I am Terry and I am a volunteer here and my thought when I first got here is that
I was really interested in the art and architecture inside the church and this
right here is the most beautiful part. This is the sanctuary. Please look up!
This is amazing. They used mostly mineral paints -- ocherous hematite, malachite.
Things like that that. That part of the dome was painted blue at one point.
They know it was blue because when the plaster started falling they could tell that
there was the layer of blue in between two layers of white gypsum. So then you
come down a little bit further and you see the cornice right up there that's
painted the orange -- again that ocherous hematite. Just below that the little
black squares. Kind of a naive interpretation of "trompe de l'oeil" of bracketed cornices.
Well this is supposed to be in a vision of holding this cornice up.
If you come further down the wall you can see up here the stenciling. Those likely
those stencils were made of maybe parchment maybe leather something like that.
There's never been any trace of any animal protein indicating that this was
not a tempera paint. There was no milk or egg or anything like that in it and this
was all done -- it wasn't al fresco it wasn't wet on wet it was actually wet on dry.
Coming down a little bit further on the wall you can see those arched -- what
looked like stones -- those were incised. That gray color very likely was
something like soot mixed with white. A beautiful little chalice painted up
there and right next to it a little bunch of grapes. On this side it was
wheat but it's pretty much disappeared now. Pretty much all you can see is the
ghost of the pigment that was there. And underneath the arch right here -- the blue.
Like I said most of the colors in here would have been
minerals. That blue was probably something -- it's probably indigo and
indigo is more of a stain than it is a paint which may be the reason that it's
stuck on there so long. The little medallion in the middle of the arch up
there -- those blue chevons that you see up there actually started life as red.
Something happened. There was some impurity in the pigment so those are now
changing color on us. Again the red right over here on this side -- this is vermilion
or cinnabar. All of these minerals were able to be obtained
locally. They didn't have to travel very far for them. And then you can see all
the way up there the little corbel -- that's the little thing that comes out
like a little table. If you look underneath -- those palm fronds they
have kind of a brownish color on there. That's probably a bronze gilt which
would have been a combination of copper and I believe zinc. Well again they try
to make it look like stone this is to be like a very strong building. The priests
were thinking of the big cathedrals in Europe. So if we come down further into
the nave -- the nave part of the church -- right here was pretty much not highly
decorated. It was just mostly white plaster and up at the top you can still
see where some of the paint remains -- right up there on the top of that niche.
And again that's probably lamp black and white. Some of the original paint remains
right down here in the corner there was a dado stripe all the way around. It was
orange, it was black, and then it was orange again and white
as you traveled up the wall. There's a piece of original flooring that remains
right there -- that little piece of floor. Underneath was probably crushed adobe,
on top of that was a six inch layer of lime plaster that had been colored this
terracotta color and then they probably burnished it with river stone.
All of these historical buildings matter. There are a lot of missions in this part of
Arizona and Sonora and they all matter. San Xavier del Bac -- that mission -- has been
going for a long time. It's still an active parish, it's beautifully painted
beautifully done, but this this building right here is is the bones. This is what
San Xavier looks like under all the gilt that's there so it's very
important I think, personally, to hang on to things like this. To preserve them
because otherwise how are we going to know? And how are we ever going to be
able to preserve what we already have in San Xavier and other places like that if
we don't know what it was like underneath?