A painstaking project

Artist’s early 20th-century work partly uncovered in church

Fortunate isn’t a label to be casually applied to Saint Cecilia.

Legend has it the young woman of noble birth converted her pagan husband to her faith and a life burying the fellow Christians killed by Rome’s then prefect.

The lover of song died slowly at the end of the second century from wounds delivered to her neck by a Roman sword. Her story and canonization as the patron saint of music touched someone’s heart.

Because an anonymous donor wanted Saint Cecilia to be seen again the way Ozias Leduc conjured her image with his famed brush over a century ago above the choir loft in Saint Ninian’s Cathedral.

“He was Canada’s Michelangelo,” Michelle Gallinger, a professional art conservator, said of Leduc. “This is our Sistine Chapel and it’s one of the churches he painted that’s never been restored.”

Gallinger and the team of fellow conservators she calls her “art gals” have been painstakingly uncovering Leduc’s work. Saint Cecilia was just the first. “It was about beauty,” said Rev. Donald MacGillivray. “When he was originally commissioned it would have been quite a sacrifice for a congregation to pay for him to come and do this.”

When the Diocese of Antigonish hired the Quebec artist in the 19th century to come to northern Nova Scotia it wasn’t just to paint Saint Cecilia. It was to paint nearly every inch of the cathedral’s interior.

The great stone building on the hill in Antigonish was raised by the Scottish immigrants who had been clearing land and building communities since their arrival.

MacGillivray’s own greatgrandfather donated a week of his time per year hauling granite from an area quarry with horse and wagon. It took the congregation nearly three decades after its 1874 consecration to pay off the initial construction debt and raise the money to bring Leduc.

But walking through the cathedral’s heavy hinged wooden doors now, you’d never know it was once a great painter’s masterpiece. Since Leduc finished his three-year project in 1903, his work has been damaged and covered and touched up until it is nearly unrecognizable.

There was the steam leak in the basement that travelled up the pillars and forced the paint from the walls. There was an incident where a person nearly fell through the ceiling, damaging some of the plaster in the process.

The committee responsible and the private donors funding the restoration have been making hard decisions because they can’t afford to uncover all of Leduc’s work. They are in a race against time.

Because as the paint peels, cracks and falls to the floor so do the strokes of Leduc’s brush so many years ago.

“We’ll do as much as we can as funds become available,” said MacGillivray.