Presenters
Abstract
The Pietro Badaracco tomb in Staglieno Cemetery, Genoa, 1875, depicts a popular theme in nineteenth-century Italian cemetery sculpture: fashionably dressed widows mourning at their deceased husbands’ tombs. A simple yet striking example, it shows a single figure standing before the tomb, head bent in grief as she raises her right hand to knock on the door, a funeral wreath in her left hand. Typical of mid nineteenth-century Italian sculpture’s realist trend, she wears detailed contemporary dress, including a tight-fitting bodice, ruffled sleeves, an elaborate lace veil, a cross at her neck, and a wedding ring.
Female figures in modern dress are not as common in nineteenth-century American cemetery sculpture. Instead, allegories and angels, usually in classical dress or flowing robes, dominate. Thus, the more than half a dozen figures found in southern rural cemeteries that almost exactly replicate Badaracco’s widow stand out as unique. Dating to the 1880s, they do not mark the graves of illustrious men but of a wife, a brother, a son, and others. How can we explain the fidelity to the details – they share the same pose, dress, jewelry, and funeral wreath – in figures thousands of miles apart? And yet, how do they differ from the original to better suit an American context? This paper will explore the migration of this motif to provide an example of the vigorous Italian-American exchange in funerary sculpture.