AP – SAN XAVIER ANGEL EMERGES AFTER CENTURY IN HIDING

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TUCSON, ARIZ. (AP) — Crews restoring the 211-year-old San Xavier del Bac mission have uncovered a painted angel on the north wall of the baptistery that was covered and forgotten years ago.

Restoration workers Tim Lewis and Matilde Rubio said the painted angel was found in March in the narrow baptistery, which is under the mission’s west tower.

The angel, draped in a red cloak, had been hidden for years, covered with dirt and a thin coating of plaster.

“It’s always exciting to see something that has been there for a couple of hundred years and no one in the recent century has noted it. Then all of a sudden, there it is,” said Bernard L. “Bunny” Fontana, an ethnohistorian who lives near the mission and has made a lifelong study of its art.

The angel is part of a wall painting of John the Baptist baptizing Christ. It appeared when Lewis and Rubio began cleaning the painting. It joins another painted angel floating on a cloud beneath a blue sky.

The cleaning process also revealed colors: red and blue cloaks on the angels, flesh color and red lips on John the Baptist and a greenish-brown object that looks like a seashell. A tail of what appears to be a dove also emerged.

“We never expected it,” said Lewis, who grew up on the Tohono O’odham Reservation where the mission is located. He continues to live there with Rubio, his wife.

“When we got up high and looked at it from that angle, looking down, it was clear,” he said. “We’d always been looking at it straight. But they are two separate angels, each with one wing showing.”

No one knows who did the baptistery artwork, but Fontana believes it dates to 1797, when the mission was completed.

Fontana guesses that the artists were not local and probably hailed from Querétaro, Mexico, near Mexico City, which was like a headquarters for the Franciscans, who took over the administration of San Xavier from the Jesuits in 1768.

Lewis and Rubio have been working on the mission’s interior restoration since 1992. Their conservation work will not be complete for another two to three years.

When the restoration work is not going on, a wooden door is typically open and will allow the public to have a peek, said the Reverend Stephen Barnufsky, pastor at San Xavier.