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Updated: May 21, 2025
The outside is sometimes decorated with long strips of various colours ending in interlaced lotus-leaves, such as are seen on stone sarcophagi. More frequently, it is ornamented on the left side with two wide-open eyes and two monumental doors, and on the right with three doors exactly like those seen in contemporary catacombs.
In short, the talent of Donato was such, and he was so admirable in all his actions, that he may be said to have been one of the first to give light, by his practice, judgment, and knowledge, to the art of sculpture and of good design among the moderns; and he deserves all the more commendation, because in his day, apart from the columns, sarcophagi, and triumphal arches, there were no antiquities revealed above the earth.
There, among pagan sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on their arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, Orcagna of Florence, or Lorenzetti of Siena, painted the typical masterpiece of mediæval art, the great fresco of the Triumph of Death.
The old sarcophagi and heavy tablets of the historic Beaufort families stood side by side with plain wooden crosses. The armorial bearings and long epitaphs of the one and the brief lettering of the other suggested the changes that had come with the war to these families, yet somehow the wooden cross touched one's heart with closer sympathy.
Many wrecks of admirable statues and fragments of exquisite sculpture were dug up; monuments of the taste and magnificence that reigned in the ancient Tusculan abodes. He had studded his villa and its grounds with statues, relievos, vases, and sarcophagi; thus retrieved from the bosom of the earth.
Burial-jars were occasionally used, as were also sarcophagi of clay or terracotta, the latter chiefly in the provinces of Bizen and Mimasaka, probably because suitable materials existed there in special abundance.
In the principal apartment stand two sarcophagi, of which one contains the remains of the sultan, the other those of his favourite. The lower part of the walls of this apartment, as well as both sarcophagi, are covered with costly mosaic work of the most beautiful stones. A marble lattice-work, six feet high, surrounding the two sarcophagi, is a masterpiece of art.
Many stone sarcophagi, some of which are artistically carved, lie scattered about in almost every conceivable position some even lying across the tops of others. But these windowless rock-palaces are all empty. Leaving Gerasa, my way leads in a general direction westward over the mountains of Gilead.
It is so scarred by time, and by the hands of iconoclasts; so dilapidated, broken and diminished, that it is as inexpressive as the crumbling mummies found in the sarcophagi, which no longer even ape humanity. But after the manner of all phantoms it comes to life again at night, beneath the enchantments of the moon. For the men of its time whom did it represent? King Amenemhat? The Sun God?
North-west of the house is the Christian cemetery, a bewildering mass of sarcophagi and foundations of several epochs, from among which many objects have been taken to the museum. All the sarcophagi had been broken into and plundered; with a single exception, that of a little Greek girl who still had the earrings in her ears.
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