Visitors to Fr Mario Zerafa’s office when he was curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in the 1980s were often disconcerted by a little sign on his desk: “If you have nothing to do, please don’t do it here.”
Their discomfiture whether the purpose of their visit could be construed as trivial was not necessarily eased by his inscrutable courtesy. That was partly the measure of the man: committed, with a purpose, mischievously disconcerting to self-importance (deflated with a lateral “nobody’s perfect”), warm yet mercurial, steely if necessary.
Slim, pipe-smoking and energetic, he glided effortlessly between different social segments that rarely met: the Diplomatic Corps (that showered him with honours), artists (whose prickly temperaments never deflected him from recognising and sponsoring), wooden administrators (whom he adroitly circumvented), inwardly timorous yet outwardly blustering (or breezy) politicians (some despised, others appreciated), elegant high society ladies (who adored him as much for his easy charm as for his lightly worn knowledge), humble anonymous pilgrims to Rome (whose turbulent confessions he heard yearly), his Dominican spiritual brothers (whose monastery he adorned with his respectable artistic talents that he never pushed) and his friends, all of us from different walks of life, who treasured him greatly.
He was an irrepressible man, a devout yet unimposing Christian whose favourite artist was the perfect transcendent simplicity of Fra Angelico, an intrepid traveller, inspiring lecturer, and tireless walker whose students on overseas art trips to his eternal and other cities struggled to catch up with. His greatest institutional achievement was the establishment of the Museum of Fine Arts in the mid-1970s on a shoestring budget, a gem and haven of which he was deservedly proud, crucible of events and exhibitions that forged Malta’s artistic community.
But his most selfless and demanding service to his native land and the international art world was his skilful recovery of Caravaggio’s St Jerome, stolen from St John’s Co-Cathedral, a labyrinthine challenge of patience, tact and dead ends worthy of any Inspector Montalbano. The strain of not being able to confide in anyone during the lengthy fraught negotiations was undeniable. Were it not for him, Malta would have lost its St Jerome forever.
Mario Zerafa was devoted to his uncle, Sir Paul Boffa, Malta’s first Labour PM, whom he greatly admired and whose memory he habilitated through Vincent Apap’s sculpture in Valletta. He was perhaps never happier than when painting out of his uncle’s paintbox that held great sentimental value to him. He seemed eternal in his boundless enthusiasm, enlightening in his knowledge, and lightly floating in his walk.
We always expected him to be around. A man of many lives deserves the grace to give them to others who realise with regret how much richer they could have been had they examined that treasure further. Thus it is always.
His last Facebook post showed his monastery quarters, much more tidily organised than most of our bedrooms, entitled ‘New projects in my mess’. He then disappeared from among us with the effortless flight of a bird. A feather floats gently out of the painting down to the ground. Fra Angelico’s final brushstroke has become his devoted admirer’s parting sign.
Long may we have ‘New projects in our mess’, the most fitting tribute to this deeply cherished inextinguishable light in our lives.