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Every morning at 7 a. m. he started off by pounding his colors. The murals were done in dry fresco, and because paint had to be applied while the walls were wet, Artist Vanka stayed on his scaffolding virtually all day and usually until 2 or 3 a. m. At night Father Zagar stayed with him, droning prayers. Over the domed altar he painted a 36-ft. Madonna & Child in rich reds and blues, violet and silver, on one side wall a scene of Croatian peasants kneeling at the Angelus, on the other Croatian miners in the U. S. standing with heads bowed while a Franciscan priest, posed by St. Nicholas' pastor, kneels to invoke God's blessing on their church. For the side altars Vanka painted a Crucifixion and Pieta in cold blues and black, with green lightning. His model for the figure of Christ was a strapping Negro mill worker. It was well toward the end of May before the final murals complementing these on the back walls took shape and made the women on their way out after mass stop and weep and burn candles.
Opposite his picture of the Virgin grieving over the dead body of Christ, Artist Vanka had composed a group of women in Croatia standing beside a shallow coffin in which lies a dead soldier. They are all in white with white headdresses and the bier is covered with delicate, almost transparent white linen. Rows of white crosses converge toward a hill crowned with a church set against a little pile of distant cumulus clouds. For a modern counterpart of this scene St. Nicholas parishioners can look on the other wall, opposite the Crucifixion. Under a black, apocalyptic sky, a young miner lies on ground covered with coal rubble. Weeping women in violet robes at his head and feet avert their eyes as a group of men with picks descend into a smoky middle background. A headline of the Croatian newspaper on which the dead miner is sprawled reads: "The Immigrant Mother Raises Her Sons for American Industry."
* Author Adamic's last book, The Cradle of Life (TIME, Sept. 28, 1936), is a story modeled after Maximilian Vanka's childhood and youth.