Hammer Art History Lecture: St. Paul Among the Snakes: A Maltese Artist Goes Home, c. 1660

Speaker: Professor Shawon Kinew

At the end of the 1650s, Melchiorre Cafà, a Maltese sculptor, was newly established in Rome. Rome was the most significant site for sculptural production in Europe at that time. It was also a Golden Age of sculpture as artists vied for papal commissions and pushed the limits of their medium. They transformed hard stone into weightless apparitions. But, in his early days in the Caput Mundi, Cafà returned home conceptually. He carved in the humble material of wood the patron saint of his island, St. Paul, to be sent back to Malta. Today the sculpture is at the center of local devotional practices, still carried in processions celebrating the Apostle’s shipwreck in Malta. Our time is connected to Paul’s and to Cafà’s in this living tradition. A study of Cafà’s St. Paul is one of Mediterranean cultural continuities, and a meditation on the ethnographic gaze of the art historian.

For more information: https://cmrs.ucla.edu/event/hammer-art-history-lecture-by-shawon-kinew/