I'll admit, I kinda lost my head, running around in a frenzy for two hours taking pictures of over-the-top aedicules (new word for me!), many not so small and often decorated with museum-quality sculpture.
The cemetery, intended to consolidate burials in Milan, opened for business in 1866. Several notable Italians, including Alessandro Manzoni, a novelist whose name doesn't ring a bell, are entombed in a marble building at the entrance. Despite its size, the Famedio can't compare with the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence.
As soon as you pass through the arches, the density of death is apparent.
They don't call the place "monumental" for nothing. Many of the tombs are of surprisingly recent vintage. It took several years in the early Sixties to build this one for Dompe di Mondarco.
The family's pharmaceutical business, now international, began in the late 19th-century with a small drug store near La Scala where Verdi and Puccini were customers.
The architects incorporated a Roman sarcophagus from the third century which begs the question: what happened to its previous occupant?
What I might call the Italian penchant for melodrama finds expression in many of the tomb designs, whether they be large or small, modern or not.
Antonio Bernocchi was in the textile business.
If you guessed this "symbolist" tomb memorializes a farmer, you'd be wrong. Gaetano Besenzanica, a railroad magnate lies beneath it. The cemetery's extraordinary website explains that the large woman, sculpted by Enrico Butti, represents Nature, breathing life into Italy's fertile land.
Could this be . . . Peter Pan?
While researching this entry, I learned that Adolpho Wildt, an artist whose work I first encountered in Venice, provided sculpture for at least ten tombs in Cimitero Monumentale, including this one, his last, for a chemist and university professor. If only the light had been better.
I grabbed this close-up from the website. Wildt's work reminds me more and more of Käthe Kollwitz's. And a little of the sculptures at the Miami Holocaust Memorial.
It turns out that Wildt and his wife are buried in the cemetery, too. Their tomb incorporates the "Mask of Pain" that so grabbed me at Ca' Pesaro.
As they say, ignorance is bliss. For the second time after returning from Milan, I discovered that I may share a fascist aesthetic. According to the Cimitero Monumentale website (see below, thank you Google Translate), Wildt was under the spell of Margherita Sarfatti, a Jewish-born socialist and art critic who, while Mussolini's mistress, influenced the development of his policies. Although the text's author doesn't finger Wildt as a fascist, it's hard not to reach that conclusion reading between the lines, particularly when Wildt's obsession with classical form seems so au courant in our nation's capital.
Artist without peace and without beauty
In the multifaceted landscape of the twentieth century, Adolfo Wildt (1868-1931) is undoubtedly the most controversial Milanese artist: excessive to the point of annoyance, extravagant in both his themes and his execution, he was the last interpreter of marble carving as the ancients understood it. In years marked by the raging avant-garde, our sculptor chose to recover images buried in an immemorial past: Hellenism, the International Quattrocento, the Po Valley Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque seem to hybridize in highly original blends, unrelated to the prevailing taste. A single statue of the master would be enough to establish an artist's fame, yet his exquisitely modern restlessness was the basis of a dramatic damnatio memoriae ("condemnation of memory"), heightened by his proximity to Margherita Sarfatti, a leading intellectual of Fascist Italy. Driven by a burning fire, as timeless as his art, Wildt seemed perpetually intent on infusing spirit into matter, celebrating the eternal struggle between soul and body.
All righty, then! And kudos to the author for some of the most incisive art criticism I've ever seen posted online. And a grudging nod to artificial intelligence for the instant translation.
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