MARK RICHARDS FRBS Sculptor. Pietrasanta: Beauty, death and Berlusconi

Post dated: 2nd December 2012

Genoa Cemetery with artists Julia, Christian, Tara and Jochen.
Generous and experienced marble carvers, Julia Vance and Christian Lange put this trip together.

What a place. I am writing this two weeks after the visit and I still struggle to take it all in.

Imagine an giant Christmas cake. The flour, sultanas, nuts etc are the dead decaying. And the lot is covered in exquisitely shaped royal icing. Tombs, graves and every conceivable commemorative form were carved in white marble. Now the works are greyed and dusty with pollution so you have to imagine the original impact. Mark Twain, who visited in 1869, wrote,

"Our last sight was the cemetery (a burial place intended to accommodate 60,000 bodies,) and we shall continue to remember it after we shall have forgotten the palaces. It is a vast marble collonaded corridor extending around a great unoccupied square of ground; its broad floor is marble, and on every slab is an inscription - - for every slab covers a corpse.

On either side, as one walks down the middle of the passage, are monuments, tombs, and sculptured figures that are exquisitely wrought and are full of grace and beauty.

They are new and snowy; every outline is perfect, every feature guiltless of mutilation, flaw, or blemish." The Innocents Abroad

Circa 1890. Graceful and composed, this is a good example of how a dead person might wish to have specific values reflected in symbols...here the cup, the serpent and the coins cascading from the bowl suggest resistance to temptation, generosity and the fleeting nature of acquisitiveness.

The sculptors used goose as reference for the wings...look at the lustrous carving in this detail...confident, deft strokes of a chisel.

One of my first encounters. There are some tombs with statues demonstrating a 'come hither' approach to the grave...and this lady has most of the chaps, and some of the girls, yearning for a swift end.

Exploiting breasts to make even death seem enticing may go some way to explaining Silvio Berlusconi's continuing presence on the Italian political scene.

Check this out:...one of his tasteful campaign videos..

The layout of the memorials reflect the social hierarchy of old Genoa...and probably of new Genoa for all I know. The graves get more elaborate the further up the ladder was the corpse. I want to know more about how income, at the lower end of the scale, determines the resting place. Are these drawers for the cremated poor?

And are these the suburbs?

At the upper end of things, the delineations seem conspicuous and rigid...the rich merchant families have statues carved and are situated in the main corridors (see above)....the super rich and powerful have mausolea. You go up the hill, into fresh, clear air and there is a kind of Beverly Hills of windowless mansions set among small gardens and leafy avenues.

But there is always one who bucks the trend..this lady, by coincidence related to Christian (left in picture) by marriage.

The beads she holds in her hands are hazelnuts.

By making and selling necklaces, doughnuts and peanuts, Catherine Campodonico maintained a meagre but steady living throughout her life. And so assiduous was she, that by the end of her days, she had amassed a small fortune. Rather than pass this to her eager relatives, she spent the lot on a marble statue of herself. And she commissioned one of the finest sculptors of the day, Lorenzo Orengo, to make the work in 1881..you can almost feel the weight and texture of the fabric.

And talking of texture....this life size 19th century piece is breathtaking. The Pienovi Tomb 1879 by Givanni Battista Villa.

So super real, she seems to move...the work captures a moment after death. Perhaps she was at his side when he died and lightly covering his face with the sheet in farewell. Perhaps she is pulling the sheet back for a final look. This work exemplifies a trend towards a direct confrontation with death, unmediated by symbols or reference to mythology.

This scene could be soppy. But it is not. The perfectly weighted and balanced forms lift it clear of sentimentality. It is a challenging image, and monumental...a moment in time elevated to legend by a master sculptor.

This one IS a bit soppy. Soppy and wooden. But worth a mention for the remarkable carved curtain in the background. You can sense air behind it.