Oh, Death!

This is a one of several impressive family crypts and tombs in the city cemetery of Sassari, Sardinia, where I'm spending a long week. Death is hauling these people toward the tomb entrance like a fisherman hauling in a net of fish. There's something about that meeting of the fictive and the real in this that just gets me. The tomb confers some of its actuality on the sculpture, and the sculpture invests the tomb with its meaning and emotional power--reality and imagination supporting each other. I have never seen anything quite like it. And yet it is after all just the tomb of some Sardinian solid citizen.

(Photo by Kia)