Abela’s cabinet of antiquities revisited : collecting, knowledge and patronage in seventeenth-century Malta

Abstract

Any observant visitor entering the former Conventual Church of the Order of St John in Valletta will notice three coats of arms above the doorway, commemorating the leading patrons of the building of the church in the 1570s. The coat of arms of Pope Gregory XIII is in the centre, flanked to the left by that of the Order, and to the right by that of Grand Master Jean de la Cassiere. The keen-sighted will also notice that high on the corners of the belfries, gargoyles carved in the shape of lions’ heads gaze out over the city, echoing the rampant lion in La Cassiere’s coat of arms. Another zoomorphic reference in the church’s façade, however, escapes most visitors nowadays. The two massive central corbels supporting the balcony directly above the same coats of arms are carved with an elegant and unusual motif made up of a series of converging volutes, reminiscent of the webbed wing of a bat or a flying fish (Fig. 1). The significance of this motif was practically forgotten when, several centuries later, during Valletta’s postwar reconstruction, it was echoed in a simpler, scaled-down version on the corbels on the apartment blocks just across St John’s Square. A clue to the origin of this motif lies between the corbels themselves, in the coat of arms of Gregory XIII, which displays a rising and winged dragon with a truncated tail. The figure of the dragon follows the prevailing conventions for the representation of these mythical monsters. The motif on the corbels shows an unmistakable similarity to the webbed wings on contemporary representations of dragons (Fig. 2), leaving little doubt that it was a direct reference to the coat of arms of Gregory XIII, completing the scheme of heraldic references on the church’s façade.