Melchiorre Cafà
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Melchiorre Cafà (in Italy also known as Caffà, in Malta as Gafa, Gafà, Gaffar or Gafar; 1636-1667) [1] was the greatest sculptor ever born in Malta, and set out for an enormously promising career in Baroque Rome which was cut short by a premature death following a work accident.
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[edit] Biography
He was born in Vittoriosa, Malta and given the name Marcello at his baptism on the 21 January 1636. He was still referred to as Marcello in 1653 when he worked in Sicily, but soon became known as Melchiorre. After his move to Rome in 1658 or shortly after, he was most frequently referred to as Melchior (or Melchiorre) Maltese. His brother is Lorenzo Gafà who was one of the leading architects in Malta.
Cafà was an already accomplished sculptor when he came to Rome and entered the workshop of Ercole Ferrata, who was not strictly speaking his teacher although he probably helped him refining his technique. Despite soon attracting his own commissions, he stayed in close contact with Ferrata and collaborated with him. He was never a pupil or assistant of Bernini who thought highly of Cafà.
In 1660 Cafà signed his first independent contract with the Prince Camillo Pamphilj for the relief of the Martyrdom of Saint Eustace in Sant'Agnese in Agone. In 1662 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca and was even elected its principal in 1667, but declined the honour. Reportedly, he was a close friend of the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli. Cafà died on the 4 September 1667 after some material collapsed on him in the foundry of Saint Peter's while he was working on the altar decoration[2] for St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta.
[edit] Works
Extremely busy throughout his short life, he only managed to finish a few major commissions himself:
- Wooden statue of Saint Paul in St. Paul Shipwrecked in Valletta (c. 1659).
- Wooden statue of the Virgin of the Rosary in the Dominican Church, Rabat, Malta (1660-61).
- The marble statue of the dying Saint Rose of Lima (signed and dated 1665; Lima, Santo Domingo) was in 1668 the centrepiece for the future saint's Beatification ceremony in Rome's Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and shipped to Peru straight after that event. While it has some formal analogies with Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa and possibly influenced in its turn the latter's Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, Cafà's statue depicts a peaceful death, free from the turmoil in the two works by Bernini.
- The relief in white marble of the Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena at Santa Caterina a Magnanapoli in Rome. The curved polychrome background is suggestive of cloud formations and of a halo, intensifying the idea that the saint is carried to heaven. There are no known dates for Cafà's intervention, but it is generally accepted that he finished it himself, i.e. 1667 or earlier.
- A bust of Alexander VII exists in an extremely fine terracotta version in the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, a signed bronze (dated 1667) is in New York's Metropolitan Museum (photo here) and a further bronze in the Duomo in Siena.
A number of terracottas are in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta, the Museo di Palazzo Venezia in Rome and the Museo di Roma.
Most unfinished works were completed by Ercole Ferrata, e.g.:
- Martyrdom of Saint Eustace in Sant'Agnese in Agone, Rome (1660-69).
- Saint Thomas of Villanova distributing alms in the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome (1663-69). Cafà's terracotta is in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta.
- Marble statue of Pope Alexander III in the Duomo in Siena (from 1665/66).
- Marble statue of Saint Paul in St. Paul's Grotto, Rabat, Malta (1666-69).
[edit] Notes
- ^ After a long period of various spellings, international scholars of Italian baroque sculpture finally agreed on the spelling Cafà, which he himself used when signing works.
- ^ This was eventually executed decades later and after a new design by Cafà's most distinguished (and according to contemporary sources his only) pupil Giuseppe Mazzuoli.
[edit] Literature
- Rudolf Preimesberger, in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 16, 1973, pp. 230-235 (in Italian; very detailed and informative but now a little dated).
- Gerhard Bissell, in: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, vol. 15, 1997, pp. 493-495 (in German).
- Keith Sciberras (Ed.), Melchiorre Cafà. Maltese Genius of the Roman Baroque, Valletta 2006 (essays in English and Italian; a combined effort of leading scholars, this is the most comprehensive and up to date publication on Cafà, correcting and removing many previous uncertainties).
