During the summer of 42 years ago, July to September 1978, sculptor and restorer Samuel Bugeja along with his sons Joe and Gerald, worked on the cultic crucifix popularly known as Ta’ Ġieżu. When the restored work was unveiled in autumn of that year, devoted worshippers were in for a big surprise.

The crucifix carried in procession in Valletta by the brothers of the Archconfraternity of the Holy Crucifix on Friday, April 13, 1984.

Prior to Bugeja’s intervention, they had felt perfectly attuned to their beloved effigy’s darkened polychromy. No one dared question its dubious realism. Now people were faced with a life-like crucified Jesus whose newly -cleaned, dark-red thick blood appeared more visually arresting, set against the repristinated pallid skin tones. The previous dark patina had unwittingly diluted the image’s inherent violence, neutralising everything to a non-offensive brown.

Bugeja had unleashed again the image’s ferociously morbid realism. Gerald Bugeja still remembers the vivid red colour of the blood that started to emerge during the cleaning process.

One thing that clearly emerges when reading Bugeja’s restoration report is the restorer’s deference to the crucifix. Those months throughout which his relationship with it had become so profoundly intimate must have heightened the spiritual side of his personality.

“Christ’s head is either the work of a very inspired artist or the result of a supernatural cause…. it is all very impressive”, he states. Gerald recalls that his father was very proud of the result.

The other thing implicitly conveyed by Bugeja’s written report is the mounting sense of unease that the restorer must have felt when he realised that the more he took away from that dark brown patina, the less familiar the crucifix looked. “In those crevices and undercuts left untouched by previous restorers,” he writes, “the original colours can still be seen, and this could be very well attested to by the many people who saw the crucifix while it was being restored.”

The crucifix before Bugeja’s intervention of 1978.

This is perfectly understandable. Vincent Farrugia Lauri, a brother of the Archconfraternity of the Holy Crucifix who at the time was a young teenager, still remembers that some of the worshippers complained that, in its new cleaned state, the crucifix had lost much of its inherent spirituality.

In the Spanish sculptural baroque tradition, the hyper-realistic polychromy applied to wooden devotional statues was typically referred to as encarnaciones, which literally means: to make incarnate the wooden sculpture through the meticulous application of pigment. Seen within this context, it transpires that Samuel Bugeja had physically and symbolically brought the statue back to life.

The Ta’ Ġieżu crucifix was originally made somewhere between the mid- to late 1640s by a Sicilian Franciscan tertiary monk from Petralia Sottana, a little town in the Palermitan Madonie. The sculptor is today solely remembered by his religious name: Frate Innocenzo. We know that, for a couple of years, he travelled up and down the boot of the Italian peninsula leaving a trail of works documenting the circuit of his artistic and spiritual peregrinations. There is a good possibility that the frate had carved the Valletta crucifix while residing in Malta.

Forty years after Bugeja’s intervention, some preliminary studies conducted upon the crucifix revealed that, in a number of instances, the gesso preparation along with the surmounting paint layer were threatening to detach themselves from the wooden structure.

An x-ray image of the head of the crucifix. Photo: James Azzopardi

The next logical step was to conserve the work and halt any degradation in its tracks. From late 2018 to mid-2019, a team of experts made up of Charles Vella, Adriana Alescio, Michael Formosa and James Saliba as conservator/restorers, Perit Andrew Ellul as a consultant on the state of the niche of the crucifix, Cynthia de Giorgio as project curator and myself as historical researcher, worked on the crucifix.

Aided by modern diagnostic procedures such as X-rays and CAT scans, we now know much more about the effigy’s manufacturing techniques. Some surprising details did emerge: a large part of the effigy’s torso is hollowed out; the arms are attached to the rest of the body with a sophisticated dowelling system; Christ’s head is kept in place with a number of large nails which go round the neck area. During the long conservation process, the crucifix was thoroughly cleaned, its jeopardised areas were consolidated and paint losses were integrated. Anoxic treatment was carried out to stop any possible insect infestations.

The processes involved in and the results obtained from this conservation/restoration project, along with in-depth historical research, provide the backbone of the publication. 

One of the preventive conservation measures that was suggested was to limit the effigy’s participation in public processions to the most extreme of circumstances. The current COVID-19 pandemic was considered extreme enough and it was unanimously agreed that the crucifix should partake in an expiatory/votive procession that is planned to take place during this coming September.

Ta’ Ġieżu Crucifix: Faith; History; Iconography; Conservation is available from the archconfraternity’s Facebook page: arcikonfraternita tas-Ssmu Kurcifiss.  Special thanks go to BOV who financed the conservation programme of 2018-9, Gerald Bugeja, Vincent Farrugia Lauri and Paul Cumbo.