Żebbuġ, Gazo Jubilates as Lost Zahra Masterpiece Returns to the Altar

A centuries-old canvas that survived Napoleonic plunder, damp limestone walls and even a misguided 1970s varnish has been returned to its rightful home in the heart of Gozo, and the village of Żebbuġ greeted it like a long-lost relative. On Sunday, after a 14-month conservation campaign financed entirely by local donations, the 1768 oil painting of the Assumption of the Madonna was unveiled above the high altar of the parish church to cheers, church bells and a spontaneous hymn from the congregation.

“She looks alive again,” whispered 83-year-old Karmenu Portelli, who remembers polishing the brass lamps beneath the painting as an altar boy in 1955. “The blues are so deep you could dive into them.”

The 2.5-metre-wide work, attributed to the Maltese late-baroque master Francesco Zahra, had darkened to a murky brown. Conservators at Atelier del Restauro in Balzan removed 12 layers of over-painting, fixed a 20 cm tear where the canvas had been folded around the altar frame and retrieved Zahra’s original celestial sky—an improbable Maltese turquoise that art historian Dr. Charlene Vella calls “the colour of our summer sea before the first boat ripples it.”

Local pride, local purse strings
What makes the project unusual is not just the rarity of a Zahra in Gozo—most of his 200 surviving works hang in Valletta’s palaces—but the way €42,000 was raised without a single government grant. Schoolchildren emptied piggy banks, farmers sold oversized pumpkins at the village festa, and one restaurateur pledged a week of rabbit-stew proceeds. Donors’ names are etched on a discreet brass plaque, but the biggest name inside the church is still “Żebbuġ” itself, painted in curling 18th-century script on the predella.

Mayor Carmene Debono, wiping incense from her eyes after Sunday’s mass, told Hot Malta: “We didn’t just save a painting; we reminded ourselves that culture isn’t something that arrives from Valletta in a van. It’s something we own, dust off and pass on.”

A canvas with a passport
The painting’s journey reads like a mini-epic of Maltese history. Commissioned by parish priest Don Pietro Pace at a cost of 150 scudi—roughly the price of a small field—it survived the 1798 French occupation when church silver was melted for bullion but religious art was oddly left untouched. In 1942, terrified villagers removed it to a rock-hewn shelter during an Italian air raid that pulverised three nearby farmhouses. A careless 1970s “touch-up” coated the Virgin’s face with zinc white, giving her what elderly villagers still call “the powdered tennis-player look.”

Conservator Romina Delia spent 800 hours lying flat on a scaffold, wielding a binocular microscope and solvents mild enough not to disturb Zahra’s original glazes. “We even found a thumb print in the lower left corner,” she smiles. “Probably Zahra himself, checking if the paint had dried.”

Tourism ripple already felt
Within 48 hours of the unveiling, the parish sacristan has fielded calls from three separate cruise-ship tour operators asking for group rates. Żebbuġ’s only hotel, five-room Ta’ Rikardu, is fully booked for the next two weekends, and the village’s lone souvenir kiosk has already commissioned fridge magnets featuring the restored Madonna. “It’s like we’ve suddenly become the Sistine Chapel of Gozo,” laughs owner Marica Cini, handing a magnet to a German visitor who confesses he came for the hiking trails but stayed for the baroque drama.

But the real impact is quieter. Sixth-former Jake Vella, who volunteered to hoover centuries of dust from the church organ, says he now wants to study art conservation in Perugia. “Before this, I thought baroque was just gold leaf and old people. Turns out it’s chemistry, history and a bit of detective work.”

As the last notes of the Te Deum faded, the congregation filed out into the sun-splashed square where the village band struck up the marċ tal-banda “Żebbuġa”. Women leaned over balconies clutching lace handkerchiefs, and someone produced a tray of imqaret still warm from the fryer. The painting now hangs in its gilded frame, but the real restoration may be the village itself—re-minded that its story, like Zahra’s sky, is still being retouched, one tiny brushstroke at a time.