Melchiorre Cafà

Biography

He was baptised on 21 January 1636 in Birgu, and the record gives his name as Marcello, not Melchiorre. He received the name of a brother who had died in infancy two years earlier; the name Melchior he began to use later.

His father, Marco Gafà, was a shoemaker, and Marcello was the ninth of ten children. His elder brother Lorenzo Gafà became one of the leading architects of Malta. Little is known of the future sculptor’s first steps, and no early works have been identified. A link with the Casanova family of sculptors, who also came from the Birgu area, can be suggested: in 1652 and 1653, still a teenager, he worked in Sicily with the Casanova brothers on stone sculptures for the cathedral in Syracuse. In the accounts he is named “Marcello Gaffar”. Later, in Malta, came a wooden statue of Saint Paul for St Paul’s Shipwreck church in Valletta (about 1659) and the “Virgin of the Rosary” for the Dominican church in Rabat (1660–1661).

In 1658 or shortly after he left for Rome. His surname took an Italian form there, Cafà or Caffa, and he signed and styled himself Melchior the Maltese (Melchior Cafa Melitensis). He arrived as an accomplished sculptor. He worked in the studio of Ercole Ferrata, a collaborator of the circle of Gian Lorenzo Bernini; Ferrata is not called his teacher in the strict sense, although he probably helped him refine his technique. Commissions of his own came quickly, but the tie with Ferrata remained, and the two worked together.

In 1660 Cafà signed his first independent contract, with Prince Camillo Pamphilj: the high relief “Martyrdom of Saint Eustace” for Sant’Agnese in Agone. The marble was completed by Ferrata, and the work dragged on until 1669; Cafà’s terracotta model is in the Museo di Palazzo Venezia in Rome. From 1663 he worked on the group “Saint Thomas of Villanova Distributing Alms” for Sant’Agostino; by one account the work was stopped at Ferrata’s insistence, and Ferrata finished it in 1669.

In 1662 he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca. In 1664 his first pupil is mentioned, the Sicilian Pietro Papaleo. From January to May 1666 Cafà was in Malta, working on several projects for St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. He was a friend of the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli, known as Baciccio.

His best-known work is the marble “Saint Rose of Lima” (signed and dated 1665). The statue shows the saint dying. In 1668 it was the centrepiece of the beatification ceremony at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, after which it was shipped to Peru, and it is now in Lima, in the church of Santo Domingo. What distinguishes it from Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” is a peaceful death without a storm of feeling, and to my mind this is a deliberate choice. In the Roman church of Santa Caterina a Magnanapoli he made the white marble relief “Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena”, with a curved polychrome background that suggests clouds and a halo. The dates of his work on it are unknown; it is generally accepted that he finished the relief himself, in 1667 or earlier. A wax sketch was found by Edgar Vella in 1995 and is in a private collection in Malta. There are also portrait busts of Pope Alexander VII: a terracotta in the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia and a bronze of 1667 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He worked a great deal and, according to scholars, finished only a few major commissions himself.

On 4 September 1667 Cafà died in Rome: in the foundry of Saint Peter’s material fell on him while he was working on the altar decoration for St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. A few months later he was to have headed the Accademia di San Luca, an honour he declined. He was buried in the church of San Biagio della Pagnotta on Via Giulia. In his native Birgu there is no monument or plaque, but the Maltese post office has issued stamps showing his sculptures. His terracottas are held in the Hermitage, in MUŻA in Valletta, the Palazzo Venezia, the Museo di Roma and the Fogg Museum at Harvard.