‘Montreal’s Michelangelo’ to disappear from park

Artist’s name nixed to honour provincial capital

• Guido Nincheri was one of Canada’s greatest religious artists, described as Montreal’s Michelangelo. But as the city prepares to celebrate its 375th anniversary next year, the administration is erasing Nincheri’s name from an east-end park to instead honour the provincial capital.

The redesigned park in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium will be home to statues donated by Quebec City, works that could not be further removed from Nincheri’s stained-glass and fresco masterpieces. Combining parks named after Nincheri and the botanist Brother Marie-Victorin, the new space will be called Quebec City Park.

Joyce Pillarella, a historian who focuses on Montreal’s Italian community, said it is upsetting that the city would place greater importance on a gift from Quebec City than on its artistic history.

She said people of non-French background are already under-represented in the city’s place names, making the removal of a prominent Italian-Montrealer hard to swallow.

“There’s a lot of ethnic washing going on here,” she said.

Nincheri, the son of a Tuscan textile broker, arrived in Montreal in 1914 after studying art at Florence’s Academy of Fine Arts. The Catholic Church was then a powerful force in the province with plenty of money to spend building and embellishing churches.

He worked throughout the province, but in Montreal, Nincheri’s masterpieces are considered to be Saint-Léon-de-Westmount and Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense in Little Italy. Both have been designated national historic sites by Parks Canada because of Nincheri’s work.

His fresco above the altar at Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense, created between 1929-33, is described by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board as “a rare and eloquent expression of Canada’s Italian community” because Nincheri incorporated portraits of contemporary Italians and Canadians. Unfortunately for the artist, one of those Italians was the dictator Benito Mussolini, depicted on horseback.

In 1940, with Canada at war with Mussolini’s regime, Nincheri was arrested as a suspected fascist sympathizer based on his portrait of the dictator. He was interned in Petawawa, Ont., for three months before his wife was able to convince authorities he had painted Mussolini only at the church’s demand.

Nincheri died in 1973 but his posthumous honours include being declared a “national historic person” in 2007 and a builder of Montreal during the city’s 350th anniversary celebrations in 1992.

Twenty-five years later, the builder’s name is to be removed from the park that sits a few blocks from the studio where he produced his stained-glass windows.

The public art that will displace him consists of four columns topped with an athlete wearing a jersey featuring a different animal and a significant date in Montreal history.

The park renovation is one of the city’s projects to mark the 375th anniversary of its founding. The spending spree is expected to cost more than $200 million in public funds, including $40 million to light up a bridge and $55 million for an urban walkway.

Mayor Denis Coderre’s office said in a statement Thursday that the city intends to proceed with the change. Coderre said the Nincheri name remains attached to a nearby municipally funded museum housing some of the artist’s work.

“In this sense, the name of this great artist of Italian origin is highlighted with respect and dignity,” the statement said.

The artist’s grandson, Roger Boccini Nincheri, said the decision to remove Nincheri’s name from the park shows how little Quebec values its ecclesiastical art. “It’s typical of bureaucratic ignorance,” he said.