St John’s Conventual Church

The floor of St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, is in many ways exceptional. The quality and quantity of its polychrome marble intarsia sepulchral slabs deserve our attention as much as the remarkable story of the floor’s survival and revival. Its culture of memory, initiated by the Order of St John during its stay at Malta, has been preserved and nurtured. The floor and its commemorative character have thus become an integral part of Malta’s heritage.

The unknown author of a seventeenth-century Latin eulogy inscribed in one of the many marble floor slabs in St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, offered passers-by a powerful reminder of eternity as he entreated them: ‘Flecte lumina, quisquis es, mortalitatem agnosce’ (Bend down with your lighted candles, whoever you are, and acknowledge your mortality). Contemporary visitors would have crossed over a dimly lit floor on their way to visit the grave of a confrère, treading upon images of skulls, skeletons, angels, and other symbols of life and death, victory and eternity on the many sepulchral slabs covering the church floor. Lit by the visitors’ candles, these images would have sprung forth from the darkness. Bending over, visitors would have looked for a particular name and, once they had found it, stood to read out the inscribed text, murmur prayers and remember their lost confrère. Intercessory prayers were said in the hope that through these suffrages the souls of dead comrades would be released more quickly from purgatory. Visitors realized that while their peers were lying beneath that ‘ice-cold marble’, they themselves might in time be laid to rest nearby to await their perfection and resurrection.

The ‘ Flecte lumina [...]’ text is inscribed on the polychrome marble intarsia floor slab of Frà François de Vion Thesancourt, Grand Prior of the tongue (division) of France (d.1649). It is placed among the other floor slabs at St John’s Co-Cathedral, the former conventual church of the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. Although the church has many fabulous collections of sacred art, a major defining characteristic of St John Co-Cathedral is its memorial floor of marble inlaid commemorative slabs. Many regard this pavement as the floor of floors: 407 inscribed texts in this church illustrate the importance of being commemorated as a member of the Order of St John.

This extraordinary collection of sepulchral commemorative slabs owes its existence to the Order of St John. Public display of those slabs forms part of the collective identity of the Knights of St John and shows the solidarity between the living and the dead Knights. Besides, the inscribed eulogies always had an educative and inspirational intention, whose validity, one hoped, would serve as a message in immortality.

Many of the inscribed eulogies on the sepulchral slabs contain two or more distinguishable styles. The descriptive part, in which the deceased Knight is introduced to the reader, contains his full name, and often his ancestry and place of origin, his cursus honorum (comparable to a short CV) and res gestae (his achievements). This part is composed in a military style, so typical of Latin, with characteristic harshness and brevity. The other part is of a much different style, where one may find poetic notions, sentimental feelings, philosophical thoughts about life and death, and occasionally, some wit.  Mentioned here may be the last deeds or moments of the deceased, composed in a more emotional style.

The aim of a panegyric, chiselled on a sepulchral slab, is to identify and identify with the deceased, whose mortal remains are reposing beneath. It must record information necessary for proper identification, such as the name, ancestry and coat of arms. There must be words of consolation and instruction, and words of praise for the deceased’s achievements, but also his relatives and dedicators are lauded, in the hope that their virtue will be an example to countless others. The Baroque mentality allowed a relatively larger freedom in writing eulogies, as long as they were doctrinally sound, than at present. In many countries today wit is not allowed on tombstones, and epitaphs may not be presumptuous or laudatory, although this rule is probably more often broken than observed. In early Christianity it was deemed arrogant and pagan to eulogize the dead, rather than to simply pray for their souls. Humanism reversed this custom, and the virtues of the deceased were emphasized to the extent that the epitaph became a summation of the late person’s achievements and character. The iconography of the slabs at St John’s shows us Angels of Fame who never seem to be out of breath when sounding their trumpets and blowing the deceased’s reputation to the four winds, while other allegorical figures are also playing to the gallery, prompted from the grave.

The victory of the Order of St John—or rather its survival in the Great Siege of 1565—brought it immense popularity throughout Europe. Although  simply part of Malta’s chequered history,  Voltaire stated two hundred years later that ‘nothing is better known than the siege of Malta’. It made the Order’s treasury and ranks swell as many aristocratic families offered landed property and monetary gifts as well as, more importantly, their children as novices to the Order. Having their sons as potential heroes greatly enhanced the status of aristocratic families amongst their peers.

The importance of the Great Siege as a benchmark against which heroism and triumph could be measured cannot be underestimated. St John’s was the Order’s conventual church and its aula heroum or hall of fame, a place which grew from humble beginnings into a showcase of the High Baroque in Malta. The church and its floor have undergone consecutive stages of artistic development, of which Mannerism and the Baroque have had the greatest impact.

Baroque art's eye-catching quality was a vehicle par excellence for describing a person through symbols, such as we find in memento mori (Latin: remember that you have to die) and vanitas concepts. St John’s funerary art typically contains many memento mori symbols. The religious ideas and military ideals of the Knights and the Order did generally not lend themselves very well to a civic atmosphere and the Knights of the Order gave a different meaning to the Renaissance concept of utile et dolce, ‘instructive and delightful’, which characterized the vanitas paintings. Instructive the tombstones definitely were, but the delightfulness was achieved not through showing a beautiful lady next to a bush of withered roses and shiny fruits with worms coming out, but through the intensity of the Knights’ spirituality and piety

Although the Knights took the reminder of their mortality to heart, they did not accept Death as a triumphatrix. Death’s role is simply as an active agent, unavoidable but necessary in pursuit of higher goals. It frequently occurs in the texts as mors invida, jeaulous Death or mors praematura, premature Death, but nowhere is it allowed to be victorious. Whereas elsewhere Death was feared for its ugly face, the Knights of the Order, at least as evidenced in the marble slabs at St John’s, simply regarded Death as a temporary inconvenience, an obstacle in the way to their ideal of eternal life and Resurrection with Christ.

Like many other church floors, the one at St John’s has developed and changed over the centuries. Slabs were added and removed or repaired when worn, but many were also subjected to a total makeover. Even the configuration of the floor itself was changed over time, sometimes drastically and on a large scale. During the reconfiguration of the floor by the Maltese artist Giuseppe Hyzler, completed in 1833, the movement of bones was not recorded. Therefore, if there are remains beneath a sepulchral slab, they do not necessarily belong to the person commemorated on the slab. Moreover, a large number of slabs are cenotaphs, the remains of the deceased having been buried elsewhere.

The Order’s sense of collective identity and culture of memory has spared the pavement at St John’s the fate suffered by so many other floors, i.e. when an old floor, considered out of date or irreparable, was replaced by what was considered a superior new floor. Ironically, a large amount of wear and tear was caused through the wearing effect of the shuffling feet of those for whom the texts were initially meant to be read, and later by large masses of visitors and worshippers, oblivious of the cry for eternity embedded in the inscribed texts underfoot. The vast collection of marble-inlaid sepulchral slabs at St John’s has suffered significantly, even though the iconoclasm during and after periods of Reformation or revolution never reached the shores of Malta.

The floor of St John’s Co-Cathedral was dear to the Order and, as a result, it was both developed and preserved. This has been crucial for its survival into the twenty-first century. Yet even when the Order was evicted from Malta by Bonaparte in 1798, the beauty of the floor was recognized as something worth keeping.

The sepulchral slabs at St John’s are mostly rendered in various artistic expressions of Baroque. Just as in paintings, the chiaroscuro technique is present, although it is much more difficult to create a sense of three-dimensionality on marble inlaid tombstones than on canvas. However, seen under the right lighting, or rather the absence thereof, the whole floor of St John’s comes to life as one gigantic chiaroscuro with larger-than-life memento mori images. At present the interior of St John’s is bathed in bright light, for the comfort of parishioner and visitor alike, but to really appreciate the art of the slabs and the effectiveness of the memento mori contained in them, the bright interior light should be switched off. Then one should try to find one’s way through the church with a candle in hand. Once accustomed to the surroundings, with the eyes squinting in the dark and the mind wide open, something truly amazing happens. When one is roaming the floor in twilight, with only the candle lighting up a small area before one’s feet, suddenly the memento mori images spring forth from their dark background, just as they were intended to do. The shock is a pleasant one of a lost treasure found. For Frà. François de Vion Thesancourt this was a regular exercise, ‘Flecte lumina [...]’.