St John's Co-Cathedral

Eight years after the Ottoman siege of 1565, the Order of St John commissioned its conventual church from Girolamo Cassar, the Maltese architect who had taken over the building of Valletta when the military engineer Francesco Laparelli left the island. Cassar had been trained on fortifications and the façade shows it: a flat cliff of pale globigerina limestone between two blunt bell towers, with almost no ornament beyond a doorway and a balcony from which grand masters were proclaimed. It was completed in 1578. What happened inside is a different building. From 1661 Mattia Preti painted the whole barrel vault, the piers were carved into high relief, and the floor was laid with some four hundred inlaid marble tomb slabs of the knights; the oratory holds Caravaggio’s Beheading of Saint John the Baptist of 1608, the only painting he signed. The austerity outside and the Baroque inside are a century apart, and only the first is Cassar’s.