ABSTRACT
Which images evoke today that vanished reality of the religious, military, Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem? Alongside the knights' eight-pointed cross, alongside their buildings in the Near East, Rhodes or Malta, let us consider also some of their votive paintings now hanging in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Graces at Zabbar in Malta. Here the future Pope Alexander VII had often prayed in the 1630s, when he was Inquisitor and Apostolic Delegate, hearing mass in the company of knights who were thanking Our Lady for her intercessions during their recent encounters with the Turks at sea. Votive paintings commemorated her graces as well as gifts to her sanctuary of altar-fronts, chasubles, copes and coats of arms of individual knights. 1 Such paintings delineate the perils of the sea menacing all men aboard the Order of St John's galleys in the early modern period, whether they were knights of noble birth, brother chaplains of respectable family or convicts and slaves chained to their oars.
