Cemetery sculpture

In the second half of the nineteenth century, sculpture in Sardinia was basically configured as a funeral monument. Public monuments are rare and scarcely built up, hampered first of all by the financial shortages of municipalities, but also by the harsh confrontation of ideas about the same form of the constituting unitary state, which sees monarchists and republicans, Catholics and Masons as opposed to each other.
Then there is another fundamental difficulty in the creation of the great celebratory monuments that instead spread in the squares of Italy: the urban structure of the main cities, fortresses of medieval origin that grew within walls, equipped with narrow and winding streets that lead to squares without arcades, with very limited spaces for communication.

It is no coincidence that the equestrian statue is unknown in Sardinia and the commemorative monument itself is more unique than rare, since the only one preceding the Statue of Carlo Felice is that of Bernardo Mantero's Carlo Emanuele III Monument in Carloforte.

Therefore, grandiose monuments, which constitute the most conspicuous aspect of official sculpture in the large spaces of Turin's squares and in many Italian cities, are rare in Sardinian city squares. Instead, it is the cemeteries that are populated with sculptures and monuments, and it is the new patriotic bourgeoisie, together with an aristocracy that gradually becomes an entrepreneur, that marks and hands down its historical memory in funeral monuments; so that, through the steles and tombstones, the stones and the urns, the full-length, half-bust or bas-relief portraits of these marble citizens and the symbols of their professions intertwined with those of death, it is possible to follow the events of society throughout the island together with the mutants Improvements of the taste of ruling class, of which cemetery fences become representative parks.

Update

25/9/2023 - 16:14