The Beheading
Caravaggio's largest and most famous canvas.
Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Simon Burchell — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Simon Burchell — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Simon Burchell — CC BY-SA 4.0
A military religious order founded in crusader Jerusalem, moved to Rhodes, then given Malta by Charles V in 1530; they repelled the Great Siege of 1565, built Valletta afterwards and ruled until Napoleon in 1798.
An hour with the audio guide; ninety minutes for anyone lingering over the Caravaggio and the attached museum.
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A facade as severe as a fort and an interior that stuns whoever enters: the cathedral of the Knights of St John (1577) was built outside like a barracks by Girolamo Cassar and decorated inside for a full century until it became one of Europe's supreme Baroque achievements — every inch of wall and pillar carved in gilded stone, the vault painted by Mattia Preti with the life of John the Baptist directly onto the rock. The floor is the surprise: four hundred polychrome marble tombstones of the Order's knights, each an inlaid picture of crests, skeletons and emblems of death — you walk over the graves of Europe's nobility entire. And in a side chapel hangs Malta's greatest possession: Caravaggio's Beheading of St John the Baptist (1608), his largest and most famous painting and the only one he signed — painted in Malta while he fled a death sentence in Rome, before he was expelled from the Order and fled again.
Caravaggio's largest and most famous canvas.
400 inlaid marble knight graves.
Frescoes painted straight onto stone.
Triq San Ġwann, Valletta