St. Ignatius Mission: Brother Joseph's Fifty-Eight Paintings

Brother Joseph Carignano was working as a cook at Saint Ignatius Mission when he began painting the interior. He had no formal art training. What he had was a ceiling that needed murals, a wall-height space that the Jesuit missionaries who founded the mission in eighteen fifty-four felt deserved something more than bare plaster, and whatever gift he discovered, or developed, or had always possessed without occasion to use it.

Between nineteen hundred and nineteen oh four, Carignano completed fifty-eight murals on the interior walls and ceiling of the Saint Ignatius Mission church in the Mission Valley, south of Flathead Lake. The paintings depict biblical scenes, saints, and scenes of heavenly imagery in a style that blends the European religious iconographic tradition Carignano had absorbed from the Jesuit context with the particular quality of light that falls across the Mission Valley at different times of year. The ochre hills to the east, the blue range of the Mission Mountains to the west: the light that filters into the paintings feels like it comes from somewhere local.

The mission itself was established by Jesuit missionaries in eighteen fifty-four among the Salish people of the Flathead Valley, part of the broader missionary project that accompanied and in many cases preceded American settlement of the Northwest. The relationship between the mission and the Salish people was complex in ways that a single history track cannot fully contain. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

What is less complex is Brother Joseph's achievement. He was a self-taught artist who had been cooking for missionaries. He painted fifty-eight murals in four years. They are still there.