Eclecticism and the Baroque Revival in the Decorative Arts in Malta – public lecture by Mark Sagona.
The lecture focuses on one of the most remarkably rich episodes in the extraordinary and profuse story of the decorative arts in Malta: the years straddling the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and discusses the prevalance of Eclecticism and Baroque Revival currents during the height of the British colonial domination. It celebrates the island’s most gifted native designers who reflected the European predilection for such design solutions, but the ouvre of Gatt is surely the most emblematic of this fascinating era, and it brilliantly captures the design mood of the epoch, especially in the context of the ecclesiastical decorative arts.