The piece of bread that transformed two lives - an unsung Maltese hero

Small deeds can lead to big results. Victor Mizzi ran a scout group in Malta in the 1950s. He went on to run his own very successful business, but even when he was helping out with the scouts he showed signs of enterprise and determination. He once contacted Lord Mountbatten, then Admiral of the British Fleet, and arranged for a group of 300 scouts from Malta to travel to the UK by warship. No mean feat to achieve!

He went to school at Jesuit Saint Aloysius College in Birkirkara.  He later started his own charter company Belleair holidays in 1974 and was highly successful. In fact, he was so successful that he made enough money to retire before the age of 50. Something I have heard so many dream of doing but never quite manage.

When the Chernobyl disaster happened Victor became aware of the shortages of supplies afflicting hospitals and orphanages in Belarus. 70% of the radiation fallout landed in Belarus and it impacted 2.5 million people with health consequences in an area that was already very depressed economically and suffering from crippling poverty. The result of the radiation was a huge increase in thyroid cancers and many children were born with malformed limbs or even multiple congenital deformities.  It is thought that 250,000 children were exposed to varying degrees of radiation in Belarus. 

Showing his usual terrier type tenacity Victor Mizzi continued to offer medicine and supplies to as many hospitals and orphanages in Belarus as he could. It was while he was visiting one of the orphanages that an incident happened which changed the course of his life. While in the orphanage a small three-year-old boy called Igor Pavlovetts, who had been born badly deformed, toddled over and offered the Maltese businessman a piece of bread. 

It was an unexpected act of kindness that led to a transformation. Victor was so touched by the small child that he arranged for him to be flown to the UK to receive medical treatment. While Igor was in the UK, Victor arranged for him to stay in a foster home. Following extensive physiotherapy and support, Igor grew in confidence and ability. 

Mind you, some of the artificial limbs and aids used for the disabled were pretty crude in those days and nothing like the state-of-the-art technology available today.  An old film of Igor's life shows his devastation when his "new legs" turned out to be just huge black crude boots with six-inch soles on them. The small child had obviously been expecting more natural-looking and more comfortable legs. But Igor's natural optimism and resilience shine through as he smiles at everyone around him despite his disappointment. Igor went on to have an independent life in the UK and has since married and had three children of his own.

Such an injection of generosity from Victor Mizzi could have ended with this one life being transformed. However, Victor was only getting started. Realising that so many children in Belarus were suffering ill-health as a result of the radiation, he started a scheme to allow Belarus children to travel abroad for 3 to 4 weeks so that their systems could recover in healthier climes. In time he would arrange for 56,000 children to have holidays outside Belarus and their immune systems benefited enormously from these breaks.  Such were his powers of persuasion that he even convinced British Airways, Belavia and Ukraine International Airlines to give all the children involved free travel to these destinations.  The charity he started so many years ago still runs today and has touched so many young lives.

So often in life, we miss these tiny but significant acts of kindness. Surrounded by the corruption and competition we might not even see the outstretched hand of a small child offering us bread. Even if we noticed it and felt a wave of sympathy for this tiny disabled child how many of us would have just moved on.  It took just one man, Victor Mizzi to see the boy, feel compassion and then arise to act, to make all the difference. That one act triggered an avalanche of endeavours that continue to influence children’s health in Belarus to this day.

 

Victor and Igor in the early years

Victor Mizzi passed away aged 84 in the UK in March 2019 and in the week before his death was visited by a journalist who recalled Victor saying to them “Always help others, when you have a chance.”

"Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity."

Baha’u’llah

Rogue and genius - Caravaggio

Caravaggio was a rogue. At least, that is the mild term to describe this irritating and flawed artist. Putting a list of his activities on paper would make you think we were describing a street thug and not one of the most remarkable painters of the 16th century. Here’s a typical account of him,

“Much of what we know about Caravaggio's life comes to us through police records and legal depositions. During his time in Rome, he insulted his fellow painters, quarrelled, fought, broke the law, defied the police and was subsequently imprisoned. He was sued for libel, arrested for carrying a weapon without a license, prosecuted for tossing a plate of artichokes in a waiter's face. He was accused of throwing stones at the police, attacking the house of two women, harassing a former landlady and wounding a prison guard.”

He got involved in street fights regularly and used the street characters such as prostitutes and beggars in his paintings regularly.  He even killed a man (over a wager on a tennis match!) and had to flee for his life. He grew up in a rough area and was shaped by the social life around him.  There is hardly any written work by him in existence.  He usually never even signed his work.  He earned money on the street selling paintings at one stage.

His work has grown in popularity especially in the last century. That is no mean feat, because he was hated by so many respected voices for 300 years after his death. In fact, he and his work were completely forgotten and overlooked for centuries. It highlights how even in the 16th century bad publicity can smother the best of artists.

Poussin, a leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, upon viewing Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, cried: "I won't look at it, it's disgusting. That man was born to destroy the art of painting. Such a vulgar painting can only be the work of a vulgar man. The ugliness of his paintings will lead him to hell.”

Another Italian Baroque painter, Giovanni Baglioni was Caravaggio's direct competitor and arch-enemy. Although he himself was influenced by Caravaggio's style, Baglione virulently attacked Caravaggio's personal life as well as his artworks continually.  Following Caravaggio's death, Baglione maliciously authored a biography that criticised the artist's works and described Caravaggio as "a degenerate failure".

Even in the 19th Century, Caravaggio was getting attacked by the art critics.  John Ruskin, an opposer of the Baroque style described Caravaggio's paintings as filled with "horror and ugliness and filthiness of sin. " 

He became an artist forgotten and his works were even attributed to others.  It was not until fairly recently that there has been a resurgence of interest in this unlikely artist and his incredible work.  There are now a growing number of people who go on Caravaggio’s trails to visit each of his paintings wherever they exist in the world.  There is something incredibly powerful about his pieces and it is hard not to be touched by their potency.

He certainly didn't make life easy for himself and his actions undoubtedly lead to disgrace, exile and eventual death. I first discovered his work in St John's Co-Cathedral in Malta. 

In the opulent cathedral with its huge gold ornaments, aged gravestones underfoot and beautiful intricate tapestries, Caravaggio's painting of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist shines like the work of a real genius. Listening to the audio presentation of Caravaggio, as I walked around, they explained he was thrown out of the order of the Knights for his indiscretions. Perversely, his powerful painting easily outshines and outclasses everything else in the cathedral. 

This is no angelic representation of Saint John the Baptist's beheading. The violence is evident in the burly man forcing his blade across the Saints neck. The blood flows from the growing wound and boldly Caravaggio signs this painting in the blood running from the gaping wound. Of course he knew that John the Baptist had a real resonance for the Knights of Malta. They prayed before the precious gold plated relic, forearm of Saint John the Baptist, before heading off to sea during the crusades. The symbolism is especially potent because it was the right forearm which was used to anoint Christ. Caravaggio transformed what was a traditional interpretation,  a formal religious painting with the careful halo around the Saint’s head and angels ascending on all sides into a brutal realistic killing. You would believe that Caravaggio’s villain is indeed a murderous killer.  The act of this death is neither celestial or full of grace but ugly and horrific as indeed it would have been.  No wonder his work shocked and appalled those used to more restrained and artificial devices.

In his portrayal of the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus Caravaggio also took a completely different tack from the common approach.  Remember that Saul had been a persecutor of the early Christians. He had hated Christians. He had made it his goal to capture, then bring Christians to public trial and execution. Saul was present when the first Christian martyr (named Stephen) was killed by an angry mob.

"... they all rushed at him (Stephen), dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. . . . And Saul was there, giving approval to his death" (Acts 7.57 to 8:1).

After Stephen was martyred, Saul went door to door in Jerusalem finding people who believed that Jesus is the Messiah.

"Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison" (Acts 8:3).

After putting these people in prison, Saul learned about their Christian friends in Damascus by somehow getting letters from the prisoners.

"I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, as also the high priest and all the Council can testify. I even obtained letters from them to their brothers in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished" (Acts 22:4-5).

So Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus into Paul was a stunning transformation.  Caravaggio caught it perfectly in his painting,

“He has re imagined Saul's transformation into Paul as a night scene in which the saint writhes on the ground, his arms thrown open, blinded by a moment of illumination witnessed only by a muscular, exhausted-looking horse and a melancholy groom.”   

Who else but Caravaggio would picture such a scene as an inner struggle, eye’s closed with the light indicating where all the action takes place.  How Saul must have suffered when he realised exactly the extent of his previous deeds.  What a rendering of that instant of bringing oneself to account and immediate transformation.

In David’s beheading of Goliath, it is Caravaggio’s features that are on the face of the decapitated victim.  

Caravaggio's behaviour throughout his life became even more erratic and impulsive.  A reason for this decline could have been found recently. In 2010, a team of scientists who studied Caravaggio's remains discovered that his bones contained high levels of lead—levels high enough, they suspect, to have driven the painter mad. Lead poisoning is also suspected of having killed Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh.  Who knows?  But his pieces of art startle now even as they did in the 16th Century.  Check out the one nearest to you and experience this gifted artist at first hand.