Għaxaq parish church resurrects 18th-century baroque altarpieces in stunning restoration

# Three Baroque masterpieces rise again: Għaxaq parish church unveils its newly-conserved altarpieces

**GĦAXAQ, MALTA** – The air inside the parish church of the Assumption of Our Lady was thick with incense and anticipation on Sunday morning as Rev. Archpriest Joe Zammit pulled back the burgundy velvet curtain on something no villager had seen in living memory: the original, unfiltered glory of three 18th-century altarpieces that have watched over Għaxaq for almost 270 years.

Gasps rippled through the nave. Where once murky layers of soot and over-painting had flattened the canvases into ghostly shadows, Caravaggesque chiaroscuro now leapt to life: St Michael’s crimson cloak billowed; the Virgin’s porcelain skin glowed; a startled dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, seemed ready to flutter straight out of its gilded frame.

“Today we haven’t just cleaned paintings,” Fr Zammit told the packed congregation. “We have restored the heartbeat of this village.”

The €42,000 conservation project, bankrolled entirely by local donations and a last-minute €8,000 boost from the Malta Arts Fund, focused on the side-altarpieces dedicated to St Michael the Archangel, St Joseph, and the Assumption. All three works—attributed to the Maltese workshop of Giuseppe D’Arena (1720-1784), a pupil of Mattia Preti—had darkened to near invisibility after decades of candle smoke, humidity and clumsy 19th-century touch-ups.

Enter Emmanuel Zeloni and his team from Atelier del Restauro. Over 14 months they used surgical scalpels, de-ionised water and a custom blend of ammonium carbonate to tease away the grime without disturbing D’Arena’s original brushstrokes. Infra-red reflectography revealed under-drawings so fresh they still bore the artist’s thumb-print in charcoal.

“These aren’t museum pieces locked behind glass,” Zeloni said, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. “They’re living devotional objects. Every crack we stabilised tells the story of generations of Għaxaq farmers who knelt here after a day in the fields, asking for rain or giving thanks for a new-born child.”

That living connection was palpable outside the church, where villagers queued for turnips and qassatat sold from the back of battered pickup trucks to raise the final €3,000. Eighty-two-year-old Ġemma Camilleri, who remembers polishing the brass candlesticks as an altar girl in 1952, clutched her late husband’s 1960s parish raffle ticket booklet. “He would have loved to see the blues so bright,” she whispered. “He always said the sky in the Assumption looked like November fog.”

Local historian Dr Graziella Vella explains that Għaxaq, a sleepy agricultural town of 4,800 souls, punches far above its weight in the national art ledger. “We have one of the highest densities of documented baroque canvases per capita on the islands,” she notes. “These restorations aren’t just about aesthetics; they’re an act of cultural self-defence against rural depopulation. Young people who were planning to leave are suddenly posting Instagram reels of the paintings. Heritage becomes a reason to stay.”

Indeed, the economic ripple is already visible. Airbnb bookings in the village shot up 35 % the week after the conservators’ mid-project Facebook teaser, according to data scraped by Malta Tourism Authority. The parish youth group has launched candle-lit baroque tours every first Friday, complete with mandolin renditions of Vivaldi performed by the village band club. Even the mayor, Darren Abela, has caught the bug, mooting a “D’Arena trail” linking Għaxaq to the artist’s surviving works in Żejtun and Valletta.

Back inside the church, as the final hymn faded, little Kurt Micallef, 9, tugged his mother’s sleeve and pointed to the newly-resurrected St Michael skewering a gilded demon. “That’s not the devil, ħabi,” the boy declared loudly. “That’s the dirt they took off!” The congregation erupted in laughter, the echo bouncing off freshly gilded surfaces that seemed to laugh along.

In a country where restoration stories often revolve around Valletta palazzos or Mdina cathedrals, Għaxaq has reminded Malta that masterpieces also hide in plain sight, between the tomato greenhouses and the old bakeries. The three altarpieces now glow not just with D’Arena’s colours, but with a community’s conviction that its past is worth every cent—and every painstaking minute—of its present.

As the last parishioner filed out, Fr Zammit extinguished the altar candles. But the paintings, newly alive, kept catching the moonlight, guardians of a village that refused to let its soul dim.