[Aztlan] bones as decoration

[Sam Edgerton]

Listeros: If you want to see an extraordinary example of human bone 
veneration under the auspices of the Catholic Church in Rome, visit the 
Capuchin Monastery on the Via Veneto just across from the American Embassy 
(a hundred yards or so up the street from the Piazza Barberini). There, in 
the eighteenth century, an off-shoot fundamentalist cult of this order, 
intent on celebrating the transcendence of the soul over the transience of 
our earthly remains, decreed that all the deceased brothers of the cult 
should allow their skeletal bones to be used to form decorations in the 
convent's special mortuary chapel. Apparently some of the still living 
brothers were quite artistic, especially in the then current rococo 
architectural style, and cleverly applied each type of bone to create 
various rococo motifs, like the characteristic "C-curve" made of linked 
illiac hip bones,  and "putti" of skulls and fibulae dancing among 
"chinoiserie" vines composed of ribs and vertebrae. The walls are 
completely covered, in "horror vacui, " with intricate bone designs of 
every sort - an ideal Hallowe'en visit which I should have mentioned last 
week should anyone have been travelling in Italy during October.
Sam Edgerton .