Some unexplored Baroque Vernacular Interactions in Maltese Village Environments

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several Maltese mastermasons were, by reason of their mployment with the Knights of St. John, interposed between the 'high' Baroque architecture imported from Rome and Paris on one side and the'low' vernacular building traditions of Mediaeval Malta on the other side. Despite a glaring lack of formal architectural training, these mastermasons or 'capomastri' as they were called, successfully managed to contribute to both forms of the architectural expression in view of the fact that their experience in local materials and buildings methods made it possible for the foreign architects of the Knights to execute their grand designs while in return, they chanelled several baroque compositional elements and ornamental motifs back to the vernacular tradition of the Maltese villages to render them more aesthetically acceptable. It is therefore, to the credit of these local mastermasons that the vernacular idiom in Malta in the course of the seventeenth and particularly the eighteenth centuries absorbed several motifs of urban Baroque and rapidly developed accordingly in the various village environments. As a result, vernacular architecture of many a Maltese countryside village is, in the case of Malta less sharply drawn that it is in Europe, the implication being that here the Baroque expression was, soon after its initial importation from Europe in the 1650's gradually suited, because of its inheritance of the communicative force of International Baroque architecture, to serve the political agendas of both church and state at a time when these were becoming increasingly upopular. This 'popularisation' of the Baroque and its grafting onto the vernacular buildings of Malta's rural environment assumes clear validity when one examines documented sources revealing information about the 'capomastri' who created the churches, chapels and houses of villages in Malta, as this paper on a hitherto unexplored aspect of Maltese architectural history will indicate.