Restoring a Desert Treasure

Renewing Mission San Xavier's ANGELS SAINTS

Text by Bruce D. Itule

Photographs by Don B. Stevenson

There is no one else inside San Xavier del Bac, the great "White Dove of the Desert" south of Tucson. The dawn is chilly, but the ever-burning candles inside the Spanish baroque church offer warmth. There's a homey odor, like Mom's been in the kitchen.

It is not lonely in here. Art works that tell the story of Christianity adorn nearly every inch of the cracked and peeling plaster walls.

Details in the art are incredible. The florid style and beautiful colors — blues,

Reds, greens, and yellows are a tribute to the padres and craftsmen who centuries ago pushed Spain's empire in Mexico north into the frontiers of Sonora and what would later become Arizona.

A gasoline blower is running outside. A man is cleaning the walk-ways, preparing for the many tourists and pilgrims who on this day will enter through the rustic plank door with an iron handle forged in the shape of a slithering rattlesnake.

Timothy Lewis, a Tohono O'odham, is the first to enter the church that was built on his people's land nearly 200 years ago. Within minutes he is joined by three other Tohono O'Odham who, along with Lewis, were hired to work at San Xavier with seven art conservators, five from Italy, one from Turkey, and one from England. Their mission: to clean the art work and make it look as it did in 1797.

Their task is not easy. Success is measured in corners and tight spaces a centimeter at a time, sometimes on the floor, sometimes more than 30 feet above. There are centuries of soot, bird and bat droppings, candle smoke, beehive materials, overpainted oils, and varnishes to remove. They do not restore or repaint. They just clean and tone down the whites so that the original colors are visible and vibrant again. The work began in January, 1992. Until at least 1996, the conservators hope to spend three months each winter at San Xavier working on hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and architectural reliefs. Total project cost should be about $800,000, which is being paid for with funds raised through the nonprofit Patronato San Xavier, a group of volunteers dedicated to the repair and conservation of the church.

UNTIL ISLER CLEANED THE BIRD DROPPINGS OFF ST. FIDELIS, NO ONE KNEW A GASH HAD BEEN CARVED IN THE STATUE'S HEAD.

Paul Schwartzbaum, chief conservator and assistant director for technical services at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, oversees the ambitious project. The Patronato hired Schwartzbaum because he is recognized as one of the world's best mural conservators. Schwartzbaum recommended that the Patronato hire two of the best conservators he's worked with: Carlo Giantomassi and Donatella Zari, a husband-and-wife team from Rome.

Giantomassi and Zari brought with them the other international art experts. Most speak little English, but each has skills that are in demand worldwide. They do their best to communicate with the four Tohono O'odham, training them in art conservation so that the church ultimately can be maintained by locals.

Not long after the sun rises each morning, people begin entering San Xavier to admire its beauty, to worship, to soak in its history. They come throughout the day, looking up at the art above them and the people working on it.

In one corner of a 30-foot-tall multilevel scaffold, which cost $10,000 to lease, erect, and take down, conservator Ridvan Isler of Turkey works on a statue of St. Fidelis. One of 54 statues inside San Xavier, Fidelis is built of wood and plaster. He has a knife through his heart and a two-inch gash in his forehead with painted blood gushing from it.

"Good work," Isler says of Fidelis, as he tries to push a tiny flake of paint back onto the statue of the saint who was martyred in Switzerland in 1622. "Can you imagine this work was made in Mexico 200 years ago? It took experience. Not simple work. Nice silver gilding."

Until Isler cleaned the bird droppings off Fidelis, no one even knew a gash had been carved in the statue's head. Isler uses a foot-long orange brush to dampen the flaking paint on Fidelis' brown gar-ment. He doesn't speak, but he does grunt in disgust when the flake falls from his finger. He never looks down at the cu-rious people below.

"Birds go everywhere," he says. "Very dirty. Acid very bad for paint. Every paint is different problem. All the paint like potato chips. Cleaning is not the problem. Fixing is."

In his white coveralls and half-frame glasses, Isler looks like a house painter, but his hands move with an artist's precision. He uses a syringe to squirt glue, one drip at a time, behind the peeling paint. Then he brushes the paint gently with water or alcohol to soften it and make it less brittle. Next he pats it with a cotton ball or with his plastic-covered index finger.

After he leaves Tucson, Isler will go to Salzburg, Austria, where he is working on a wall-painting restoration in a residence that is near the house where composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in 1756. It is a 16th-century painting of a map of the world.

He takes a break to talk about San Xavier and Arizona. "I imagined the desert here like Sahara in Africa. Sand. Camels. No sand here. Just cactus everywhere. Here not a desert. Lot of green cactus. Beautiful landscape. Beautiful country. Very calm.

"This church not possible to compare

TUMACACORI MISSION: First-aid for a Sorely Troubled Ruin

After many long years, the weathered stucco walls of the Tumacacori Mission ruin echoed with the sounds of trowels wielded by men of an ancient nation whose ancestors first raised those walls.

San Jose de Tumacacori was the northern outpost of Franciscan missions of the late 1700s. But because of Apache attacks, it had become a complete ruin by 1770.

In May, 1992, Gabriel Wilson, Timothy Lewis, and Toni Encinas all Tohono O'odham completed a phase of the conservation work at Tumacacori, now a national historical park.

After helping with the conservation work at Mission San Xavier del Bac as apprentices of an international team that had restored and stabilized the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the three men were asked by the National Park Service to help with the stabilizing of the interior of the dome at Tumacacori.

The dome contains some of the original frescoes remaining in the old church.

Now the three conservators are training park service personnel in the techniques and procedures of conservation.

Tumacacori National Historical Park is 19 miles north of Nogales on Interstate 19. There is an accessible visitors center/museum; living-history demonstrations and guided tours are offered in winter, in summer demonstrations are weekends only and tours are by request. The park is open daily 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Admission is $2 for ages 16 to 62. For more information, write or call Tumacacori National Historical Park, P.O. Box 67, Tumacacori, AZ 85640; (602) 398-2341.

To church in Italy, Turkey, or Austria. This building 200 years old. It is very important to this country. In Italy, thousand churches. In United States, just one.

"This is necessary to restore this building. I think it is an important monument, not only for this area, but for the world.

We must take care. Maybe 20 years ago better to start restoration, but this okay."

San Xavier indeed is a monument, but it also is an active Cath-olic parish of the Dio-cese of Tucson. Since 1692, when Father Eusebio Francisco Kino first visited this area known as Bac, reli-gion has been taught here. Kino began to build the first chapel in 1700. The present church, built by Fran-ciscan fathers from 1778-97, followed var-ious structures on the site, and for much of this century it has been packed every Sunday.

Today's pastor and guardian of the Franciscan community at “The baroque style of art was used to teach theology. Somehow the building would have to teach the story of Christianity. The building itself would have to evangelize the people. It was a summary of the Catholic doctrine.” Father Dallmeier visits with the conservators as they move around the scaffolding. “It’s amazing what they have accomplished,” he says. “It’s not a museum. It will continue to be a shrine church. It’s a place for pilgrims. It’s a special place where people come and experience spirituality in their lives. I hope the day never arrives when it is only a museum.” Between 200,000 and 300,000 pilgrims and tourists visit San Xavier each year, and Father Dallmeier says candles probably will continue to be used in the church even though their smoke slowly has darkened the walls and art. “The candles are important to people as symbols of devotion,” he says.

Schwartzbaum agrees that San Xavier is important for its art and as a religious gathering place. “There is a staggering public participation in the church,” he says. “I’ve been working restoration for 26 years, and San Xavier is unique. Historically, it is the only thing of its kind. It has the most beautiful Spanish colonial wall paintings in the United States. Its paintings are incredibly high quality, and they are so well preserved.

“The work is very sophisticated. The artists used expensive pigments. The red is vermilion. Prussian blue is used. I think they were imported from Europe. These are very precious, very expensive pigments that were not found locally. These colors were meant to be bright.” Indeed the cleaned art work is bright and vivid, and it is easy to tell which work has been completed and which has not. The cleaned art seems to jump off the wall, quickly involving viewers. There are mural-size wall paintings with intricate background designs. It’s possible now to see details in the yellow and blue sunflowers on the ceilings of the church’s domes. The flying angels painted on the wall with their flesh-colored skin and golden hair are wondrous. The still uncleaned pieces of art are shiny from being overpainted with oil or varnish. They are murky and tend to recede into the walls. Where the cleaned art is bright red, blue, and green, the uncleaned is dark brown, dirty green, and algae-colored.

“People come in and see the bright colors and think we’re repainting,” Schwartzbaum says, “but it’s all just cleaning and toning down the white areas. People aren’t used to seeing the bright colors. Time and man have conspired to hide the beauty of the art.” White areas are toned down with a watercolor solution called “dirty water.” The neutral color is brushed on white areas missing paint so that the whites don’t pop out and lessen a viewer’s appreciation of the colors.

Bernard Fontana, a retired University of Arizona anthropologist who has spent nearly 40 years studying San Xavier, says interior work could not begin until the mission’s exterior was stabilized, a project that began in 1989. Repairs had to be done to stop water leakage, which started soon after an 1887 earthquake. The quake damaged damaged San Xavier’s domes, which were patched over the years with layers of concrete. As the concrete cracked, water seeped into the church and began to turn the plaster to mush and destroy the wall paintings. The mission is like Fontana's child. He has watched it closely for much of his life, researching and writing about it like no one else. He serves as secretary of Patron-ato San Xavier.

"The sculpture and paintings were done by skilled professional artisans from Mexico," he says. "In the United States, this is as close as any building comes to the Sistine Chapel. No other Spanish-period church in the United States equals the mission's architecture and art."

As Fontana watches, Donatella Zari moves her hands quickly yet deliberately over a large wall mural titled "Our Lady of the Rosary," which shows the Virgin Mary holding a rosary in one hand and the Christ child in the other. The faces of five angels are painted at her feet. "It's all overpainted," Zari says of the mural. "Some part easy to remove. Some part more difficult. I need 10 days more or less just to clean."

Meanwhile Vincenzo Centanni works on another painting in a corner. "I am re-touching the color," he says, looking down from his 30-foot perch. "Up close you can tell where the color is missing. From three Getting there: Mission San Xavier del Bac is three-fourths of a mile west of Interstate 19 about 10 miles south of downtown Tucson. From Phoenix take

WHEN YOU GO

meters, the people won't be able to tell."

Like the others, Centanni is impressed with the mission and Arizona's desert. "Tucson and Arizona are a very strong emotion for me," he says. "It is extremely beautiful desert, color, mountains. I visit some missions in California, but nothing is like this."

Accommodations: There are no overnight accommodations on the San Xavier Indian Reservation, but nearby Tucson offers plenty, from budget motels to some of the nation's finest resorts.

What to see and do: If the money is raised, the art conservators will work at the mission for three months each year, beginning in mid-January, until the project is completed in about 1996. It's easy to spot which work they have completed and which work they have not. The bright, vivid colors of the cleaned work

ANGELS SAINTS

One of the Tohono O'odham learning a new trade, Timothy Lewis says he had never thought much about San Xavier's art. "I have more admiration for it now," he adds, as he scrubs a portion of the east chapel's wall. "They didn't have electric lighting when they were painting it."

Lewis works on his back, underneath the first level of scaffolding. Above him is Silvia Reggianni, who is cleaning the three-dimensional blue, red, and yellow checkerboard design painted on the lower portions of San Xavier's walls.

"You can see difference," Reggianni says, pointing to the art all around her.

Photo Workshop: Join the Friends of Arizona Highways and photographer J. Peter Mortimer when they explore both San Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori on their Missions and Ghost Towns Photo Workshop, February 9 to 12, 1994. For in-formation, call the Friends' Travel Desk, (602) 271-5904.

You are sure to attract you. The mission itself is one of Arizona's oldest landmarks, and its architecture is spectacular. Make sure you bring your walking shoes and camera. Picture taking is allowed inside the church except during services. Tohono O'odham also have fry-bread stands set up near the mission each day. There is a gift shop at the mission as well as a shopping area to the south. All of the shops offer Tohono O'odham baskets and other art work and gift items.

Admission: There is no admission charge to San Xavier del Bac, but donations are accepted. Just remember that this is an active church and dress and act accordingly.

The Patronato San Xavier also needs contributions to help it finish the interior art-conservation project. Contributions are tax-deductible and can be sent to Patronato San Xavier, P.O. Box 522, Tucson, AZ 85702.

For more information: Telephone San Xavier del Bac, (602) 294-2624.