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Malta’s National Museum of Art (MUZA) opened in Valletta in 2018. Its collection spans the entire period from the fourteenth century to the present day. Its holdings include paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, works on paper, and contemporary pieces, with notable highlights from the Dutch and Flemish schools of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

The founding collection from the Grand Master’s Palace features portraits by Willem Key and the Circle of Jan Van Scorel alongside paintings from Rembrandt’s workshop, by Herman van Aldewereld and Balthasar van der Bossche, and after Hans Rottenhammer. Later acquisitions include four large paintings by the Caravaggist Matthias Stom and Theodoor van Thulden’s monumental Allegory of the Good Government of the City of Antwerp. Among the museum’s other highlights are David de Haen’s Heraclitus and genre portraits by Nicolas Van Haeften.  

MUŻA also stewards drawings by Northern Netherlandish artists, such as Adriaen van de Velde’s landscape, Bonaventura Peeters’s naval battle, and a Rubens workshop drawing of the Adoration of the Shepherds, prepared and incised for transfer for the engraving by Paulus Pontius. These are complemented by Dutch and Flemish prints and maps of Malta by cartographers from the Northern Netherlands. As a whole, the collection reflects Malta’s enduring ties to European art and the Order of St. John.  

Krystle Farrugia, Principal Curator (December 2025)