Malta

Malta under the Order of St John, from 1530 to 1798, kept its accounts in the scudo of 12 tarì, each of 20 grani. The Order struck that unit in silver alongside copper grani, and above it a gold coinage of zecchini modelled on the Venetian sequin, with pieces of 5, 10 and 20 scudi and multiples up to twelve zecchini; Spanish and Sicilian silver circulated freely beside it and the Treasury’s larger dealings were reckoned in gold. Because the Order governed the islands as a bureaucratic state, it generated and kept paper on an unusual scale: the Archives of the Order of Malta, now in the National Library at Valletta, preserve council minutes, treasury registers, fortification accounts and building contracts in a near-continuous run of several thousand volumes, supplemented by notarial registers and cathedral chapter records. For a record of paid creative work this is an exceptional survival — a small territory whose new capital, its fortifications, its conventual church and its painted vault can each be followed through named designers and the sums they were voted.

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Mattia Preti’s Reward from the Order of St John for Painting the Vault of St John’s, Valletta 1661–1666

In September 1661 Grand Master Rafael Cotoner accepted Mattia Preti’s offer to redecorate the interior of the Order’s conventual church of St John in Valletta, and over the following five years Preti designed and painted the whole barrel vault with the life of the Baptist directly onto the stone. For the scheme the Order gave him two gold chains — one valued at 600 scudi, presented in January 1662, a second worth 300 in June 1663 — together with cash payments of 1,000 scudi in 1662 and a further 1,000 on 20 December 1666. The figure converted here is the 2,000 scudi of cash only; it bundles Preti’s design, his own hand and his assistants’ labour, and his modern biographer observes it could hardly be called payment for so vast a scheme. The scudo was a money of account, so the gold value rests on the Order’s own zecchino standard and on a tariff of forty-three tarì to the zecchino recorded a generation later, which if anything understates it.

~1,907g

Sciberras, Keith. “Mattia Preti: Knighthood and Patronage,” in Mattia Preti: The Triumphant Manner. (Valletta, 2012); Malta Numismatic Society, “Knights of Malta Coinage”; Numista, catalogue entry for the 12 zecchini of Grand Master Antonio Manoel de Vilhena, Malta, 1725.