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The Cathedral of the Knights
Portrait and historical review of one of the world’s most opulent cathedrals...
What is most striking in St John’s Co-Cathedral, one of the most magnificent churches in the world, is the self-aggrandising vanity of the Knights of Malta, formerly called the Sovereign and Military Order of the Knights of St John. Originally a band of humble European aristocrats who volunteered themselves in trouble spots along Christian routes during the Crusades, as monks, warriors, and carers of the wounded, they were eventually beaten out of Jerusalem and later Rhodes. They ruled Malta from 1530 until Napolean Bonaparte’s invasion in 1798 (he allowed the 1,751 odd knights three days to gather what they could and depart), and in their last two centuries, the spoils of power coupled with secularisation rippling through Europe drew them back to their princely roots. Many knights were fussed over by Muslim slaves, clothing them and serving them food, and hoisting them through Valletta, the capital, in fancy sedan chairs. Decade after decade, many wallowed in debauchery, drinking, womanising, throwing banquets; in ever growing delusions of grandeur, they became overbearing overlords.
As the order’s conventual church for 220 years, the Co-Cathedral bears legacy to that transformation. They kept tinkering with the church all the while, particularly the addition of monuments commemorating the order’s commander in chiefs, the Grand Masters; there are more Grand Masters than saints in the church. The largest monument belongs to the French Grand Master Antonio Manoel de Vilhena, probably the most sumptuous of all, whose bust is flanked by triumphant angles and whose locks of shoulder-length hair resemble the manes of the two lions that support the whole structure. Vilhena is handsome, his face slightly tilted in smug confidence. But such flattery and prestige inevitably led to intrigue and internal power struggles, evident elsewhere in the church: another French knight, Anselme de Cays, took his grudges to the grave. He is buried under the threshold of the Passageway to the Annexe so that fellow knights couldn’t avoid stepping on the tombstone and unleashing the curse etched in marble, “You who tread on me will be trodden on.”
On retreat after the Turks had beaten them out of Rhodes, the knights acquired Malta from Spain to form the new frontline against the westerly expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Emperor Suleiman the Magnificent needed Malta as a platform to attack the western Mediterranean, but the knights courageously repelled a Turkish invasion in the Great Siege of 1565. Against all prognoses, the knights had halted the mighty Ottoman Empire, a victory that turned their fortunes round. Now celebrated as Europe’s heroes, membership recruitment surged and the knights’ coffers overflowed with personal wealth bequeathed to the organisation, income from the European estates knights’ families possessed, and, in Malta, a boom in trade and state-sanctioned piracy aimed at debilitating Muslim trade vessels. Over the years they consolidated their position in Malta, erecting some forty kilometres of fortifications, including the building from scratch of the new fortified city of Valletta.
Built between 1573 and 1578, St John’s Co-Cathedral was one of the first buildings to rise on Valletta’s skyline. Adopting some of the mannerist styles he had observed during his internship in Rome, the Maltese architect Girolmu Cassar designed a huge church, its scale almost distorting. It’s modelled on the Latin cross, with heavy piers to prop the vast nave, and its flanks hold nine side chapels. Cassar opted for an austere façade topped by stout belfries of flat surfaces that look like towers, a design that reflected the then ascetic sensibilities of the knights, although he softened the forbidding façade by ingeniously panelling it into three bays. At the time, the church’s interior was also suitably stark and grim.
Priorities and attitudes started to change irreversibly by the mid seventeenth century when Malta was considered impenetrable, and the knights’ fleet reigned supreme in the central Mediterranean, controlling an area of 1,000 kilometres diameter centred on the island. The Spanish recognised the severest of storms as the ones “which only the galleys of Malta could weather.” These developments rendered the knights’ role as frontline warriors to virtual oblivion, and in this atmosphere of complacency, they distanced themselves from their disciplinary vows of celibacy and chastity. They embraced baroque, which symbolised power and prestige, and they set about transforming the plain interior of their conventual church into the flamboyance of baroque. For several years they pumped more money into the Co-Cathedral than on defence. The result – a church that is artistically overwhelming, its baroque plumes and ripples blazing uncontrollably across the interior – led the ecclesiastical authorities to promote the conventual church to the status of a second Cathedral in 1813, hence the tag Co-Cathedral.
As you step from the sunny St John Square into the Co-Cathedral, your eyes take a while to adjust to the dimness of the nave. The variegated floor is a mosaic of 364 inlaid marble tombs where some of the higher hierarchies of knights are buried. Each tombstone was individually created, with a Latin scroll serving as an epitaph, and flippant with symbols of prestige, immortality, virtue and evil, such as eagles, angels, flags, lions, and crowns. The nave’s walls are studded with Maltese crosses and the coats of arms of the two Cotoner brothers (whose cotton buds plastered on their insignia symbolise an ancestry of cotton growers) who presided over the church’s transformation.
In 1661, Grand Master Rafael Cotoner commissioned the Italian artist Mattia Preti (1613–99) to paint the eighteen vignettes on the vault recreating episodes from St John’s life. He painted directly on the porous limestone, and applied directional light to overcome the distortion of perspective on the concave surface. It took Preti five years to finish the job, but he had clinched his reputation: besides executing several other paintings, he sculpted the piers to a rich pattern of gilded leaves, scrolls, and flowers, and became the artist at large who supervised the church’s artistic re-creation.
Impressive as the nave may be, it is the side chapels on either side beyond the piers that are the most ornate. Eight of the nine chapels were assigned to every langue, which was responsible for the design of its chapel (the order was constituted from eight langues that administratively grouped together the knights hailing from each of the eight European regions). Self-pride and a measure of pique drove each langue to compete for the most outstanding chapel, and each chapel is delightfully distinct in the design of its florid walls, ceiling and altars. Such rivalry is best illustrated in the bombastic monuments of the Grand Masters elected from that langue. Larger than wardrobes, most of the Grand Master monuments bristle with much of the same motifs of triumphalism – angels, flags, guns, cannons, swords, banners – framing a bust of the persona.
Of the two side chapels that don’t have Grand Masters, the largest is the Chapel of Germany. The only Grand Master elected from this region was the last one, the feeble Fredinand von Hompesch who ushered the knights’ loss of Malta when he capitulated to Napolean Bonaparte in 1798 without much resistance. He was humiliatingly stripped of his title the same year. The second chapel is the obscure Anglo-Bavarian Chapel. The original Anglican Langue dissolved in 1540 when Henry VII estranged Britain from the Catholic Church in Rome, executing unrepentant knights and confiscating their property in Britain. Some British knights continued to serve in exile, but their numbers were so small that they had to be annexed to the Bavarian Langue, which gave rise to the Anglo-Bavarian Langue in 1784. No Grand Master was ever elected from these regions, and this chapel lost its most valuable items – a set of silver caskets – when Napolean Bonaparte helped himself to the knights’ most expensive treasures to finance his military adventures.
Throughout the history of the order, French knights made up the largest contingent. Forty-four percent of the knights were French, and this status is reflected in the Chapel of Castille, the most sumptuous in the Co-Cathedral. It has the two largest Grand Master monuments, and an excellent mural by Preti entitled St James Assisting the Spaniards in Defeating the Moors. One of Preti’s last works, its muted colours – autumn-orange and russet – must have come naturally in the artist’s last years.
Right of the main altar, the Chapel of Our Lady of Philermos is the only one not assigned to a langue. It’s enclosed by silver balustrades and boasts a beautiful geometric marble floor. Redolent with the whiff of burning candles, it’s the holiest chapel, lit by a silver chandelier and graced by the simple beauty of the gold-gilded icon of the Madonna.
The church’s centrepiece is Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John the Baptist in the Oratory of St John, connected to the nave via a doorway right of the main entrance. Caravaggio was a fugitive from justice for committing murder when he found refuge in Malta in 1607. The knights courted him and commissioned various paintings, chief of which was the beheading for the Oratory, which served as a place of worship for novice knights. He painted it in 1608, and soon after found himself in prison on behalf of Italian justice. A few days later, he mysteriously escaped – probably aided by sympathetic Knights – and spent a further two years on the run before he died of fever. He was alone and thirty-eight. The beheading is considered by many art historians to be the best painting of the seventeenth century. In its perfectly balanced composition, its master use of light and shade, its application of half tones to breathe life into the subjects, it has the qualities of a masterpiece. Caravaggio was the first painter to effectively use sideways lighting to add depth to his paintings.
The Oratory leads to the Museum of St John that exhibits the church’s riches. Chief among these are the three large sets of Flemish tapestries quilted in 1702 by the Belgian artist Jodicos de Vos for a price almost equivalent to the yearly defence budget. Each is composed of fourteen panels depicting episodes from Christ’s life, Christian fables, and saints. These tapestries were hung in the church’s nave when, by the eighteenth century, church going had become a grandly ceremonial affair. As you browse the museum’s collection of church silverware, elaborate vestments, illuminated choral books, and several portraits of knights draped in a ceremonial atmosphere, it’s easy to imagine the rapturous ritual of mass in the church’s heyday. Every Sunday, several hundred knights donned their black robes emblazoned with a white Maltese cross to attend mass under the watchful eye of the Grand Master: he sat on his throne beside the altar as two pages took turns fanning him with a gold-handled peacock-feathered fan.
Given such unashamed pomp, it’s a good thing that Jean Parisot de la Vallette – the Grand Master the knights owed so much to – is buried in the barest part of the church, the Crypt of the Grand Masters. If he had to see the exuberance in the conventual church, he would frown deeply. Vallette balanced the wisdom of statehood with the stoicism of a seasoned warrior when, at the age of 72 in 1565, he led his knights to withstand the Turkish invasion, and later founded Valletta, which bears his name. His simple tub-shaped stone grave is propped on low stone trestles, and the Crypt, reachable via a flight of stairs near the altar, is the only place that has the qualities you would expect from a conventual church. The plain altar, typical of the vernacular altars of medieval Malta, is tucked into a corner and topped by a group of rare sixteen-century woodcarvings recreating the crucifixion. But what it lacks in art, the Crypt makes up in the solemn atmosphere of its ascetic simplicity. As the only part of the Co-Cathedral that retains the original, restrained tastes, it pays tribute to the knights’ mission, “the service of the poor, and the defence of the Catholic faith”.
© Victor Paul Borg
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