While in Sicily during the Mediterranean campaign, my father visited the Capuchin crypt in Palermo. There he took several photographs of the mummies hung on the wall. This week, I am peering in to that crypt from 1944. I asked my father recently why he took those photographs. His answer was a characteristic no nonsense one: "Because they were ugly."
Indeed they were. The mummies were hung upright against the walls of the crypt, and, in a fashion making them even more ghoulish, dressed in formal clothing. These mummies can still be seen in Palermo and are apparently an offbeat tourist attraction. I checked their holdings on line and saw some familiar figures. They look like their environment has been spruced up a bit since 1944. My father’s photographs from that time show some crumbling in the walls and what looks like wire barriers.
As I began my crypt series, I retained the damaged look and the wire barriers by drawing in splattered ink on a large crisp piece of ivory drawing paper with a nice deckle edge. I selected a figure that was particularly gruesome looking to me. It is one I remembered coming across over fifty years ago in the photo album I discovered as a child as an intrepid explorer of other people’s closets.
To my surprise, as I worked on this piece, it engendered the same discomfort that I experienced all those years ago and I wondered if I would even be able to finish it. Like most art works, though, working continuously on the composition caused the subject to diminish and the medium to grow. The charcoals made nice scratch marks as they stumbled over the ink. The oil in the Chinese ink I used caught the light at different angles and livened the drawing with reflective properties. Pastels added some softness and modulations. Stepping back from the finished work, though, I have to agree with my father’s assessment "they were ugly."
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