Just a brief post this time, which I suspect is of mainly personal interest...

Last week my wife was presenting at a human rights law meeting in Malta, connected with her work on the Istanbul Convention, and I came along for the ride. This photograph was taken in the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, where I was admiring landscapes painted into lunettes in the walls. A nearby sign said ‘the walls, pilasters, arches, the *tromp l’oeil soffit *and some lunettes were painted by the Italian decorator Nicolò Nasoni in 1723-25.’ Nasoni is most famous as an architect in Portugal (he arrived in Oporto circa 1725 in the entourage of Dom Antonio Manuel de Vilhena, who was then Grand Master of the Order) and his work extended to landscape garden design, incorporating his own fountains and statues. However, the landscape painting above is not by Nasoni, it dates from the island’s hundred and fifty year period as a British colony. An online article suggests that these new paintings aimed to demonstrate ‘the British connection with Malta and also to portray the British rulers as the natural heirs of the glory that was the Order’s reign.’ Obviously most of them relate to identifiable Maltese landmarks but research has found that some motifs are English, ‘such as an octagonal tower in Tunbridge Wells, and another of a bridge that has since been modified in Bath.’ They were painted in 1887 by ‘none other than the grandfather of Judge Giovanni Bonello, an artist by the name of Giovanni Bonello, after whom his grandson was named.’ Judge Bonello was actually an eminent member of the European Court of Human Rights, described on his retirement as ‘a man of broad and deep culture, a connoisseur of great art and a distinguished historian.’