St. Peter

F. N. Souza, the iconoclast, produced several works on Christian themes but those were mostly a sharp critique of the church and its believers. However, this work, painted when Souza was in Rome, is rare because of the absence of the macabre, a leitmotif of his art. Yet, St. Peter has all the attributes of the artist’s work of this period—a high forehead in which the saint’s eyes are unevenly splayed, their penetrating gaze looking directly at the viewer and a long nose over the mouth. The tonal playfulness too is a departure from his signature excoriation of the clergy. The brown of the figure underscores Souza’s resistance to white hegemony in claiming Christ as one of their own.