Upon hearing of the fiasco over an art teacher showing an image of Michelangelo’s David to a class of sixth graders, I couldn’t help but think of my visit to Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale last year. For Americans, walking into an Italian cemetery like the Monumentale can be an uncanny experience. Built in 1863 under the direction of architect Carlo Maciachini, the Monumentale features elaborately designed buildings, mausolea and statues. It serves as a final resting place for major Milanese figures including the writer Alessandro Manzoni, composer Arturo Toscanini, and fashion designer Franco Moschino.
The statues, which allude to pagan and religious imagery, and range from the fully clothed to fully nude, evoke a theatrical brand of grandeur and sorrow that only Italians can achieve. These depictions of the human form speak to a deep-seated intuition that the body — capable of both generating life and collapsing into dust — reflects grand cosmic realities. This symbolic consciousness is pervasive in the cemetery, reminding visitors that death is not something to run away from, but rather is an unavoidable, mysterious reality to be explored.
When visiting cemeteries (that is, if they ever do), most Americans prefer to swiftly make their way in and out — driven perhaps by the eeriness of the design and landscape or by the fear of confronting the inevitability of their own death. Thus my alarm whilst watching visitors at the Monumentale taking their time to visit their loved ones, some going for a stroll around the cemetery afterwards or even laying out a blanket for a picnic. Such ease, such comfort with death was shockingly (but also alluringly) unfamiliar to me.
Across the way from one male nude perched on top of a coffin, I saw an image that was more familiar, more crassly American: a billboard for Dsquared2 underwear featuring a nearly nude model with his legs sprawled out for all to see. Americans seem to have a proclivity for oscillating between extremes of sexual puritanism and libertinism.
Though the recent outcropping of controversies in Florida have been presented as a culture clash between the left and right, I’d argue America’s opposing factions have a lot more in common than we think. The impulse to “cancel” educators who won’t promote sexual fluidity in their lessons coexists quite logically with the impulse to cancel educators who present students with “pornographic” classical depictions of nude bodies.
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Photos taken at the Cimetero Monumentale in Milan, Italy.
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