The story
Walk into St John's in Valletta and the first thing underfoot is a floor of around 400 inlaid marble tombstones, each marking a Knight of the Order of St John, the crusading brotherhood that ruled Malta from 1530. Skulls, crowns, coats of arms and Latin epitaphs run from the door to the high altar. This was the knights' own church, built in the 1570s by the Maltese military engineer Girolamo Cassar, and its plain, fortress-like front gives no warning of the gilded interior.
Most of that interior belongs to one man. Mattia Preti, a painter from Calabria who joined the Order, spent the 1660s covering the long vault with scenes from the life of John the Baptist, the knights' patron saint, painting in oil straight onto the stone.
Many visitors come for two canvases by Caravaggio, who reached Malta in 1607 fleeing a death sentence for killing a man in Rome, and was briefly made a knight. In the oratory hangs The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted in 1608 and more than five metres wide. It is the only painting he ever signed, and he wrote the name in the blood running from the saint's neck. Within months he was jailed, escaped, and was expelled from the Order, reportedly in this same oratory.
The smaller Saint Jerome Writing, an old scholar bent over his book beside a skull, hangs nearby. In December 1984 thieves cut it from its frame. It came back two years later, after long negotiations between the thieves and Malta's director of museums, and needed restoration before it returned to view.
