The Art of Angelo da Fonseca: Life, Times, Context

ANGELO DA FONSECA — the Poona-based artist, renowned for Indianising Christian icons, and painting the Madonna in the Indian revivalist neo-Bengal art styles of Santiniketan — is back in the public consciousness with two recent exhibitions of his work in Goa, and a handsome new publication — FONSECA —  by Delio Mendonca and Architecture Autonomous. The recent spotlight though, has only increased interest in his life and work, and accentuates the importance of art historian, fiction writer and artist, SAVIA VIEGAS’ primary research and forthcoming book on the underexposed Fonseca. Pamela D’Mello gets her to reveal glimpses of her research findings.

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Q. You’ve been researching Angelo da Fonseca, his life and work for over a decade now and have curated exhibitions and written essays on him. I believe your book is to be published shortly…..

Yes. It has been the most intense and difficult journey I have navigated so far. The work started in my head in 2002. It was at his centennial year exhibition at Pilar Theological College, Goa, that I came face to face with the name and artwork  of a man I had met in childhood — Angelo da Fonseca. I had watched him paint then, just once  —  a man with a quiet demeanor, a man of great height. His wife wore a cotton sari and had a terrifying voice that shook the candelabra in Alice Mann’s (Angelo da Fonseca’s niece Alice Costa Pereira, whom he visited on his Goa trips home, lived next door to us in Carmona, South Goa) house. He had a daughter, my age, who looked like an angel. Such was the memory of childhood, frozen in time! 

I gasped at the beauty and power of his work at the 2002 exhibition, and the memory got hinged somewhere in the grey cells, because I was to leave in a few months for my senior Fulbright fellowship and would be away for a year. 

The  journey into researching Angelo da Fonseca really started 14 years ago, after I wrote a paper for an international conference at MS University, Baroda.  There were hushed whispers as I pulsed images of his pictures and read my paper on  “The Semiotics of Archival Trajectories”.  No one knew about a Goan artist called Angelo da Fonseca! ‘What? I heard his name shouted about in my backyard in Goa in childhood’, I wanted to shout, but listened meekly, as among them were  art luminaries like Geeta Kapur, Ratan Parimoo, Vivan Sundaram, Jyotindra Jain, among others. Someone came and offered a grant that I could apply for and thrust the application form into my hands. ” Apply!” she said. “You have a solid case!” In 2010, I was granted ₹1 lakh by India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore, to do ground research on Angelo da Fonseca. 

I was still grappling with finding the links to his oeuvre, which would reflect on socio-cultural factors, when Fr Savio Abreu and Fr Rinald D’Souza, the Director and his Deputy at Xavier Centre for Historical Research at Porvorim, Goa, approached me to curate exhibitions on his work. We planned three exhibitions for the first year, 2012 — A Christmas Story for December; The  Passion and Glory for the Lenten period and a third, titled Maiden, Muse and Madonna.

With the  opening of the first exhibition, I remember raising the hackles of local intellectuals and art experts. “You have to reflect his aesthetics and the greatness of his art,” one said to me.  “You cannot curate his art between the joyful and sorrowful mysteries!”He scoffed.  And I did just that. Because while the research feed was emitting information, I was still grappling with the idea: Why did Angelo da Fonseca paint as he did?  Why did he abandon secular work or underplay it?

Anoop, my husband, who is a journalist said: “You are just hanging on… Call it Finding Fonseca and just publish all the information you have.” Finally, in Covid time, I was able to  get my act together. Yes, the book will be published in May 2023 – when it will be his 120th birth centenary and 55th death anniversary.  He was born on December 6, 1902 and died on December 28, 1967.

Q.  There are still major gaps in the public-domain information about Fonseca as an individual. What has your primary research thrown up about his early life in Goa, his parental family, his siblings?

Our methods of documentation are poor. There are no paper trails and the oral history tradition  does not live beyond a few generations.  Also when the natal house gets demolished, evidence and clues run helter-skelter. Yes, I do know a few grand-nephews and nieces, who were adolescents or children in his time.  I have been able to garner some details from them. His daughter, known to me since childhood, helped immensely.  I had the good fortune to get to know the artist’s wife, Ivy da Fonseca, in the last two years of her life,  and we spent some quality time together in Pune and in Carmona, which was a valuable experience. But Ivy had set her sights on an Oxbridge scholar writing a book on Angelo da Fonsea and only put ‘a little warm faith’ in my research abilities. Also, the mother and daughter were in battle over custody of the patrimony, so I had to tread carefully. 

Ivy had several custodians who guarded her trail and interviews.  One was the lovely Sr Jenny who lived with her and handled her access to the public.  To date, I do not have access to his passport, his correspondence, his family albums or his inventory of his paintings. By virtue of being famous, a persona like that, belongs to the public domain. A great grand-nephew has a collection of his postcards, but despite repeated requests, I never got to see the collection.

Luckily in Goa, the elite family tree eventually boils down to one huge circulatory system.  Everybody is related to everybody and going via myriad  local culverts,  led me to the big river. 

First let us talk about his childhood.

The artist’s father was Louis Bonaparte Albuim da Fonseca and mother, Maria Delfina Isabel Fernandes. The young Jose Nicolau Angelo Antonio da Fonseca spent his childhood on the idyllic island  of Santo Estevam, near Old Goa. The da Fonsecas were an elite and a large  family. The young Angelo was one of 17 children,  11 of whom survived. It was not uncommon for mothers to have many 

children, given the mortality rates of the time. Additionally, religious censure, large homes, coupled with landed properties, enabled the support of large families.

Many of the da Fonseca siblings were artistically gifted. The artistic vein came from their mother Delfina, who replicated postcards with  great meticulousness — so much so, that you could not tell the copy from the original.  Shadow puppetry was a regular form of  entertainment, as twilight lengthened and darkened its shadows. An older sister, Olinda (Torres Dias)  and two brothers, Anthony and Cajetan, were artists; the latter had graduated from Sir J J School of Art, Bombay.

Angelo da Fonseca’s own artistic abilities were detected early.  A narrative unwinds from the past, that once, when his father at an advanced age fell ill, the team of medics attending to  him noticed  the young Angelo sitting in a corner, sketching the chief medic. It was a sketch that first established his artistic proclivity.  Much later, the estate and the grand family house were partitioned off into plots and sold to tenants, who had occupied the backrooms and under new post-colonial laws had to be granted ownership. Many of the residents of the estuarine islands of Divar, Chorao and Santo Estevam had moved there during the  epidemics in Old Goa in the 17th century. The old city was the entrepot and capital of Goa at the time. When Pangim became the capital in 1853, many of the island elite hopped onto the ferryboat and moved to the city. The island’s grand residences lost their significance, while tradesmen from South Goa moved in and began to live on the islands, plying their trade and servicing Pangim city. 

The merits inherent in a young Angelo da Fonseca’s line drawings, were noticed for the first time by Jesuit priest Fr Charles Ghezzi, who headed St Vincent’s Boys High School, Poona and by the school’s design teacher, Master Godbole.  Like young boys of his elite Catholic social stratum, Angelo da Fonseca learnt to play the violin, dance the waltz, foxtrot and corridinho (a Goan-Portuguese folk dance) and cultivated an appreciation for theater.

Angelo da Fonseca did his elementary schooling in the Portuguese-medium at Santo Estevam, followed by a short stint in a Panjim high school. Thereafter, he switched over to  English-medium at St Paul’s High School in Belgaum —  a colonial educational hub located 100 km south of Panjim  which was then a favourite with many Goans aspiring for English-medium education.  Angelo da Fonseca later moved to Bombay and enrolled into St Xavier’s School there, and then moved on to St Vincent’s Boys High School, Poona where he completed his schooling in 1923.

In spite of the early signs of artistic talent, the 21-year-old Angelo da Fonseca enrolled into medical education at Grant Medical College in Bombay. Like most young men from Goan elite families at the time, he too had three elective career choices — to be a doctor, a priest or a lawyer — laid out to abet the gentrification drive of upper-caste Goan parents.  Angelo da Fonseca,  propelled by an artistic impulse, chucked a medical career after two years, his studies thwarted by an illness.

Angelo da Fonseca’s association with J J College of Art – somewhere during the directorial tenure of renowned English portrait painter W E Gladstone Soloman — was brief, uneventful and certainly without absorption of his spirit. He found the ‘academic art training’ unpalatable, and the approach of J J College of Art, Eurocentric and conformist. In an essay many years later, he wrote: “The Principal was European and they were expected to paint from observing sitting models” — a methodology which did not fit into his ‘idea of art’.

Q. What and who were the influences that shaped his nationalistic worldview and his desire to translate that into art? 

I have wondered. Angelo da Fonseca seems not to have the insularity that Goans harbour, othering anything that falls beyond the pale of their Christian identity, as ‘konkonponn‘.

It is perhaps his destined journeys to various parts of India that makes him shed this artifice and embrace a pan-Indian identity. His schooling in Belgaum, Poona, Bombay and Calcutta allowed him to see both the diversity and unity of a huge landmass called India and humbly accept himself as a part of that whole. A new baptism is showered by these pan-Indian journeys, that he begins to meditate on a universe which hitherto may have been beyond his reckoning. A universe whose unfolding had been curtained and thrust into a mode of alterity. Much later, Mathew Lederle  described him as a ecumenical person. Meanwhile, the drums of independence were beating louder and Angelo da Fonseca traverses in his train journeys from Calcutta to Goa, as it chugs through a swadesified land, a continent of different colours, before he walks through a forest path and comes to the immigration check post where the Portuguese officials stamp on his bilhete de viage.

Three things work on Angelo da Fonseca’s return: the new imagery of pan-Indian costume that his mind unpacks, is anathema here, where the gentrified elite class he belongs to is draped in the taste of European fashion and hair is cut short.  Mother Mary in a sari is unthinkable. The communitarian atmosphere of the northeastern city is missing here and an orthodox clergy pontificate, make eyes and wagging fingers from the pulpit.

Angelo da Fonseca is on the run and he opts for an Anglican Ashram of the Christa Prema Seva Sangh (CPSS), where those conditions seem to exist and he begins to breathe easy and paint.  He gets noticed and draws the attention of Sepp Schuller, the German curator of Christian art, who picks up his work for a 1937 exhibition in Paris. 

In 1938, he meets Father Henry Heras, the archeologist/historian Spanish Jesuit priest, who comes to CPSS, checks out his portfolio, purchases some works and bonds over a cup of tea. That very same year, he is introduced to Cardinal Celso Costantini,  theologian, artist, writer and archaeologist, who was at the Vatican. 

Justice, humanity and peace are the tenets that Europe  — which has passed through the throes of a  five year World War I and is swerving  towards the precipice of  another one — is  hoping for in 1938.  But clearly, the continent is up in flames. World War I had embroiled soldiers from the  colony in the war. On their return,  decolonisation movements had intensified the world over. The correspondence between Angelo da Fonseca, Costantini and Heras, reveals very crucial links as to why a post-colonial strategy for Christianity to survive in Asia and Africa, was important for the Vatican. Given what had happened to Jews in Europe, what would be the future of Christianity in a postcolonial world?  Clearly there was an established alterity between Asians and the Gods they worshiped and these were issues of race, colour, culture, food and custom. The  architecture of the churches was European, so were  the nature of services and the language they were delivered in. So a mediation in introduction to indigeneity  is first begun in religion. And for intellectuals like Heras and Costantini, Angelo da Fonseca, with his proclivity, became a poster boy of inculturation in religious art.  If you do the math, things fall into place. The meeting took place in 1938.  Between 1962-65 was the Second Vatican Council and after 1965, the process of inculturation began in the colonies.  While this move to nativise mass and make it more inclusive succeeds, the art itself does not have the desired effect and after the death of Heras in 1955 and Costantini in 1958, it goes into limbo.

Q. What do you think prompted him to seek out and stay true to the Bengal School of Art, to the very end? Some scholars have pointed out that he actually went to Bengal to hone his portraiture skills, since that offered a career choice — but was spotted by Nandalal Bose who convinced him to take up neo-Bengal art. And at the end of his training at Santiniketan, he was steered by Abanindranath Tagore towards a re-visualization of Christian themes in Indic imagery.

I would give greater importance to his second and third chain of friends and mentors who acted as catalysts in his growth and maturity as an artist.

Let us take  his journey to Calcutta and Santiniketan, whereon starts his artistic journey.  Angelo da Fonseca starts with a letter of recommendation to the Tagores and when the meeting takes place, he has a change of heart and shows his portfolio instead. All through his life, the artist flashes the badge of his alma mater Santiniketan and the fact that he was a shishya of Abanindranath Tagore and a follower of the neo-Bengal school, which was essentially a revivalist school. We find in his collection several sketches and paintings  worked on in Bolpur, where Santinketan and its art school Kala Bhavana are located. The obvious deduction is that he was a student of Kala Bhavana.

But research at Kala Bhavana draws a blank. There were no student works that would footprint his existence as an alumni of the school. Live interviews with one retired principal and another teacher of Kala Bhavana, Dinkar Kowshik (2010) who are past their seventies and still live in the vicinity, also  leads into a cul-de-sac. They move their silver heads from left to right and cannot recall a student of that name. “We would have known if he blossomed and became famous. They rattle the names of artists associated with Kala Bhavana who grew to  become artists working on Christian themes. 

My next best hope is a register maintained by Nandalal Bose, who made meticulous documentation of students who were in Kala Bhavana. But during my visit in 2010, the register could not be located. R Siva Kumar, Principal at Kala Bhavana who has written several authoritative works on the art school and Abanindranath, later very graciously gets in touch and informs me that “the register has been located and the entries start from 1930.  For that year there is only one entry and from 1931, Angelo da Fonseca’s name does not feature in the list. However there is a window of hope, as many pages are left blank in the beginning, suggesting that he intended to write names of earlier students, but that wasn’t done!”  But Siva Kumar is certain that Angelo da Fonseca’s art contains faithful traces of  the Bengal school.  Kumar’s contention is that if he left Bengal in the beginning of 1930s, some of his paintings would have been etched from memory. So it highlights a very important method of working from memory — which you also notice in several other paintings where his family members feature as Mary and reveal their youthful avatars. I would like to mention that the art school Kala Bhavana, was founded in 1919, though Visva Bharati started functioning only in 1921. It was a free-wheeling association till 1930-31, when the structure was formalised. Many artists lived on campus and attended programmes at the art school. My conclusion is that Angelo da Fonseca, during his sojourn at Calcutta, lived or frequented Bolpur, but was never a student of Kala Bhavana.

However, the Oriental Society of India used to conduct six-monthly courses for mofussil town students under the headship of Abanindranath Tagore. Located in the heart of Calcutta city, this course was very popular and drew students from all over.  Even Mathew Lederle attests that the artist did a six month course under Abanindranath Tagore.

Abanindranath who was nonconformist in his educational strategies  must have taken a liking to the young lad, for he had been invited to Jorshanko House, where the Tagores painted on the famous South Balcony. Promising young painters were often invited to chat and work with the maestros. Angelo da Fonseca visited Jorshanko House when Abanindranath was painting the fabled Arabian Nights. It is here that he does a portrait of  Abanindranath in 1930 and Rabindranath Tagore, in 1931.

I don’t know if he wanted to become a portrait painter or if Nandalal dissuaded him, because I have not been able to establish any clues in my field work. I think he picked up the art of making colour from Nandalal. For, all through his life, he ground his own colours, which was also an important dictum dictated by the Bengal school.

There are a clutch of postcards and letters from Abanindranath to Angelo da Fonseca after 1931, indicating that the two kept in touch with each other. The conversation is casual.  Abanindranath encourages the artist to ‘paint the church.’ He says that some of Fonseca’s work displayed in a Calcutta exhibition ‘was very good.’.  ‘Keep painting’, he urges and says that he had discussed Fonseca with Nandalal, who had gone for a 1934 exhibition to Bombay.’ He confesses that he is not painting nowadays, but passes his time reading the Bible.

Both Jyoti Sahi and Mathew Lederle, who have tracked the Angelo da Fonseca story in the larger frame of Christian art, admit that it was the Bengal School and Gandhiji who encouraged the growth of Christian art, at that juncture. It is purported by many writers that Abanindranath taught Angelo da Fonseca, the Japanese ‘wash’ technique, which was used extensively by Abanindranath himself. But I tend to concur with Jyoti Sahi, that the paper habitually used by Angelo da Fonseca was ordinary paper, which did not have enough porosity. This method required several immersions in water and drying, so that the colour pigments would percolate into the layers of paper and leave a dream-like misty quality in the final work. The Goan artist used chart paper in many of his works, which  are neither porous nor would stand the strain of immersions. But Angelo da Fonseca did follow Abanindranath and transliterated many of his works into his own compositions, as my book will show.

Q. You’ve alluded to the three phases that are identifiable in Fonseca’s oeuvre. Can you tell us about these and what marked the transitions?

I look at his work from 1930-1948 as the first phase; 1950-1957 as the second phase; and 1958-1967 as the mature phase.

If you examine all his works together, you do realise that each phase throws up some breathtaking works that break the boundary and are identified in a class of their own. Such is the maverick genius of  Angelo da Fonseca! The three secular works he painted in 1939-40 — Spring and Summer, The Girl at the Well and Churching — these works are painted almost eight years after he had departed from Calcutta, but the Santiniketan influence lingers on. This is a clear indication that the artist paints from memory. In a 1959 painting of the Annunciation, the visage portrayed is that of a very youthful  Alice Costa Pereira, his niece who was his peer in age. Music, 1932 also resonated with the influence of the Bengal school, particularly of the work of A R Chughtai. The iconic Madonna, painted at St. Ignatius church in Kirkee, Poona, was also painted in this period.

The second phase begins when he returns from an extended stay in Europe and gets married. The very next year, there are marked stylistic changes in his work. In the International Marian year (1954), several commissions to paint the Madonna, gives rise to a whole range of diverse Madonna and Child works. “I have painted the Madonna in all diverse ways,” the artist was known to remark.  In 1957 his daughter was born and there are several paintings of baby Yessonda.  As she grows, she becomes the model for the young Jesus. In the middle phase too, there are some fine works. I would single out Amarah Namah  and the Ecce Homme  series, as some of the outstanding works of this period. In this period,  Fonsecan trademarks emerge: the faint outline of a west Asian horizon, denoted by flat-roofed structures, especially in the Pieta series, the composite recessed backdrop of Hindu, Islamic, Catholic structures, representative of our diverse religious heritage. Rupert Arrowsmith and Delio Medonca, describing the murals at De Nobili College, Pune, both affirm, one by writing and the other by footnoting, that it recaptures the landscape of Tuscany.  I fail to understand this, for in St Theresa of the Roses, the vignette earlier shown is of temples etc. In another mural, there is a Gupta Bronze on the table and another has Ahura Mazda, the Zend-Avestan God.

When we look at  Angelo da Fonseca’s oeuvre, one thing becomes clear. He tries to locate every event of the Christian narrative on Asian terrain and Asian culture. I don’t have any scholars to substantiate the points I present. Those who could have, are dead. But it is necessary to stick my neck out for the sake of clear-headed future research.  I may be wrong at critical junctures, at the way I think and present my view.  But I hope that if I am wrong, someone can set the record straight, for the sake of Angelo da Fonseca. 

In the final stage, there is a shift in his compositions. His secular portraits have always been rich in colour as compared to his religious paintings, which always have a very subtle background like a placid blue sky or a powder blue colour, but in many of the 1960s works, the images break free. Look at John the Baptist, St John writing the book of Revelations or the Apocalypse or Our Lady of Assumption.

Q. The last phase, that you’ve described as his most striking, was cut short by his early demise….What are the works of this period and how different are they from the Fonsecas that have gone on exhibit.

Yes it is, even though in my mind I like to visit the labyrinth of his works and tick off great works all along. This was a period when the artist was undergoing severe depression which plagues many an artistic mind. His two great  patrons — Heras and Costantini — were already dead; the papal network was busy with the challenges of inculturation. His daughter was growing up. As she did, he realised his daughter was still young and anxieties of not seeing her grow and his own impending end, had begun to plague him. In 1962, he starts painting his older siblings (sisters), then in their eighties.  In the use of colour, the positioning of the figures, the  background in which the atmosphere comes alive —- there is a volatility and tensility in these images. He is painting aged saints, with an aged beauty of features, that lend a different kind of authority to his art. The wild look in the eyes of St John is riveting. So is the haunting look  in Beginning and End and the perfect iconography of Mother and Child.  This was the time he had begun to develop premonitions and was very depressed. The family took it as an artists’ angst. Angelo da Fonseca visited Goa twice in 1967 and painted furiously. Soon after Christmas he passed away.

Q. As an art historian how would you assess the two strains of his oeuvre? Though Fonseca is known as a painter of religious themes, his wide body of secular works do not receive as much attention. Yet some of his later secular works are extremely powerful.

This question addresses the crux of the matter. Why does Angelo da Fonseca not exhibit in a salon?  Why does he not join up with other artists of the time?  Why is a separate exhibition of religious art held, first as a curtain raiser in St Xavier’s College, Bombay and later held in Rome and other European cities? These thoughts have a trajectory to them. India was not a small enclave like Macao or totally under cultural control like Brazil — both colonial enclaves where the conversion to Christianity was complete. India has had its own old civilization, culture and languages. Goa was a part of that larger country, India.

Europe was in turmoil after World War I. Even before World War II, — with the rise of Nazism, Fascism, Bolshevism and the ambitions of Japan to become a superpower in Asia — the papal Church, more so during the tenure of Pope Pius XII, were faced with uncertainties around the fate of Christianity and Christians after the inevitable decolonisation of Asia, given what had happened with the Jews.

The other major concern then, was Japan’s ambitions. Japanese artists have already travelled to Santiniketan and are interested in the creation of a pan-Asian art. Japanese artists teach the wash technique at Santiniketan and eventually Kala Bhavana develops the Bengal school of Art. 

Angelo da Fonseca is drawn to the new experiments of the Bengal school and proceeds to the eastern city.

Celso Costantini,  who opens an office in China in 1922, to allow Christianity to  incorporate local bishops, music and musical instruments, also sets up a University there. About sixteen years later (1938), he turns his attention to India and through Heras, is introduced to Angelo da Fonseca and gives him several commissions. There is interesting correspondence from the cardinal to the artist. Costantini writes about Fonseca’s art in a magazine founded by him – Arte Cristiana.  He advises Fonseca on a painting he has asked him to paint and requests him not to depict flags (that connote nationalism), but children, around the figure of Christ. He sends him material on the life of Fra Angelico (Friar and Early Renaissance Italian painter famed for his pious and innovative frescoes in Florence) and advises Angelo da Fonseca to  paint from the point of view of his own Indian society and culture. He also advises him that it is better for him to work from India than live abroad.

One can sense that within Christian papal circles, there is a concern  that early  twentieth century developments – the invention of flight (1906), the onslaught of war — are fragmenting  perspectives in art and that emerging new perspectives might change the future of art. 

Surrealism and Dadaism change the Image. Angelo da Fonseca, accepting the Costantini brief, begins to see that a future is developing in depicting religious iconography with Asiatic skin and clothing. He is very serious about being an iconographer by the 1940s and begins to orient himself as an artist in that direction. His writings and interviews reveal that he prays before starting a painting, paints from memory and does not allow secular imagery to distract his concentration on the religious. He never declares himself as a modernist and always states that he is a shishya of Abanindranath Tagore.

Q. Much is made of the rejection of Fonseca’s art in 1930s colonial Goa. And of alleged rejection of his artwork in Churches. Yet he was exhibited in Rome, feted by the Pope, and had patrons within religious orders in India. How do we academically and objectively understand these processes in their historical and social context, without falling into  grandstanding and blaming some sections to valourise the self?

Angelo da Fonseca  was in Calcutta till 1931 when the portrait of Rabindranath was painted, then there is a rerouting to Goa and a quick exit. The paper trail of Abanindranath’s postcards – first one addressed to his home in Goa  and subsequently to the CPSS ashram — clearly validates such a whirlwind rerouting and relocation. I  don’t dismiss that a painting of Mary in a sari would have been the trigger, but there were other triggers as well. To branch out as an artist, a breaking of the doxa of the habitus, was necessary.  Tell me, how many of Goa’s talented artists at the turn of the century stayed back and produced art that made its mark?  FX Souza? Vamona Navelkar? Angela Trinidade? F X Trinidade and several others? Several European artists went to smaller places and prospered. Paul Gaugain  in Tahiti, is one example. Goa would have been an ideal place to paint, but something was amiss. South American artists, Frida Kalho or Diego Rivera, Leonora Carrington, David Siqueiros and others achieved success working from their own country.  Our artists  and writers — quite a prodigious output for a small state  — after being baptised here, had to take confirmation somewhere else.

At the time Angelo da Fonseca was working, India was trying to  reposition the majoritarian “Hindu” culture. In many ways, his work would have been chaffed without the set of patrons he had. He had to grow internationally, to be recognised locally. It’s a rule of the book for artists and writers. An Iranian proverb says that a nightingale needs a garden to sing. The artists working with Christian themes needed to exhibit, sell and have their works discussed.  Heras and the network of Jesuit institutions, worked on exhibiting his works in India and abroad.  Heras, Costantini and Lederle are the main writers to take the artist’s work to readers in India and abroad. While Malenfont and other priests worked  to garner acceptance for his work within church circles. Yet, contemporary art writers merely footnote this major groundwork, in passing. 

Angelo da Fonseca  and other artists working with Christian images are excluded in the grand narrative of the nation’s art  — even though in many ways as a western Indian artist, his contribution is significant.  

It is a mystery why he does not exhibit his secular work or develop it as a parallel stream.  There is a significant archive of portraits, mainly of women and landscapes, which weigh down in his portfolio and are never viewed.

A few years after World War II,  Angelo da Fonseca was on a two year European tour,  exhibiting in the capitals of several European countries. His works feature in a major exhibition  in Rome in 1950. European commissions to paint, keep coming in. In the 1950s,  he  receives a Knighthood from the Pope and  medals from Pope Pius XII.  By the 1960s, the entire initiative for Christian art, is disbanded. But by this time Angelo da Fonseca is a well known artist and did receive private commissions from Indian and foreign clients.  I am not able to authenticate this. The artist maintained a meticulous register of his work, which is not traceable.  This is the thing in our country. Documents like these are not treated as public patrimony and are quickly privatised. Someone will pocket something for services rendered or steer the narrative in a hagiographic way or inject their own heroism into the narrative.  I don’t see myself working that way. As a historian, it is important for me to exhume the narrative of the state and its art. I  marvel at the degree of custodianship you encounter when you are dealing with institutions and museums. They lock up the past by not allowing researchers to have access to documents that would have facilitated our understanding of the past. 

Q.  In a conversation you point out that he depicted his wife, Ivy, as a model for the Madonna and this precluded its use as a religious object of devotion in Churches….And at a recent book release some testified that Fonseca’s art was actually treasured and inspired many within the Christian laity, to both keep his prints and copy his style.

From 1930 onward, many women feature as his models for the Madonna. There is Guita Roy, a student he paints at Santiniketan; Alice Costa Pereira, niece by sister, Helena; Maria Isabel Conceicao Torres Dias, his adopted niece by sister, Olinda and some others. Post 1951, many of the Madonna images are commonly believed to resemble Ivy da Fonseca. The most significant thing, is after 1951, Ivy, a dress-wearing, cross-sporting Catholic girl from Kirkee (Poona), Sangolda (Goa) and Karachi (Pakistan) — gives up her dresses and starts wearing the sari and Indic jewellery. Her blouses have three-fourth sleeves like the Madonna he paints and her hair is secured in a juda. The association is matched for the Poona Catholics of Arsenne Road  and those that live in the vicinity of St Francis Church.  Angelo da Fonseca paints his wife as the Madonna. 

The artist would be both irked and amused by this parallel, that he would reply: ‘Going by historical facts, do you really believe that over the years, artists have ‘really’ painted Mother Mary?’ It has always been wives, lovers and mistresses they have painted to resemble her!

Surrealist painter Salvador Dali used the fabulous and serene features of Gala Gradiva, his wife and muse for the creation of the Assumption of the Virgin into heaven in 1958. In 1606, Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted a dead and bloated sex worker in the Death of the Virgin for the Carmelite convent of Sant Maria dela Scala in Trastevere, Italy.  Caravaggio had modeled the painting of the Virgin Mary on the drowned prostitute from the morgue. Mary was depicted wearing a red gown which was found on the body at the time of the drowning.  

I believe that the patrons of Angelo da Fonseca foresaw an Asiatic Church in the future, but that did not happen. Mainly, because there were several issues of symbolic power in the way the Indian clergy and the laity accepted indigenisation of the important figures of the Catholic Church. The entire exercise to create inculturation in icons of the Christian pantheon, remained an exercise that was sanctioned from the top; was to some extent ‘elite-driven’ and did not reach the mass of worshipers, because  an orthodox and conservative clergy stood between such art and its public. One has to also factor that the rigour of the Inquisition was withdrawn as late as 1860, and that within 70 years, Angelo da Fonseca was propagating something  quite the opposite of what the Santa Fe had advocated to the  public.  The papacy  also made efforts to get the hierarchies within the dioceses to accept the new art. For, by 1943, Rachol Seminary, had got a Hindu artist to replicate the style of Angelo da Fonseca and created eight murals on its walls. Mind you, each parish priest who passed out from this seminary, got placements all over the parishes of Goa. Yet the idea did not seed.

I do not deny that a large number of priests brought and replicated the work of Angelo da Fonseca and other artists. But the purpose that it was meant for,  was not achieved. Art India, an institution that printed cards, holy pictures and posters, was started in the 1950s. When Mathew Lederle took over, he started printing cards, and posters by Indian artists who depicted Christian gods in Indian imagery. But Lederle, Heras and others propagating this, were primarily European priests and it did not become an exercise that touched the hearts of the masses to create devotion.