Caravaggio is the undisputed master of the chiaroscuro. But 400 years since his eventful visit to Malta, he would be shocked to see some of his greatest works obscured into oblivion – while the limelight is being shone on paintings of shady repute.
The capital city is hosting what is being marketed as “an exhibition of original masterpieces” under his name, Caravaggio: Images of the Divine.
Of the 17 advertised paintings only eight were exhibited and only three are authentic Caravaggio masterpieces.
Yet, international scholars and art experts are outraged at what they are calling a veritable scam with much wider and sinister implications.
Foremost among them is Italian celebrity art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, who speaking to MaltaToday said he was “perplexed” by the fact that the exhibition sells its paintings as Caravaggios without shedding light on the highly controversial attributions.
“It is clear there are only a few Caravaggios there,” Sgarbi said. Although he was invited for the opening, he distanced himself yesterday saying the curators have to answer for the ambiguous nature of the exhibition.
“All the paintings are of course great and beautiful masterpieces, but they’re the works of other Caravaggio contemporaries,” Sgarbi said.
The exhibition by Heritage Malta has been advertised here and abroad for months as an impossible gathering of the Italian genius’s opus that would have brought more than 17 of his masterworks under one roof.
Works such as The Beheading of St John, The Supper at Emmaus, the Burial of Saint Lucy, and the Adoration of the Shepherds grab the attention of any art lover worth his salt, and the public relations blitz launched by the heritage state agency, with the sponsorship of big government and private corporations, did just that.
The catalogue, press releases, website and pre-launch publicity circulated worldwide before the exhibition opened at the National Museum of Archaeology on 30 September promised the ultimate in the undisputed Caravaggio repertoire, under the patronage of Malta’s President Eddie Fenech Adami and his Italian counterpart, Giorgio Napolitano, together with Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, Culture Minister Francis Zammit Dimech, Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, foreign minister Massimo D’Alema, home affairs minister Giuliano Amato and Italian ambassador Paolo Andrea Trabalza.

Yet visitors to the exhibition end up seeing only three of the artist’s undisputed masterpieces: St John the Baptist, on loan from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica of Rome, the St Francis of the Museo Civico di Cremona, and the St Francis from Palazzo Barberini, Rome. The latter is however also a disputed picture about which the arts world is divided.
The rest are five highly controversial paintings brought from Europe and the US, attributed to Caravaggio by a minority of art experts and snubbed by the majority, who laud their beauty and technique but dismiss them outright out of the artist’s repertoire.
Visitors to the Valletta museum are easily led to believe that all the eight paintings are Caravaggio’s works despite the raging controversy, but surely deceitful is the website set up for the exhibition, www.caravaggiomalta.com.
On the page “exhibition online”, the website lists a total of 17 masterpieces that are supposedly on show, including the Beheading of St John and the St Jerome that are still hanging at the St John’s Co-Cathedral, and other great works that are in fact still exhibited not in Valletta but in faraway Milan, Rome, Messina, Syracuse and elsewhere.
The same ruse is used on the exhibition’s official catalogue, which places masterpieces that are not on display and even gives them exhibit numbers as if they were brought to Malta for the event.
The organisers defend the exhibition, which is praised all the same for bringing over three Caravaggio masterpieces to Malta. Yet the answers to their critics remain unconvincing.
Renaissance Productions, the events company embroiled in a quarrel with one of its prestigious former clients earlier this year – tenor Josef Calleja – is credited with making the contact for Heritage Malta with Italian agency RomArtificio run by Roberto Celli.
An Italian exhibition organiser notorious in the arts market circles, Celli has convinced Renaissance and Heritage Malta of his ability to get up to 20 Caravaggio masterpieces to Malta for the 400th anniversary, persuading even Culture Minister Francis Zammit Dimech to give his full support.
“We originated the idea through our contact in Italy,” said Anton Tabone of Renaissance Malta and nephew of Heritage Malta’s chairman, Mario Tabone. “It befitted Malta to organise such a high calibre exhibition. But obviously not being experienced in art we only served as the catalysts and handed over the idea to Heritage Malta.”
In fact, about the “missing masterpieces”, Tabone claims he cannot give much answers.
“We can’t answer about these details. I know there were some paintings, not many, that didn’t make it at the last moment, despite being promised we would get them on loan. Celli dealt with the foreign institutions for Heritage Malta.
“I know the Beheading and the St Jerome were never requested, and the fact there is controversy about some of the paintings is part of the interesting debate. There are world authorities giving their signature to Caravaggio’s attribution, like Sir Denis Mahon and Maurizio Marini. You know how it goes, there are lots of paintings which are not recognised by the majority as Caravaggios today but that will be recognised tomorrow, and vice-versa.”
The same Celli was responsible for a “Royal screw-up” when last November he persuaded the Queen’s surveyor of paintings to exhibit in Rome a newly proposed Caravaggio from the royal collection for the first time since its restoration.
The picture, the Call of Saint Peter and Andrew, was to be exhibited with other great Caravaggio masterpieces.
What RomArtificio ended up doing instead was to secure a low-key exhibition space at the unsightly Termini train station for two months, with controversial paintings attributed to Caravaggio flanking it.
That same event also had the “signature” of Sir Denis and Marini – both of whom were involved in the Malta venture as curators.
Heritage Malta Chairman Mario Tabone said the website was meant to be closed down given that it contained wrong information.
“We have nothing to do with that website and we urged the people behind it to close it down,” Tabone said yesterday. “It’s unfortunate if it is online again. The catalogue, on the other hand, is not meant to merely list the paintings on show but also other pictures accompanied by a collection of essays.
“What we did was to make Caravaggio accessible to everyone, to reach out to the public, not just to art professors,” Tabone added. “That’s why we took a very didactic approach, with programmes for children, workbooks, Caravaggio trails, audiovisual presentations, plays and other ways of attracting the public’s attention through authentic means, not just superficial re-enactments.”
Kenneth Gambin of Heritage Malta said the agency never intended to get some of the paintings pictured in the official catalogue.
“Let’s say the catalogue is not ideal, but it’s unthinkable to believe we would ask for the Beheading,” Gambin said. “Nor did we request the Burial of St Lucy or the Supper at Emmaus. They’re included in the magazine for the sake of completeness because we wanted to cover all of the artist’s major works at the end of his life.
“Some other paintings are missing because unfortunately we didn’t manage to conclude agreements with some of the museums and institutions that had to loan them to us. One of them, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, was found at the last moment to have its frame infested with woodworms,” – although even this work is deemed not to be a Caravaggio by most art experts.
Tabone himself admitted “only three or four” of the pieces exhibited are uncontested Caravaggios.
“There’s no problem with that,” Tabone said. “The fact that there is wide disagreement about them means there’s still a healthy debate. In fact my original suggestion was to name the exhibition ‘And the debate continues’. Our curators (Marini and Sir Denis) believe they’re all Caravaggios but lots of scholars question that.”
Gambin added: “If there are 80 Caravaggios in the world, there is hardly agreement about 20 of them. World scholars keep debating his works, and the fact he never signed his paintings except the Beheading doesn’t help much, although even then his signature could be forged.”
Caravaggio scholar and lecturer in history of art at the University of Malta, Dr Keith Sciberras, is however of a different opinion.
He says the corpus of undisputed Caravaggio pictures is large and only a handful of his paintings are genuinely disputed.
“I am thrilled we can take art history students to view two Caravaggio masterpieces – that much has to be credited to Heritage Malta as this in itself is a great contribution to our country – but the rest of the paintings are highly disputed, even discarded, by the absolute majority of international scholars,” Sciberras said when contacted. “Some of them are not even considered as Caravaggios, while others are obviously contemporary copies.”
Himself the consultant and catalogue co-editor of a parallel Caravaggio exhibition by the St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation that brought on loan the famous Portrait of a Knight from the Pitti, Sciberras said: “The very controversial pieces have to be clearly labelled as such so the public would be aware. If attribution is under question, or there are possible attributions to other artists, they should also be spelt out in the catalogue and on the display.
“The Sacrifice of Isaac, for example, is a brilliant, wonderful work of art, but I, and lots of other scholars, do not believe it is a Caravaggio.”
Sciberras said catalogues should “generally reflect the paintings on show in the exhibition” with the exception of a couple that would not make it at the last minute.
“One expects catalogues to include a few paintings that wouldn’t arrive because of last minute mishaps. But when you have nine out of 17 paintings missing that means there’s something wrong, especially when you have been bombarded with press releases and adverts publicising them.”
Of the same opinion is Professor David Stone of the University of Delaware’s Department of Arts History and one of the high profile Caravaggio experts invited by the St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation for its exhibition.
“The (Heritage Malta) exhibition has many excellent paintings in it but it would be fairer to talk about Caravaggio and his followers for the simple fact that many of the paintings are copies that are disputed and attributed to other artists,” Prof. Stone said.
“What is important is whether or not the scholarly opinion has been brought to bear on this exhibition and its catalogue, rather than presenting it as a clear-cut case of a Caravaggio exhibition, when the opposite is the case. Unfortunately, this doesn’t come out clearly in the exhibition. The Sacrifice of Isaac, for example, is not Caravaggio’s, even less its copy, which is also exhibited. Even the general public can tell that one is a mediocre copy of the other, and the exhibition doesn’t help one appreciate all this.
“Very often it is the case that exhibition catalogues would include some paintings that would not have made it in the end, but never in my career have I ever seen a case where there are more absent paintings listed in a catalogue than there are on show. I think this is too bad; the catalogue does not represent the exhibition in this sense.”
One of the ironies about the two parallel exhibitions is that, by looking at both catalogues, one is led to believe the St Jerome is in both places at the same time as it is listed and numbered in both of them.
About Sir Denis Mahon and Marini, Prof. Stone acknowledge their importance as scholars but insisted they were in a minority in persisting with their Caravaggio attributions.
“Almost no other scholar would say so,” he said about the controversial paintings attributed by them to Caravaggio. “These two are important scholars but they are in a minority. I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong, but this is a highly debated question that is not reflected in the exhibition and its catalogue.
“Besides, the labels and the lights are all wrong, with all that light shining in your eyes making it harder to identify what’s authentic and what isn’t. The labels don’t get at the heart of the matter and do not bring out the attributions contested in literature.
“This was a great opportunity to get the public involved in the delicate and complex world of attribution, but that opportunity was lost and what we got instead was a whitewashing of the issues. This lessens Caravaggio’s reputation, it devalues it unfairly. I think it is unfortunate that in this anniversary year of Caravaggio coming to Malta, instead of probing his influence on Malta and examining his works carried out here, we have this schizophrenic exhibition trying to do many things without doing anything well. This is really not about Caravaggio in Malta at all; it is kind of beside the point. It could easily be held in Tokyo.”
Sciberras also challenges the idea promoted by the exhibition, which shows two identical paintings attributed to Caravaggio, that the artist known for his disorganised and erratic lifestyle made his own copies.
“Caravaggio did not repeat himself,” he says categorically. “He had no workshop, and it was not in his temperament. In fact, in two famous instances that he produced second versions, these are not exact copies.”
The idea of exhibiting minor, not to say rejected, works as Caravaggio’s next to his undisputed masterpieces also has sinister implications on the art market.
Experts observe that the way the arts market works, once you start exhibiting the controversial pieces in such a high profile exhibition, their price starts sky rocketing tremendously, by the millions.
“When you look at this catalogue, placing the ‘rejects’ side by side with the Beheading and all under the patronage of Malta’s and Italy presidents, prime ministers and authorities, it is inevitable that their market value will go up,” one expert said.
“In theory, having so many works from private collections raises questions, as we don’t know if they are on the art market,” Prof. Stone said.
Open till 30 November, the event has also attracted some of the most generous corporate sponsors and supporters willing to have their brands near the master’s brush, namely the National Lotteries Good Causes Fund, the Malta Tourism Authority, HSBC, Air Malta, the Malta Financial Services Authority, GO, the Malta Stock Exchange and Alarm Tech.

kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt