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.
About the presenterElisabeth Roark
Elisabeth Roark, Professor of Art History at Chatham University,received her M.A. and Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at the University of Tennessee and Converse College. Her research addresses pre-1900 American art, especially portraiture, artist imagery, and cemetery sculpture. Roark edits Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies. Publications include the book Artists of Colonial America and articles in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, American Art, Italian American Review, and Nineteenth-Century Art.