Una chiesa scomparsa “dentro della nuova, assai più magnifica”. Progetti e ricostruzioni della cattedrale di Mdina tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna

Abstract

A corpus of drawings attributable to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and preserved in the Diocesan archive of Mdina, allows us to better understand the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Malta after the earthquake of 1693, which damaged the medieval building. This had already been interested, a few years earlier, bu some works that had affected the presbytery area. The survey and project drawings, partly published but never studied in depth, offer valuable information on the medieval church and on the transformation process, on the relationship between the pre-existing buildings and the new projects. Starting from the available drawings, and with the support of documentary data and eighteenth-century chronicles, the contribution intends to retrace the construction events of the Maltese cathedral between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The aim is also to formulate, and virtually represent, an hypothesis regarding the aspect of the medieval church, significantly equipped with a bellfry-facade, also analyzing the relationship between the old and the new building, to understand how much the former may have influenced the design of the latter.