VERGIL Lo Schiavo's name is probably a mystery even to aspiring young Newcastle artists today.
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Best known for his large murals, the Italian-born Vergil (or Virgil) was a man who inherited the traditions of grand Italian fresco painters.
For this dedicated Michelangelo of the Antipodes made his mark in bold brush strokes on walls of banks, public buildings, private homes, churches and St Mary's Cathedral, in Sydney.
At the age of 36 years, he won the coveted Sulman Prize in 1945 for his idealised mural Tribute to Shakespeare located inside the University of Sydney's Union.
Over time, three university walls were decorated by murals done by Lo Schiavo (1909-1971) in his own distinctive style. Another, in 1951, was a study of famous characters from the novels of Charles Dickens.
The third, his masterwork in 1971, was called Mankind and hidden among the multiple figures were fiery Newcastle BHP blast furnaces.
All works are highly prized today by Sydney University and may be Lo Schiavo's most obvious lasting legacy.
Back in the 1930s, the young bohemian artist befriended another artistic type, a penniless, heavy-drinking thespian called Peter Finch, who went on to win a posthumous Oscar for his 1976 film, Network.
The future film star stayed at the Lo Schiavo home for six months to enjoy spaghetti evenings with illustrator Unk White and the tall, lanky, noisy John Goffage, later known as Aussie screen icon Chips Rafferty. This same family even taught Finch the fine art of sword fighting, a skill which presumably came in handy later in Hollywood.
In return, actor Finch posed as a model for Lo Schiavo for two paintings he did for St Mary's Cathedral.
Lo Schiavo also painted two large murals for Commonwealth banks. Both were called Industry and one was for a Newcastle branch bank.
But this tale concerns a second, now apparently lost and "unknown" Newcastle artwork, this time inside a former Rural Bank building, on the corner of Hunter and Bolton streets.
And in its own way, this 10-metre x three-metre mural, depicting our early pioneering days is a "lost" Hunter Street art treasure.
Painted in 1958, this mural was on the far southern internal wall of the ground floor bank. Particular care then had to be taken with it when the entire building was stripped, gutted, rebuilt and renamed as the State Bank's new head office only 26 years later.
As it turned out, Lo Schiavo's mural was one rare feature of the original Rural Bank building left untouched.
The mural was cradled through the extensive refurbishing work. The new ground floor ceiling also had to be raised to accommodate it and reflective stainless steel ceiling tiles installed to highlight the work.
To ensure his artwork's longevity, Lo Schiavo had mixed wax with his paint to help it survive.
Among his earlier commissions in the 1940s, La Schiavo said he had painted 27 murals in the New Ritz Hotel, Bombay, and three murals in St Stephen's Cathedral, Brisbane. Of this second Newcastle mural, he said his first rough sketch was conceived partly by contemporary scenes and partly by his own imagination.
The giant, stylised mural of Newcastle township in about 1824 showed early settlers with sheep, a prominent bull and a sole redcoat soldier. The crowd stood above the city near King Edward Park with Nobbys Island and the harbour as a backdrop.
My own memory of the major artwork is of subtle, muted colours. To my eye, the figures also seemed almost too olde world European, too alien in the landscape; dressed in long dark robes more fitting to, perhaps, America's Mayflower pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Anyway, the overall effect was mesmerising.
What I best remember though was a story told about the artist's sense of humour and serious approach to his work.
Told by an architect, the late Cecil Hay, the story concerned a telephone conversation he'd had with Lo Schiavo at 6.30am on the day he began his bank mural.
" 'Cec! Why is that bloody block of wood on my wall?"
"I told him it was a provision for a future wall clock to which he replied, 'Well, you'd better move it, it's right on my bull's anus!' " And so the clock's position was quickly changed.
Today, all traces of the mural and the bank itself are long gone. In recent times a Lucky 7 convenience store has occupied the same ground floor site where bank tellers once toiled.
But around the corner, inside a Bolton Street entrance to the building, there's an obsolete door sign reading "bank entrance". A small wall plaque opposite reveals that NSW's then treasurer Ken Booth MP opened the renovated building on July 16, 1984.
It was only about six weeks after the NSW government finally brought electric rail services into Newcastle city.
The towering, black glass structure is now simply called the Maxim building and it has been a past barometer of business confidence, reflecting faith in inner-city Newcastle's future, and especially Hunter Street, over the decades.
The key site, diagonally opposite Newcastle's former post office, was once home to the famous Criterion Hotel.
It stood there for 80 years before being demolished in the mid 1950s. The hotel had replaced an earlier inn, one of Newcastle's oldest buildings.
During excavations, the builders even uncovered the inn's cellars plus an underground spring, complicating a complex engineering feat. A menswear store on the western side of the bank was bought, demolished and an eight-storey bank extension added on with the whole structure reclad with a radical, curtain-wall glass facade.
In a city with a then glut of office space, the State Bank's $4 million (probably $10 million today) gamble to build a new regional head office seemed to pay off with 80 per cent of the building leased to tenants within 10 days of the new bank opening, helping reinvigorate the city heart.
Today though, the big mystery remains of where the "lost" mural went to with stories circulating it may be saved in the basement, but in sections.
"There's nothing down there, except the bank vaults," Maxim building spokesman Geoff Leonard later revealed.
"We've had the site since 1998 and there's been no record of any mural since taking over. I certainly wouldn't have thrown it out had it been there. I would have seen the heritage value in it," he said.
"The only possibility might be it's still behind the back wall of the present store," Leonard said.
Hunter historian Ed Tonks said: "I hope it's saved. The mural was one of the overlooked secrets of our city," he said.
"The mural was a great thing the Rural Bank did for Newcastle. It recognised how important early Newcastle was for NSW."
The former teacher said that back in the late 1970s he took school students on an urban geography excursion to the bank.
"I used the visit to highlight the colonial occupations depicted in the painting and show the significance of weathering on the ocean stack [then Nobbys Island].
"At best I hope the mural is now buried behind the plaster shop wall there. At worse, it would be painted over," he said.
And here the trail into what happened to the mural runs cold, but someone must know something. Watch this space.