Francesco Zahra 1710-1773. His Life and Art in Mid-18th Century Malta

This book celebrates the 300th year anniversary of Francesco Zahra's birth in 1710 and seeks to show the extraordinary range of the artist's output. Zahra was Malta's most important native painter of the mid-18th century and his style wonderfully captured the spirit of the Late Baroque. He was extremely prolific and could handle the brush with a fascinating ease, thus furnishing Maltese churches with hundreds of panitings, large and small. His extraordianry creative spirit also ensured that his pictures breathed the compositional freshness of mature artists.

Francesco Zahra produced various designs for church furniture, marble altars, silver artefacts, liturgical vessels and other objects d'art that still survice scattered around the island.