How a Montreal church fresco landed its creator in a concentration camp

Columbus Centre Collection

On the southeast corner of Av Henri-Julien and rue Dante in Montreal’s Little Italy rises a lovely Romanesque-style Catholic church. Designed by Roch Montbriant and completed in 1919 it was built by Italian immigrants from the Molise region of Italy who wanted to worship in their own church. They named it Madonna della Difesa although it’s known today as by its French name, Notre-Dame-de-la-Defense.

        This was my parish church from the time we moved to rue St-Dominique in Montreal’s Little Italy in 1959. Not that my family went to mass every Sunday. My parents were too busy trying to survive while raising three kids. My mother who worked full-time in a garment factory, Sundays were for catching up on housework and preparing for the week ahead. From time to time, we attended the summer street festivals celebrating one saint or other. If we kids got lucky our father would buy us a custard-filled pastry or an ice-cream cone from the bakery directly across the street from the church.  

         Only decades later did I learn that one scene in the big, gorgeous mural, all fifteen-hundred square metres adorning the vaulted ceiling above the main altar, landed its creator in a Canadian concentration camp during World War II. Italian-born Guido Nincheri, painter, architect, muralist and superb stained-glass artist, known as Canada’s Michelangelo, designed the church’s interior. Because of one detail in the fresco covering the immense apse, Nincheri was arrested in 1940 and sent to a Canadian prisoner of war camp.

        Among a visual feast of saints, religious figures and episodes in Canadian history covering the fifteen-hundred-square-foot vaulted ceiling, the offending image depicted the fascist dictator, Benito -Mussolini, Il Duce, on horseback at the feet of Pope Pius XI and his cardinals. The scene marked the 1929 truce between the Italian state and the Catholic Church which made the Vatican a sovereign state and pronounced Catholicism Italy’s official religion.

        Born near Florence, Italy, Nincheri settled in Montreal in 1913 and went on to have a distinguished career designing the interiors of Catholic churches across Canada and New England. Nincheri designed Madonna della Difesa interior and spent fourteen years covering its walls with frescos, which he completed in 1933. 

        The Mussolini detail raised no eyebrows at the time. Europe wasn’t at war and many world leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister L. Mackenzie King and Britain’s Winston Churchill deemed Mussolini a statesman defending the western world against the communist threat.

        Fast forward to 1940. With war now raging in Europe and Mussolini Hitler’s ally, Nincheri’s inclusion of the now reviled Italian dictator branded him a fascist sympathizer and enemy alien. Except he wasn’t.  

        Nincheri was at work painting angels inside Sainte-Amélie de Baie-Comeau when the RCMP arrested him and shipped him to Camp Petawawa in Ontario—aka Camp 33, one of about forty across the Canada—joining some six hundred other men, mostly Germans and Italian prisoners of war. Japanese prisoners arrived a couple of years later.

      Nincheri spent only three months in Petawawa, released thanks to the efforts of his enraged wife, Giulia, who worked to free him. With his original sketches in hand, his family showed the court that the Mussolini’s scene had not been part of the artist’s plan and insisted church elders forced him to include it.   

       In her book, The Art and Passion of Guido Nincheri, author Melanie Grondin writes that Nincheri’s son, George, says his father did not want to include the detail but relented after church wardens threatened to cancel his father’s contract if he continued to refuse. His father, he says, didn’t want someone else finishing a project close to his heart in which he’d been involved from the beginning and, for another, hard times during the Depression meant other work would be hard to get.   

        The fresco, which had so enraged Canadian federal authorities, spent the war years covered by a nailed over it. The nail holes remain and so does the controversy. Even today there are those who denounce its existence as homage to fascism and want it erased.