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

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 7, 2025** 

 05:00PM - 06:00PM PDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **UCL CMRS Center for Early Global Studies**  

 [Royce 314, 10745 Dickson Ct  
Los Angeles, CA 90095  
United States



 ](<https://www.google.com/maps?q=US CA Los Angeles 90095 Royce 314, 10745 Dickson Ct>) 



 

 



 

 ![Photo of a sculpture, a crowd taking a look at the sculpture and its surroundings. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4426/files/2025-01/IMG_7131.JPG)

 

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/>



 

 



 

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