Renzo Gauci - an appreciation
This afternoon, the community of Tarxien, together with many feast enthusiasts, will pay their last respects and bid farewell to Renzo Gauci, the sculptor.
Dr Simon Mercieca is senior lecturer, Department of History
He passed away last Thursday. Unfortunately, I cannot be there, as I have other commitments abroad. Renzo was an artist of great capability and talent. Maybe, he was little appreciated in his lifetime, especially within certain circles of academia. But irrespective of what academia thought about him, he was a great artist and this has been established by the appreciation showered on him by the wider community of ‘festa’ enthusiasts. Thanks to his versatility, he was one of those who kept our ‘festas’ alive. His artistic creations helped maintain our traditions, giving them their merited importance within villages and town communities. All this when many thought, including academia, that feast days were numbered and turned up their noses to this aspect of our Maltese culture.
Renzo began his career making papier-mâché figures for his home parish; Tarxien. He was born at Tarxien and remained there until the day he died. He loved his parish to the extent that when the new parish priest, Fr. Chris Ellul, was installed, and appealed for volunteers, Renzo took up the invitation and made it a point to attend the meeting despite his failing health.
I did not know Renzo while I was growing up in the periphery of Tarxien. However, I got to know him towards the end, which gave me the opportunity to better appreciate his talents. It was the late Fr Mario Agius who introduced me to him. Fr Agius had great admiration for Renzo and his works. He always supported him, particularly during the period when Renzo came under fire for his indefatigable work in favour of the Maltese ‘festa’.
Renzo started his career when the Maltese festa was in difficulties. In the 1970s, nobody would have bet a penny that one could make a career working on statues, ornaments and decorations for feast days when these began being considered something of the past. The Government of the day decided to wage war on Catholic feasts or anything to do with feast decorations. One risked ridicule and being accused of hanging on to the cobwebs of the Middle Ages. This was a recurring adagio in those days. Charles G. Vella in his Sinjali Maltin ta’ Żmienna refers to this war.
Today, this may appear a bit of an anachronism, as politicians on both sides, patronize religious festivals. I state this not to create political controversy but to give the historical background and help the reader to put Renzo’s works and activity in context.
But if the Government of the day was the enemy from outside, soon there was even a more dangerous enemy from within. Once the state beat the retreat, afterwards it was the Church’s turn to aim its guns on festas. Many priests started to discourage decorations within churches and began a covert war against Catholic confraternities. At this point, the band clubs started to increase their prominence and became an alternative. They were even free from the interference of parish priests. Inadvertently, Renzo Gauci got caught in this controversy since his first works, if I am not mistaken, were for the secondary feast – as they were called in those days - of Our Lady as patron of Catholic Doctrine (Il-Madonna tadDuttrina). He was also an active member of its confraternity at Tarxien.
In this political and religious context, his sculptures, decorations and works were considered a threat. Those who thought so, were proven wrong. His foremost interest was Tarxien and its parish. But in those days, there were many experts at the Curia who did more harm than good.
I had the privilege of meeting Renzo at his home, a few months before he passed away. Even though he was sick, suffering from cancer, he accepted to meet me. We had a long conversation on art, Maltese artists and past technical skills, in particular about the making of papiermâché statues. We discussed how this type of work also depended on the material available for artists, and how the arrival on the local scene of new materials, in particular, what colloquially was known as ‘ġibs Ingliż’, actually plaster of Paris, changed the art of creating papier-mâché statues. One of the pioneers in this new technique was Antonio Dalli. New materials introduced in the last 200 years had their impact on local art.
On that occasion, I had the opportunity to also share my research on an old sculptured face in wood that belonged to an old early 19th century statue. In Maltese, we call this type of wooden face a ‘maskla’ or mask. I discussed with Renzo, the possibility that this mask belonged to the statue of Our Lady of the Doctrine of Tarxien until it was replaced by Antonio Dalli when he restored the statue. Renzo Gauci also had the opportunity to restore this statue and knew a lot about its history.
Besides being an artist, he was also good at restoring both papier-mâché statues and historic wooden statues. He made miracles on the processional statue of his home town; the statue of the Annunciation.
During our lengthy discussion, his noble character emerged. We discussed how Tarxien has changed in our lifetime and of those who had an influence on him. He spoke with great respect of the sculptor Manuel Buhagiar. Renzo considered him his mentor and he was the one who warned him on what to expect if he intended to work with priests and feast enthusiasts. The chances are that those whom he submitted his designs would actually have the work executed by others who were not up to scratch. And at the end of the day, they would blame the design or declare that it was technically impossible to execute! Renzo confessed that he had had to face such situations many times in his life.
One of the areas in which Renzo truly excelled was wood carving. His designs and some of the works he actually executed are extremely expressive and beautiful. The most difficult thing to recreate in sculpture are faces of dead persons, in particular when having to do so from photographs. The renaissance sculptors made their marble busts when their patrons were still alive! Unlike painting, sculptors cannot create busts of death persons from one or two photos unless not aided by 3D digital reconstruction. When Renzo had a free hand, he excelled.
Despite the fact that he was revered by festa enthusiasts, Renzo Gauci remained unassuming. A man with a heart of gold for whom many – on Facebook - have already been testifying to the impact and legacy he has left behind.
I recall seeing in his workshop, a papier-mâché statue of St. Michael. It was in a bad state. Renzo took it upon him to restore it. The statue belonged to the Society of Christian Doctrine of Paola (Museum). It had been repaired once before, in the 1980s, by the Rev. George Deguara of Paola. It was broken again and Renzo offered to repair it for free. I am mentioning this because I remember Renzo’s comments: ‘I have great respect for TalMużuw. Where I can, I help them’. He was grateful to them for all the encouragement they had given him, when as a youngster they discovered his inborn talent and aptitude for making models and decorating Christian figurines .
It is his humility that speaks for the magnitude of this man. Today many band clubs and feast enthusiasts boast of having works done or designed by this master. Rest in peace Renzo.