Tombs of artists

The tombs of sculptors, painters and architects

Architects, painters and sculptors find in the cemetery not only a fertile ground in which to work, but also a place of eternal rest. Some tombs were designed by the artists themselves, others are the result of the merciful fondness of sculptor friends, when the departure was sudden and unexpected.
This is the case of the Tomb of the sculptor Giuseppe Capolino (Trieste 1827-1858), a stele-shaped funerary monument which the Hungarian Béla Brestyanszsky (Budapest 1834-1895), director of the atelier and his successor, active between Venice, Trieste and Vienna, created for his sculptor friend, who died at the very early age of 31 in 1858.
The same fate befell the funerary monument of the painter Umberto Veruda, buried in the family tomb in the plot that his grandfather Pietro, portrayed in the Vicenza stone bust, bought in 1864 for 210 florins. When the painter's untimely and sudden death occurred in 1904 at only 36 years of age, the Circolo Artistico decided to embellish the family tomb with a cast-iron aedicule, eternalising his memory with a bronze bust, palette and paintbrushes, the work of the sculptor Giovanni Mayer, to whom Veruda was bound by friendship and a profound artistic affinity. There are also numerous tombs of architects and engineers from Trieste who have redesigned the face of the city since the beginning of the 20th century, the most important of which is the Berlam family tomb, designed by the head of the family together with his sculptor friend Gianni Marin who, in 1904, asked permission to erect the monument depicting the bronze portrait bust of Giovanni Berlam resting on a stack of books, as a reminder of the importance of study and cultural training in the career of an architect. Others include the Zammattio Tomb, which the sculptor Giovanni Mayer built in 1905 in memory of the architect Giacomo Zammattio, and the Mosco Tomb, where Giovanni Maria, one of the city's best-known Art Nouveau architects, is buried, created in 1924 by his son Carlo.
The tombs of illustrious sculptors include the Mayer Tomb, which Giovanni Mayer designed for his own cenotaph, and the Conti-Marin Tomb, which holds the mortal remains of the cemetery sculptor Luigi Conti, created by his nephew Gianni Marin on his uncle's death in 1904. Among the most recurring names who designed decorations for sepulchral monuments, a prominent place can certainly be given to Luigi Conti (1839-1904), who also created the Marussig Tomb in 1901. Conti, who advertised his atelier in the Almanac and Guide to Trieste at the end of the century, describing himself as a "sculptor-decorator [...] who artistically executes monuments and tombstones in any style [...] portraits, medallions in marble or bronze also from photographs”, has an interesting 'cemetery caricature', with a large funerary obelisk in the background and the inscription [RE]SURRECTURIS created in the Circolo artistico by Carlo Wostry. This caricature sets out to underline the prolific production of funerary works, specifically of decorative parts and architectural scores, in collaboration with other sculptors such as Francesco Pezzicar, Ivan Rendić, Donato Barcaglia and Giovanni Marin. The most significant tombs of artists from the second half of the 20th century include those of Marcello Mascherini (MONUMENTAL TOMB), Ruggero Rovan and Ugo Carà.