Tomb Chiarella

On this tomb, which was made in 1864 for Giovanni Chiarella, the father of the two brothers who have founded the Politeama Genovese theatre, the sculptor Cevasco has placed an angel praying in front of a sepulcher; in the bas-relief at the centre of the sarcophagus there is a representation of the deceased who is detached from his family and taken to the afterworld. However, the drama is hold back and reassembled in a quite traditional scheme: it can be considered as a model of that kind of sober representation which is typical of the classicism and was dominant during the first monumental season of the cemetery of Staglieno. Like it happens in the tomb Gambaro, which was made some time before by Cevasco, there is no more that kind of “photographic” description of the details, which would have been typical of the subsequent decades with the bourgeois realism. Giovanni Battista Cevasco, who has been one of the first sculptors who have worked in the cemetery of Staglieno, along with Santo Varni and Carlo Rubatto, has been a prolific artist and appreciated by some prestigious commissioners as the House of Savoy and the marquis Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini, for whom he has made lots of works which find nowadays themselves in the beautiful romantic park of the Villa Pallavicini in the city quarter of Pegli. His style has always been moderate, beginning from a classical one, which characterizes this monument, and ending with a more realistic one, as in the tomb Badaracco, at the beginning of this route.

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