The Malta Independent on Sunday
The Goddess of Fertility
Niki Petroni
The motif of the Goddess of Fertility began to make an appearance in some works by Maltese modern and contemporary artists. It is interesting that all the artists who explored themes of fertility, womanhood, religious faith, modern politics and others in relation to the pagan prehistoric past individually imbued the motif with personal worldviews. I would here like to attempt to introduce these artists and the implications posed by their re-articulation of the past.
With the discovery of many prehistoric artefacts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the boundaries of history suddenly expanded, widened, giving the imagination the possibility to explore practices and beliefs that were perceived as culturally alien and temporally distant.
Despite the great progress made by research, there is no absolute certainty on the exact meaning of the Goddess of Fertility statues and I don’t think we can ever know the full story of prehistoric cultural artefacts. This ambiguity, however, can be seen as emancipatory, as liberating artists of historical obligation. The interpretative freedom of understanding these symbols could likely have been an element which attracted them to the subject.
The interest in prehistoric symbols, artefacts and practices was highly characteristic of European modernist artists who were searching beyond the Western civilised world that they felt had conditioned creativity and social expectations of ‘proper’ artistic behaviour. The pursuit of authenticity, however, was a rather troubling project that has been written about in countless studies on modernism.
The major element that seemingly differentiates Maltese artists from their European modernist counterparts was that the will to explore prehistoric culture did not necessitate travel to faraway lands. They did not have to look beyond the West, as did Paul Gauguin, in search of primitive cultural forms. The Maltese were physically close to the Megalithic temples, which raises the question of historical marginalisation; of placing prehistory beyond the parameters of traditional identity, a contentious subject in itself.
As observed by Tricia Grame, an artist who visited Malta in the late 90s to see the statues of the fertility goddess, our culture highly venerates the Virgin Mary. She is celebrated as the giver of divine life and is hence intimately connected to the Goddess of Fertility, likewise a symbol of the creation of life. Therefore, the goddess is not as alien to the Maltese spiritual consciousness as we may think. The latter represents the archaic maternal figure and seemingly transcends any traditional categorisation. Her importance is eternal and universal. As much as she is used an emblem of Maltese culture, adorning the covers of travel guides and tourist brochures, she does not bear any national specificity, or even any strict adherence to a particular cultural sphere.
Antoine Camilleri appropriated the motif of the Goddess of Fertility directly in some of his works. However, his entire oeuvre is infused with references to womanhood and fertility, and in many instances there is an obvious allusion to both the archaic and the Roman Catholic manifestations of this idea.
Camilleri portrayed his wife as a goddess of fertility, being the woman who gave birth to his children. She is typically portrayed nude with an egg-shaped underbelly and a spiralling bellybutton, two motifs often found in his work to symbolise fertility and the continuity of life. Another of his motifs, the crosshatched pointed arch, frames these odes to motherhood, alluding to the delineation of sacred space found in Gothic art and the pointed canopy under which divine subjects were placed.
Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci also profoundly explored this link between the Madonna and the prehistoric goddess, linking them to two human fundamentals; nudity and motherhood. But whereas Camilleri was interested in developing a symbolic language that borrowed from both spheres of representation and connecting this to his personal family life, Schembri Bonaci focused on poetically morphing the two together to directly challenge the iconographical tradition of the Madonna, an innovation acknowledged by both Peter Serracino Inglott and Emanuel Fiorentino.
His works emphasise the common aspects of these two forms of belief and provide a modern reading of the role of religious imagery in shaping identity. By developing a new idiom out of two contrasting, even opposing, iconographical traditions, he demonstrates the malleability of culture in its ability to assume new forms and meanings whilst retaining their relatability by means of shared cultural associations.
Other artists who appropriated the image of the goddess were Frank Portelli and Isabelle Borg. However, each moved away from her conventional symbolic meaning and from Roman Catholic references. The voluptuousness of goddess’s body is readapted by Portelli in his seminal Contours series. Borg forged new goddesses out of the archaic one to create modern pagan and personal devotional imagery.
Norbert Francis Attard’s limestone sculpture MLP loves PN and PN loves MLP transforms the statue into a statement on Malta’s major political parties and their obsession with one another. This postmodern piece brings together, as noted by Dr. Raphael Vella, ‘unknowable religious rites with modern political rites.’ Vella framed the sculpture within the context of consumer culture by saying that ‘Political language, like the language of marketing, exploits the artefact and the identity it represents.’
To mark the surface of a reproduction of a pagan spiritual object with graffiti says much about the institutional takeover of culture for political advantage, but also tries to subvert that position by showing how creativity can give birth to new images to overcome such dreary impositions. The work could also be interpreted as a symbol of unity acting against political division, underlining the common heritage of the Maltese by travelling as far back in history as the survival of such artefacts would allow us to.
Several notions are at play in the works of these artists, all of which show a preoccupation with Malta’s pre-Catholic artistic past. The link with Catholicism and with modern secularism reveals them entering into the ancestral past by means of more attainable spheres of knowledge. In the attempt to inch closer to a distant world, they establish relationships between it and that which is more readily perceptible. However, their referencing of these cultural symbols effectively deconstructs conventional notions of religious and national identity.
They are not only dealing with the past but commenting on the present and envisioning broader spiritual possibilities. This also implies that the meaning of the Goddess of Fertility cannot be compartmentalised according to its past significance and use. Treating past symbols as purely iconographical would ultimately limit us from opening up the definition of the past and its transformation in modern times. This approach unequivocally has a dual function, as the expansion of visual language to include the archaic within the modern serves to fortify our understanding of contemporary selfhood.