National Post (National Edition)
LA NATIVITÉ
VINCENZO POGGI SURVIVED INTERNMENT TO BECOME ONE OF QUEBEC’S PREMIER STAINED-GLASS ARTISTS
A stained-glass window at Notre-Dame-de-la-Victoire church in Lévis, Que., depicts the nativity. The artist, Vincenzo Poggi, rarely spoke of his years in an Ontario internment camp during the Second World War. He was held because of his Italian heritage.
Art and life took Vincenzo Poggi to a few very different places before he settled in the redbricked house on the hill in Westmount, Que., two flights of stairs up from street level on a peaceful stretch of busy Rue St. Catherine.
As a young man he worked in Paris and Milan and then moved overseas to Montreal, charmed by the chance to learn from Guido Nincheri — Canada’s Michelangelo, the finest designer of stainedglass windows Poggi’s new hometown had ever seen. A decade later his adopted country took him prisoner; deemed an enemy in wartime for his Italian blood, he was confined in a camp at Petawawa, Ont., a military town off the Ottawa River.
Shortly after he was granted freedom, he sat in the offices of a Montreal glass shop and considered an order the business had just received. A Catholic church near Quebec City had commissioned a set of 17 stained-glass windows. The panes would line the left and right walls of the edifice, straddling the altar and portraying each stage of the Virgin Mary’s life.
Over the course of 1945 and 1946, the job of creating the windows fell to Poggi. When it came time for him to visualize a nativity scene, he drew Jesus in a diaper atop his mother’s lap, surrounded by praying children, a shepherd with his hands outstretched and a pair of obedient sheep.
To complete the rendering, he positioned a toy wooden horse — a personal flourish — at Mary’s feet.
“According to the information we have, he took the liberty to introduce some elements of contemporary art in his production,” said Gaëtan Hallé, an official at the church that bought the windows: Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Victoire, or Our Lady of Victory, in Lévis, Que.
“I think that’s what makes it different (from) something you can see in other churches, or coming from other artists.”
Poggi, who was 88 when he died 30 years ago in Montreal, was a celebrated artist in Quebec religious circles; today, windows he crafted continue to vivify dozens of Christian churches around the province.
Yet he rarely spoke about his handiwork, in part because he “wasn’t too talkative” in general, Poggi’s son Maurice, 73, said recently. The elder Poggi worked nights and weekends, and on the sparing occasions he took downtime while Maurice was growing up, the two of them preferred to collect stamps together.
Two telling details about the artist emerge in a 1959 Westmount Examiner article, a clip of which Maurice keeps to this day. In a profile of Vincenzo, the suburban Montreal newspaper observed that he had hung only two of his own pieces in his home: a drawing of his wife, Janet, and a portrait of a young girl’s reflection in a mirror.
Earlier in the story, Poggi explained why he’d mostly renounced portrait-painting years earlier: the compulsion to make small talk with his subjects threw him off. Instead he allotted his focus to stained glass, a vocation brimming with colour and devoid of gratuitous conversation.
Vincenzo Poggi was born on April 10, 1900, in Milan, where he studied fine art from 1917-23 before departing for Paris after graduation. He spent three years decorating homes in the French capital and then returned home for a job at a Milanese art studio.
In 1929, Poggi relocated to Montreal to work for Nincheri, a stained-glass maestro who studied design in Florence and emigrated from Italy just after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Poggi liked the city, and when the initial contract he signed elapsed after a year, he decided to stick around.
He remained in Nincheri’s employ until June 1940, when prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, not yet a year into another calamitous global conflict, ordered the arrest of any Italian-Canadian whom authorities suspected might be capable of subverting the war effort. RCMP officers corralled about 600 men in total, including 40-year-old Vincenzo Poggi.
Interned at Petawawa, Poggi made art of scenes that unfolded before his eyes: a charcoal sketch of a boxing match, a dark drawing of a storm, portraits of several of his fellow prisoners. Released in early 1941, he was detained again a year later and held until September 1943. He never spoke of those years, Maurice said. It was a disagreeable experience, and no one likes to recount memories of that nature.
Joyce Pillarella, a historian from Montreal whose grandfather was held at Petawawa, said the experience of internment chilled the city’s entire Italian-Canadian community. The families of the men who were hauled away had also been branded as “enemy aliens.” Italians lost their jobs; customers stayed away from their businesses. Landlords refused to rent homes to them. Children had to leave school to try to make money in their fathers’ absence. Friends ostracized them or were afraid to help them out.
“When I started interviewing (the children of internees), they had been quiet about it for almost 60, 70 years. They had not talked about it. There was a lot of shame attached to the stories,” said Pillarella, who published a book about Montreal’s interned Italian-Can- adians in 2012.
“When (their fathers) were in the camp, they were controlled by barbed wire. When they leave, they’re controlled by fear.”
After he was released for good, Poggi worked as a draftsman and painted children’s toys for a time. In 1944 he joined J.P. O’Shea, the stained-glass firm where he designed the Virgin Mary windows for the church in Lévis. In 1947 he opened his own shop, Studio V. Poggi. For many years it was situated on the first floor of his family’s home, the redbricked residence on Westmount’s Rue St. Catherine.
As a child who occasionally would have preferred to be playing outside, Maurice chipped in to help around his father’s office. He cemented panels, packed completed windows to be shipped. Later, he studied art history and went on to work in advertising. In the mid-1990s, some years after his father’s death, he started volunteering with a project at Toronto’s York University: a registry that documents stained-glass windows across the country.
In a window that is housed at Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Victoire in Lévis, somewhere between sheets of glass that depict the marriage of Mary and Joseph and the death of Christ, Maurice’s father devoted a panel to life in Nazareth. Two women dote on a pair of children. An angel flutters under the words, “Douce mère” — sweet mother.
In the bottom right corner is a surprising addition: Bambi, the wide-eyed deer that headlined a classic Disney film in 1942. It is another Poggi flourish, an artistic liberty in the mould of baby Jesus’ toy horse.
Though we can’t be sure what the man was thinking in the moment, Hallé, the church official, is fond of the improvisation. He sees it as a reminder that the scenes in the windows still matter.
“We’re not only talking about an old history,” Hallé said. “We also have a link between those stories that go back 2,000 years and today.”