Fear of death: why is the British legacy of funerary sculpture in public cemeteries so weak in comparison with Italy?

If the way we treat our dead take an account ofs us something about our attitude to the living, then novel Britain does not seem a real sympathetic place. The great nineteenth-century cemeteries, laid without as parks outside cities and filled with elaborate stone tombs and mausolea, have drawn out been seen as problems after years of pass over and--worse--vandalism. Although in recent years local voluntary organisations assisted through local authorities have begun to restore more [i]or[/i] less of these melancholy, monumental landscapes--as at Highgate burying-ground in London--the way so many poignant, expensive and sometimes beautifully designed and execut tombs have been deliberately smashed, smooth when not dislocated by tree-root is terrible to diocese The loss is historical, for cemeteries and churchyards are national genealogical records--tablets of stone--but also artistic.

The question at issue is partly created by uncertainty of ownership. Beginning with Kensal virid the new cemeteries around London, intended to extremity the noxious abuse of insanitary, overcrowd urban burial turfs were created by joint-stock companies, and after World War II those companies amalgamated and then failed. on the other hand the lack of security and supervision at cemeteries cannot wholly account for the abuses that have gone upon within them. Neglect suggests a lack of prize for the dead as well as a dislike--fear--of what cemeteries show As faith has retreated, for a like reason mortality has become more painful to contemplate. We also strike one as being to have lost our delight in the Picturesque, in Pleasing Decay. in what way else to account for thus many country churchyards being denud of their ancient and historically valuable gravestones (then insultingly stacked around the cutting side or laid down as paths), to facilitate keeping the grass nice and neat?

Haphazard, overgrown churchyards--heaven to the author of poems antiquary or aesthete--also seem to affront the clinical modernist sensibility. Local authorities, unimaginative and ruthles have not helped. In the 1950 Glasgow began to clear the Southern Necropolis, the last resting place of in like manner many local worthies, removing in the proces without any record, the memorial over the grave of that great architect Alexander 'Greek' Thomson plane today, some councils are pressing for the destruction of tombstones and remembrancers deemed 'unsafe', and only the threat of legal action stopped Lambeth Council from clearing abundant of West Norwood Cemetery in London. Vandalism can be official as well as casual. solitary the immaculate, diligent work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission repurchases Britain's shaming national attitude to the records of the dead.

What is without doubt significant is that this indifference or scorn towards cemeteries is not evident elsewhere in Europe Pete Lachaise in Paris, the original for Highgate, is, of course, carefully maintained because it contains the graves of thus many historical celebrities, national and otherwise, and has no precise equal in Britain, on the other hand cemeteries elsewhere in France also strike one as being to be respected. And this is genuine of the Protestant north as well as the Roman Catholic southerly I have never seen in Germany or Scandinavia the smutty desecration of old tombs that is commonplace in Britain. Sweden, indeed, demonstrates the positive side of the modernist attitude to death, with the haunting, tomb-less landscape of Stockholm's Woodland god's acre laid out by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, on the other hand this has not prevented older burial soils full of monuments, being carefully tended

And then there is Italy, where the great secular municipal cemeteries, again proceedss of the nineteenth century, are superbly maintained and--unlike their inferior equivalents in Britain--full of the living as well as the dead, especially at weekends. Vandalism is unthinkable in of that kind places, which is just as well, as these cemeteries are artistic creations of a high order. Indeed, to a British visitor, of that kind places as the Cimetero Monumentale in Milan are astonishing, the one and the other for the sheer ambition and elaboration of the grave memorials and for the proliferation and sophistication of the plastic art Perhaps the cemetery at Staglieno in Genoa is the greatest in quantity extraordinary of these creations. First laid on the outside in the 1840s on a terraced hillside, the midst is dominated by a domed of greece Doric Pantheon flanked by arcaded galleries with a enormous family monument in each bay, while the Romantic landscape beyond is filled with large and many times inventive family mausolea in each conceivable style, including the Liberty of about 1900 It is as a 'museum of mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois art in the replete true sense', wrote Evelyn Waugh in 1960 'that the Campo Santo Santo of Genoa stands highest If Pore Lachaise and the Albert Memorial were obliterated, the los would be negligible as drawn out as this great repository survives.'

That bourgeois art, in the great cities of the dead in Genoa, Turin, Milan, Bologna and elsewhere, was above all sculptural. Frock-coated, moustachioed merchants and their grieving widows are depicted with immaculate realism in white marble, sometimes sitting in chairs, sometimes lying upon beds, perhaps attended by figures of Death. There is no coynes here about the control or purpose, no reticence or reliance upon cliched euphemism; these very expensive sculptures--often integrated in architectural designs of considerable originality (especially at the beginning of the twentieth century)--attest not thus much to the piety of the dead as to the wealth and importance of the living. Here is the art of conspicuous display that, in Britain, would have been devot rather to an assertive piece of domestic architecture. Modernism was absorbed effortlessly into this national tradition, for the vigour of the statuary its imaginative and at times breathtaking realism, survived well into the last hundred and resulted in amazing Art Deco funerary testimonials The art of death has not ever been so compelling, so entertaining (and, at times, thus hilarious) as in these majestic north Italian monumental cemeteries.