436 
THE MEDITERRANEAN NATURALIST 
St. John to which they were presented in the 
year 1700-1, by Baymond PerelloseBoccaful, Grand 
Master of the Order of the Knights Hospitallers, 
of which a brief monograph has recently been 
issued from the Government Press of the Island, 
and the pen of Sir F. V. Inglott G. C. M. G. 
They were executed in Brussels, probably at 
the factory, and certainly under the inspection of 
Judocusde Yos, one of the most eminent Flemish 
manufacturers, and bear with his name the well 
known mark of the Brussels loom, an escutcheon 
gales, between two capital letters B. Historical 
evidence points to the fact that the whole of these 
grand achievements of the weaver’s art, twenty-nine 
in number, were executed between the years 1697 
and 1700; and M. Darcel director of the Gobelin’s 
factory observed on the occasion of his visit to 
Malta in 1881, “we are astonished that three years 
should suffice to weave so large a surface”— The 
skilled eye of expert however did not fail to dis- 
cover that the degree of speed had been attained 
by a division of labour not often traceable in 
ancient specimens, resulting in some patent defects, 
for inasmuch as the large subject pictures seem to 
have been fabricated in one piece, and then joined 
to two perpendicular and two horizontal borders, 
forming a frame surrounding each of them the 
junction of this frame at the angles presents in 
several instances a want of accuracy which even 
the inartistic eye is competent to detect. Here and 
there also, especially in the portions executed in 
grisaille, (grey shading) a break in a shadow brings 
alight coloured fold of the drapery into the con- 
tinuation of the dark one. M. Darcel attributes 
this disfiguring blunder to the simultaneous 
employment of several 'work people upon the same 
piece, and the fact that from not strictly observing 
the line of general proportion one has missed the 
true point of junction ac which his work should 
have combined with the other; a mistake all the 
more likely to occur, when as we are informed Avas 
the practice, apprentices were employed to weave 
the easier and less elaborate portions of the design, 
while those of a finer and more ornamental character 
were under the charge of experienced artificers, 
known as “ officiers de tete” 
M. Darcel ingeniously describes tapestry as a 
“woollen mosaic” the art in the one lying in the 
arrangement of the threads of wool, as in the other 
of the coloured cubes of marble which constitute 
the material with which the design is carried out; 
there is however this drawback to the beauty and 
permanency of the textile material, that when sus- 
pended from an arch or along a wall, the weight 
is borne by the threads of the woof and not by the 
substance or warp of the tapestry; hence the fabric 
is liable to speedy disintegration, and requires to be 
lined, and to be furnished with a contrivance for 
a more even distribution of the strain upon it, by 
way of precaution against the injury which is sure 
to result when it is merely suspended Prom the 
upper edge without these safeguards. The Malta 
tapestries have never until the present decade been 
protected from this mischief, and hence fell into 
disrepair, which might soon have destroyed them 
but has fortunately been arrested without material 
injury to their general effect. 
For size and beauty, as well as for adaptation to 
the position which these pictures are intended 
to adorn, this superb set of tapestries excels 
any other in existence. The fifteen large 
panels, 20 x 22 feet each, which contain the 
scriptural and devotional designs, cover a space 
of more than 571 French metres: the panels in 
grisaille more than 122 metres, being fourteen in 
number, and measuring each 6 x 22 feet. To appre- 
ciate them properly we must glance at the general 
plan of their display, arranged there can be little 
doubt by the doner under the advice of the eminent 
artist Matteo Preti, the painter of the grand ro- 
mantic ceiling of St. John’s, whose death took 
place in the year preceding that which is the date 
of the gift of the Tapestry. 
The church of St. John is in plan simply an 
oblong vault 187 feet by 118; a wide central nave, 
of 50 feet span, lighted by pierced openings in the 
barrel of the roof, 63 feet in height, is flanked on 
either side by six chapels of similar design, which 
again have arches of communication one with an- 
other so as to form side aisles parallel to the choir 
and nave. Every inch of the walls of these and of the 
massive piers which sustain the fabric and separate 
the chapels from each other, is lavishly and gor- 
geously adorned by the art of the carver, gilder, and 
painter. The ceiling glows with the tints of the 
pencil of II Calabrese (Preti), and the pavement 
is entirely composed of a most elaborate mosaic 
of coloured marbles, wrought into the coats of 
