A Man With a Mission to Repair and Restore : History: Scholar Norman Neuerburg is returning the California landmarks to their original, and surprisingly colorful, splendor.

Norman Neuerburg is a man with a mission. Actually, he’s a man with many missions: Mission San Juan Capistrano, Mission San Juan Bautista, Mission Santa Barbara, Mission San Fernando.

Puns aside, Neuerburg is a multifaceted scholar who in retirement has returned to the first scholarly love of his life--the California missions. Specifically, the study and restoration of their startlingly colorful interior decor.

Colorful? Every kid who ever toured a mission on a grade-school field trip came away with indelible impressions of . . . drab whitewashed walls, red tile rooftops, dreary, dusky rooms with sorry mannequined representations of friars and Indians engaged in “mission life.” Hardly anything that could be described as colorful.

And yet, were any of those bored field-trippers to today tour the gran sala of Mission San Fernando Rey de Espana, known more familiarly to Valley residents as the San Fernando Mission, they would drastically revise their opinion.

“At least a third of the rooms in this building had extensive painted decoration,” said Neuerburg, standing in the gran sala, or great reception room.

“Old photographs I have seen showed the Valley to be relatively empty and desolate except for the green of the orchards around the missions,” he continued. “Travelers would come over the hill into the Valley and step through the door here and into this wonderful room. It must have been a real high. And I realized this was why they did it!”

The room is elegant. A rosy pink dado with a vine and flower pattern wraps around all four walls up to about knee level. A brick red sawtooth pattern arches above two doorways. Long, sky-blue rectangles--meant to suggest stonework--emanate from the window frames and the main doorway. A pastel-blue seashell is centered above one archway; an Indian figure wielding a bow and arrow stands at eye level to the left of another. Completed in 1989, it is an exact replica of the decor of the room when the mission was in its prime in the 1820s, a detailed re-creation of the work of the original Indian interior designers.

“Yes, the work was done by Indians,” Neuerburg, 64, said. “The shell has a Christian symbolism. It’s a symbol of baptism, and baptism is a ritual for entering into the church. Also, it’s a symbol of pilgrimage. The one bit of decoration in this room that is a non-Christian symbol, that is Indian, is the little figure with the bow next to the door.”

The figure was a motif added by an Indian for purely decorative purposes.

The most dramatic feature in the gran sala is the wall painting above the doorway immediately opposite the entrance--a primitive but festive depiction of Indian “grape barbers” harvesting grapes for the mission’s main product--wine.

“That’s California’s first ‘Chamber of Commerce’ painting,” Neuerburg said with a laugh. He was also responsible for restoring a number of historical artworks hanging at the mission (one was found down the street on the back of a “Hay for Sale” sign). “It’s a particularly interesting painting because it’s one of the few done on walls in the missions that represents a scene . Practically all the other decorations are just decorative . This painting said to visitors, ‘This is the thing that we’re most proud of.’ ”

Re-creating the decorations required some inventive techniques. First, Neuerburg had his own expertise to draw upon. He’s a Valley native--born on Chiquita Street in North Hollywood in a house built by his father--and a visitor to the mission since the late ‘30s. Neuerburg was a tour guide at the San Fernando edifice at age 15, and helped work on a 1941-42 mission restoration project. His initial enthusiasm was fueled by an inspirational junior high school teacher.

For the restoration, Neuerburg relied on his precise memories and notes on how the mission appeared at that time, because it still was much as it had been in terms of decoration at the time it was completed in the early 1800s. He also utilized his dedicated study of California history, his knowledge of painting, art and archeology--he studied painting in Rome on the GI Bill after World War II, was a longtime professor of art at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and is considered an expert in Roman archeology.

“After the ’71 earthquake, they came through the mission and replastered. They put on chicken wire and about three-quarters of an inch of plaster over everything.”

When San Fernando Mission Msgr. Francis Weber asked Neuerburg to do the renovation, “I hoped to be able to uncover the grape harvest painting. Although I found a little bit of the flowers in the lower part, I found that most of it had been destroyed by the nailing in of the chicken wire. So what I did, in effect, was to base the new painting on the photograph that I had from the ‘40s. There were a few color photos, but I remembered enough about it. In certain other things, for instance, for some of the doorway embellishments, I have straight-on photographs, so I could actually project a slide onto the wall and trace the design.”

Neuerburg’s expertise and enthusiasm is such that he has found himself in the rare position of researcher and restorer--not only at San Fernando, but in other California missions. His re-creation of the designs inside the church at San Juan Capistrano led him to a precarious Michelangelo position--laying flat on his back on top of a scaffold, painting the ceiling. He has uncovered dadoes and wall patterns at Mission San Juan Bautista in Hollister, Calif., and left his historically correct mark on the Santa Barbara mission as well. But perhaps none of the work he has done has been as involved as his efforts to re-create the so-called “Governor’s Room,” which also happens to be at the San Fernando Mission.

“This,” he said, no pride affecting his scholarly narration, “was the most elaborately decorated of any room outside of the church in a California mission, and it was pretty elaborate.”

And, indeed, so it is again. Although it is unlikely a governor ever stayed in the room (the government and the missions were politically at odds, Neuerburg is quick to point out), the corporal of the mission guard was housed there, and he was treated to a busy wall scene of great Tuscan columns, archways, an intricate floral border above a marbled dado and a six-petaled flower topping the doorway.

Although he sometimes had to make educated guesses as to particular colors, Neuerburg’s theories about the missions having been proudly decorated are anything but speculation.

Other mission experts have taken issue with his ideas--usually to be effectively rebuffed. As Weber put it, “Although you might not always agree with him, you’d better have a good reason for disagreeing. He’s the kind of guy who would go on ‘Jeopardy!’ and walk away with the place.”

Among the pains Neuerburg went to in his research were to locate and read all existing mission records he could find--in Spanish. (Neuerburg, who also knows his way around Italian, German, French and ancient Greek--his major at UCLA--is currently mastering Catalan, a language of Spain used extensively in California missions.)

“He has spent hours and hours and hours in what survives of California missions documents and records,” said historical editor Ed Carpenter, formerly with the Huntington Library in San Marino and a friend of Neuerburg’s since the late ‘40s. “For instance, he has studied the ‘bills of lading’--the supply requisitions--for what the missionaries ordered from Mexico on the annual supply ship. And he said, ‘After all, they didn’t order 20 kegs of vermilion paint if they weren’t going to use vermilion paint!’ ”

In the early ‘70s, Neuerburg was the adviser on historical architecture to the J. Paul Getty Museum, and is responsible for the Roman architecture there--a task that plunged him into a storm of criticism. Having had his fill of controversy, he returned to his boyhood love, the California missions--never anticipating the extent to which he would become involved in their restoration. He has published two books about them: “The Decoration of the California Missions” and “Saints of the California Missions.”

“I had dreaded the difficulty of doing the actual painting, but . . . I found myself getting into the spirit of the original artist, and I thought the actual painting work was really exciting to do. I ended up enjoying it more than anything else,” he said, standing on the cool, red tile floor of the gran sala .

“If you have the guts to take an interest in something, it’s surprising what will happen. I found there were so many things I thought I couldn’t do in my life, that I found that I could , and that’s a message that I like to get across to young people.”

To be sure, without the risks taken by Norman Neuerburg, the loving, colorful efforts of scores of long-dead native California artists would be forever lost.