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Then there are huge stone sarcophagi, engraved with hieroglyphics within and without, all as good as new, though their age is reckoned by thousands of years. These great coffins are of vast weight and mass, insomuch that when once the accurately fitting lids were shut down, there might have seemed little chance of their being lifted again till the Resurrection.
Clouds of steam fill the air, and through the fog you perceive a fine mêlée of figures, some half dressed, some statuesquely nude, towelling themselves or preparing to wash, or shaving at bits of mirror propped on the window-sills. Pink bodies wallow voluptuously in the deep porcelain-ware tubs, which are of the shape and superb dimensions of Egyptian sarcophagi.
The first of these are the relics of a Roman sarcophagus, discovered in a mausoleum, containing three other sarcophagi, at Xanthus. On the top have been reclining figures of a male and female, and at the sides combats of warriors.
There was a simple lawn of fine grass with a vast central basin surmounted by a figure of Venus, nude and white; and antique fragments, vases, statues, columns, and /sarcophagi/ were ranged symmetrically all around the deserted, sunlit yet melancholy, sward.
There are an enormous number of inscriptions, a few sculptures comparatively, a great many architectural fragments, and an infinity of small objects. Among the sculptures two or three, sarcophagi may be specially noted. One with the subject of Hippolytus and Phædra, found in the narthex of the little basilica at Salona in 1859, in a fifth-century stratum, is a late copy of one in the Louvre.
In their Latin poems they sing his praises and celebrate his amour with the fair Isotta, in whose honour and as whose monument the famous rebuilding of San Francesco at Rimini took place 'Divae Isottae Sacrum. When the humanists themselves came to die, they were laid in or under the sarcophagi with which the niches of the outside walls of the church were adorned, with an inscription testifying that they were laid here at the time when Sigismundus, the son of Pandulfus, ruled.
A great deal of white marble decorates the old stonework of the aisles, in the shape of altars, obelisks, sarcophagi, and busts.
His name, and pictures of him are to be found on stones in the fortress of Cairo, on a relief in Florence, a statue in the Vatican, on sarcophagi in Stockholm and London, a statue in the Villa Albani and on a little temple of red granite at Leyden.
It contained an altar built up of stone, plastered over and painted, measuring at the base 2 feet 8-1/2 inches by 2 feet 2 inches and 3 feet 7 inches high. Also sarcophagi for the bodies of the martyrs there found, also one that Mellebaudes had prepared for himself. In the floor were many graves, possibly of his kinsfolk.
This Campo Santo is indeed most eloquently illustrative of loving reverence and remembrance of the dead, and is quite a museum of beautiful monumental statuary. This burial-ground is a system of sheltered colonnades, where the dead are deposited in sarcophagi, resting on shelves on the inner walls, tier upon tier.
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