Photos

I promised earlier that I would publish a picture of the interior of St Johns Co-Cathedral. It is a marvelous building and I am afraid that none of the pictures I took does it justice.

Just about every inch of this church is decorated somehow. Most of the walls are carved maltese limestone, with images, patterns or just maltese crosses all over the wall. The roofs are painted and full of gilded relief details.

The floor is very special, each colorful tile is a grave for a member of the order of St. John, the Maltese crusaders. They are as you can see colorful and detailed, all of them. The age of the graves seemed to range from the 16th century up to the 19th century from a brief glance.

I don't think I have ever been to a more decorated building than this one, at least not of this magnitude, it was almost overwhelming.

This is also where I took the picture of Poor Clemens.

Cathedral Info
St. Johns Co-Cathedral was built between 1573 and 1578, it was designed by the maltese military architect Gerolamo Cassar who has designed several of the more prominent buildings in Valetta. The inside was largly designed by Mattia Preti, the Calabrian artist and Knight. Preti designed the intricate carved stone walls and painted the vaulted ceiling and side altars with scenes from the life of St John.

St. Johns was originally the regular church of the Hospitalers (the Knights of Saint John) but grew to equal prominence with the archbishop's cathedral at Mdina.

St. Johns is also the home of a small art collection by the famous painter Caravaggio (1571-1610), one of his most famous paintings "Beheading of Saint John the Baptist" (1608) can be found here as well as "Jerome III" (1607-1608). You can also see a number of replicas of his paintings here.

Picture
Picture was taken with support from a sign to keep the camera steady for the slow shutterspeed.

It was very hard to compose this picture, you just want to include Everything! I guess a stiched multi image would have been best but the poor lightconditions (for my tiny camera) made that idea very hard to follow through on.

Postprocessing done was levels, saturation, unsharp mask and a little burning of the overexposed center statue.


The information above about St. Johns Co-Cathedral was added to en.wikipedia.org on the 1:st of March 2005 by me, the author and copyright holder of the text.