Moonlit Miracle: Long-Lost Querio Masterpiece Unearthed in Valletta Archbishop’s Palace

Hidden behind a stack of dusty ledgers in the sacristy of the Archbishop’s Palace in Valletta, a rolled canvas no wider than a church candle has sent ripples of excitement through Malta’s art world. Signed boldly in the bottom-right corner “Sylvester Querius fecit 1709”, the small oil painting—a luminous Nativity bathed in Mediterranean moonlight—has just been authenticated as an autograph work by Silvestro Querio, the Genoese master who spent his most fruitful decade on the Maltese islands.

For centuries, Querio’s name has flickered at the edges of Maltese collective memory: a foreign prodigy summoned by the Knights in 1698 to fresco the ceilings of the Order’s auberges, the same ceilings that British bombs cracked open in 1942. His surviving Maltese works were thought to be limited to fragments in the sacristy of St John’s Co-Cathedral and a single altarpiece in Żabbar. The discovery of an intact, signed panel changes that narrative overnight.

Dr Maria Camilleri Fava, senior curator at Heritage Malta, first spotted the canvas while cataloguing minor artefacts ahead of the Palace’s 2025 reopening as a public museum. “I was photographing 19th-century chasubles when I noticed a sliver of gilded wood poking from a leather trunk,” she recalls. “When I unrolled it, the moonlit ultramarine hit me like a splash of seawater. Querio loved that pigment—he imported it personally from Acre.” Infrared reflectography carried out at the Bighi Conservation Centre confirmed the fluid under-drawing characteristic of Querio’s hand and, crucially, the date.

Local scholars are calling the find “the missing keystone” of Maltese Baroque. Prof. Antoine Grech, head of art history at the University of Malta, explains: “Querio took Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro and baptised it in our light. This Nativity places the Holy Family not in a Bethlehem stable but in what looks like a limestone cave—Għar Dalam, perhaps—under a Maltese summer sky. It’s the first time we see him marrying Italian technique to Maltese landscape.”

The timing is serendipitous. Valletta’s Cultural Capital bid for 2030 has been hunting for flagship restorations, and the Archbishop’s Palace—long closed to the public—was already pencilled in for a €3 million EU-funded revamp. The painting’s discovery has fast-tracked negotiations. “We had planned a static display of vestments,” says project manager Karlene Borg. “Now we’re designing a climate-controlled Querio wing with interactive projections that let visitors flip between X-ray, infrared and visible light views.”

Community reaction has been swift and heartfelt. Within 48 hours of the announcement, the Facebook group ‘Malta Baroque Lovers’ swelled by 4,000 members, and Gozitan restaurateur Josephine Briffa launched a crowdfunding page titled “Send Querio Home for Christmas”, aiming to raise €50,000 for a travelling exhibition that would take the Nativity to village parishes before its permanent installation in Valletta. “My nanna used to say Querio painted angels with Maltese eyes,” Briffa laughs. “This is everyone’s painting now.”

Even schoolchildren have been swept up in the fervour. St Albert the Great College in Valletta has already incorporated the painting into its art syllabus; last week, Year 9 students recreated the Nativity tableau on the school roof, using recycled cardboard and battery-powered fairy lights. Their TikTok clip—captioned “1709 meets 2024”—has clocked 87,000 views.

The Archbishop’s Curia has promised transparency. In a joint press conference with Heritage Malta, Archbishop Charles Scicluna pledged that conservation will be livestreamed, “so every Maltese can watch Querio’s blues emerge from centuries of grime.” He added that admission to the new wing will be free for under-18s and holders of the Kartanzjan, Malta’s seniors card.

As dusk settles over St George’s Square and the Palace’s honeyed limestone glows gold, the city feels poised on the cusp of rediscovery. In a country where history is often measured in sieges and stones, a small canvas no bigger than a prayer book has reminded us that art, too, can be a fortification—against forgetting, against the grey wash of time. Come Christmas Eve, when the restored Nativity is unveiled to the public, Valletta will not just be celebrating a painting; it will be welcoming home a piece of its soul.