Naples by the autumn and in Malta by July 1607, where Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, who wanted a painter of that reputation, took him up. Within a year Caravaggio had painted the Grand Master’s portrait and the Beheading of St John the Baptist, the largest canvas he ever made and the only one he signed, and in July 1608 he was received into the Order as a knight.

In August 1608 he was involved in a brawl in which a senior knight was wounded, and was imprisoned in Fort St Angelo. He escaped, by means never fully explained, and was gone to Sicily by October. In December the Order expelled him in his absence, in the same oratory where the Beheading hangs. He was dead within two years.

Preti’s forty years

Mattia Preti, from Calabria, came to Malta in 1659 and stayed until he died in 1699. In those four decades he turned the plain conventual church of St John into the interior it has now, painting the whole vault with the life of the Baptist, and supplied altarpieces to churches across the island: the martyrdom of St Lawrence at Birgu, works for the cathedral at Mdina, and the canvases that now anchor the national collection at MUŻA.

Where Caravaggio is a single overwhelming picture, Preti is everywhere. The two together explain why an island of two hundred thousand people has a national collection worth a museum.

Following the thread

Begin in Valletta at MUŻA for Preti, go on to St John’s for the Beheading and the vault, and to the Palace where Wignacourt received his painter. Cross to Birgu for the fort Caravaggio was held in and the church with Preti’s altarpiece, and finish in Mdina, whose cathedral was rebuilt in Preti’s last years and holds his work. Every interior on this thread charges admission; the walk tells you what is behind each door before you decide.