An Amazingly Life-Like Statue

Beauty/Art: Human creative talent at its finest

[Note: you may need to click “Show Images” on your email to see the pictures.]

The Greek poet Ovid once wrote about a sculptor named Pygmalion who carved such a perfect statue that it actually came to life! (He then married the statue-woman, with Aphrodite’s blessing, but that’s the weird part of the story, which we won’t go into…)

As myths go, it was a pretty clever story. Also as myths go, it held a deep truth. Some sculptors are so marvelously talented that you might think their works are real.

That was the sense I had when I saw the sculpture in our feature image which can be found in the Staglieno Monumental Cemetery in Genoa, Italy. It adorns the family crypt of the Oneto family, whose patriarch, Francesco Oneto, was a banker and commissioned the statue in 1882.

The artist was the neo-classical Italian sculptor, Giulio Monteverde (1837-1917), who was known for sculpting in a style called naturalism or realism – translated, that means he made amazingly life-like statues!

That is certainly the case with this one. Wow, it’s stunning. 

If you just look at the headshot you see what looks like a young woman, but the full image reveals that it is actually an angel, with wings, standing as an angelic sentinel in a niche within the family mausoleum. The angel looks to be in a pensive mood, slightly melancholic, perhaps symbolizing the grief a family feels at the loss of its loved ones.  

Yet, the statue’s name is the Angel of the Resurrection. Her look is pensive, but it not pessimistic. It is full of hope. Seen from the side, she holds a trumpet in her right hand, waiting the Day of Resurrection when “the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised,” as St. Paul so eloquently wrote to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:52).