An eminent doyen of cartography turns 100: a tribute to Albert Ganado
The scholar and cartographic expert created a permanent treasure trove of Maltese art and culture. The committee of the Malta Map Society pays tribute to his achievements
Yesterday, Albert Ganado turned 100, having lived for a century starting in the interwar year of 1924 on March 9.
Malta is proud of its centenarian. Among his attributes, Ganado is a most eminent and respected scholar, a cartographic expert of Malta maps, a bibliophile, an author of 12 Melitensia books and innumerable articles.
He is also a lawyer, a politician during the pre-independence years, a historian and researcher in local and world libraries, and a keen and obsessive Melitensia collector of all that is Malta.
His collection spans antique maps, including the unique and very rare maps and books, manuscripts, prints, engravings, views, paintings, lithographs, watercolours, caricatures, newspapers, old photos, postcards, stamps, postmarks and any manuscript/printed matter where he could trace the word ‘Malta’, even if this is one word in an old book, or a book written by a Maltese or a Gozitan on any subject.
Through his collection mania, he created a permanent treasure trove of Maltese art and culture and more, with surely no equals in the field of cartography, his specialisation.
Since he started practising law in 1947, he has published books and articles in academic journals on the cartography of Malta, his primary interest, Maltese history, art, legislation, politics and philately just after conscription during the war years when still a young student at the then Royal University of Malta.
He was imbued with a patriotic melitensium amor through his father, Judge Roberto Ganado, from whom he inherited his love of maps and books from an early age.
Ganado started to search for Malta maps, to collect and look up maps in Malta and abroad in libraries and in the antique map market.
He created a wide network of international contacts allowing him to pick and choose not only decorative maps but also rare maps of Malta, like the ones found in the rare Lafreri atlases, when demand was relatively low.
Through his great powers of observation, he studied, analysed, and identified map plates and the various states of maps in detail. He extracted a flood of information. Very soon, cartography became the tour de force in his Melitensia search.
Through his profound studies and extensive research over lifelong years in foreign libraries on printed and manuscript antique maps of Malta, he managed to build a collection of quality. He attended conferences and symposia abroad, where he lectured to international cartographic experts on various occasions, in Rome, Leipzig, London and Vienna, all the while organising various cartography exhibitions in Malta.
Ganado was a regular contributor to the scholarly cartographic journal Imago Mundi – the journal of the International Society for the History of Cartography – considered to be the bible of world cartography.
With his encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject, he put Malta on the map. Writing books during his long and illustrious career in the cartographic field led to a reputation of a scholar in a preeminent position in the local and international cartographic scene.
His magnum opus is the twovolume scholarly work A Study in depth of 143 Maps representing the Great Siege of Malta of 1565, an account of the Siege through maps.
He travelled widely in search of maps in their different states, tracing also the changing of hands of the printers’ plates to different owners who change minor features in the same plate and publish later under different names and titles. He studied and described in a structured manner and in great detail each map, its main geographical features, its publisher/printer/engraver, its watermark, in which libraries/collections exemplars are found, and more.
Ganado’s map collection contains unique, very rare and rare Malta maps. The manuscript 1558 Genga map of the proposed plan of Valletta is obviously unique, while there are only a few exemplars of other printed maps by Lafreri, Gili, Saliba, and Camocio. His two printed Camocio maps are two of the set of four Siege maps of 1565 and are so rare that UNECSO has included the set in the International Memory of the World Register.
On the strength of Ganado’s hard work, awards, honours and tributes started flowing in. On his 70th birthday, he was honoured with a Festschrift, a writing presented to scholars in the form of a book Liber Amicorum Dr Albert Ganado for his contribution to Malta’s history and cartography.
Another cartographic award followed in 2003 – a prize by the National Book Council for his book Valletta Citta Nuova: A Map History (1566-1600), a reference work which in now considered by international cartographic experts as the most comprehensive study of the development of Valletta from a map perspective.
An impressive selection of his rare maps, including maps by Lafreri, are to be found at MUŻA since 2008. It is known as the Albert Ganado Malta Map Collection (AGMMC) and contains 450 maps still in an exceptionally good condition.
For the same reason, in 2011, Ganado was honoured with the highest award in international cartography, the Helen Wallis Prize by the International Map Collectors Society (IMCoS).
In his award speech, Tony Campbell, the IMCoS president, stated: “So this year’s worthy winner of the Helen Wallis IMCoS Award goes to the outstanding luminary of cartographic Melitensia, Chevalier Dr Albert Ganado.”
Two years later, our Maltese luminary was conferred with an honoris causa doctorate D. Litt. by the Faculty of Laws of the University of Malta to acknowledge his expertise in same field. Cartography and the map history of the Great Siege were also the driving force behind his promotion to Knight Grand Cross of Magistral Grace of the Order of Malta.
A biography of Ganado was published in Maltese in 2020 and in English in 2023.
The Malta Map Society, of which Ganado is a founding member, now an honorary life president, is grateful to him for founding the society at the venerable age of 85 and for placing it on the cultural map of Malta.
The society thought it fit to honour his achievements especially those in cartography. We, the members of the committee, are grateful to our centenarian honorary life president for his invaluable contribution to the cartography of Malta. We wish him many more years to come.