The catacombs beneath Rome’s Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins Church
are decorated with the remains of almost 4,000 unnamed Franciscan friars.
This might be what Nabokov meant when he said art
is equal parts beauty and pity—six vestibules
of ulnas and humerus, hundreds of skulls architected
into arches, eyes overflowing with broken
bits of their own bodies, Baroque-style chandeliers hung
of human collar bones while below a group of six men
dead for more than three centuries sleep
still dressed in rough-woven robes, perhaps dreaming
mosaics of vertebrae leaves and petals
fashioned from hand bones, thousands of hands
formed into thousands more flowers and,
in the middle room, a mobile, which seems imagined
by one of Calder’s forefathers, tinkles
with what it took me a few minutes to realize
are men’s ribs. In all, there are five-and-a-half rooms
festooned with what remains of those friar’s lives, lives
filled with baby teeth and little brothers, hang
nails and heart attacks, their mothers long buried.
When no one was looking, I reached through
the protective wire mesh, ran fingers around a man’s
empty eye socket. My hand came back coated
with what might have been dust but surely
contained a trace of what he’d been, his pain
and penance as well as our common hunger.
In the seventeenth century, the Catholic Church
excavated all these forgotten friars, piled
their corpses haphazardly into three-hundred carts
drawn by three-hundred donkeys. Then some
thirty years passed while someone, and no one
is sure who, arranged the remains into what
I have to call fantastic. Mosaics of mandible flowers,
the wall a chessboard of fleshless faces overlooking
a fibula table, femur and shaved tibia shaped
into what looks like a clock stopped just around
the time clocks were invented, wall hangings
of pelvises metamorphosed into flocks of prehistoric
birds as if the birds’ spines suddenly remembered
they’d once carried wings, and at corridor’s end,
a painting of Jesus, his hands on Lazarus.
