In the historic centre of Naples lies the Sansevero Chapel, a former church converted into a family burial chapel by the noble di Sangro family in 1613. In the 1750s, Raimondo di Sangro, the Prince of Sansevero, committed the last years of his life to decorating the chapel with great works of art. He had already had a rich life of enquiry and experimentation in the sciences and was well-known for his inventions as well as a deep involvement with alchemy and Freemasonry. However, since Raimondo had had run-ins with the Inquisition and had elected to destroy his scientific archive before his death, it is his artistic legacy that remains.
In particular, he commissioned three sculptors to produce a marble sculpture each, namely Antonio Corradini’s Veiled Truth, Guiseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, and Francesco Queirolo’s Escape from Deception. By good judgement or good luck – or, some said, by the mysterious powers of the occult – Raimondo’s choice resulted in all three sculptures turning out to be amazing masterpieces of exquisite skill.
Let’s look at just one of them. The Release from Deception by Genoese sculptor Francesco Queirolo shows a man’s emergence from a fisherman’s net, guided by an angel hovering above a globe as he untangles the man from the net. Every piece of this incredible sculpture is carved out of marble, including the carefully crafted knots in the net draped around the figure of the fisherman. The scene depicted is both biblical and allegorical, the net symbolising sin, worldliness or wrong-thinking, and the angel helping the man to see the error of his ways.
The idea of one man, with his mallets and chisels and rasps and rifflers, struggling with one block of marble to “free the form trapped inside the block”, as Michaelangelo used to describe it, is a compelling one. I myself have only fleetingly passed through Naples, but if I ever return, I shall be seeking out the Sansevero Chapel; I’d like to see this “in the flesh”, so to speak!
High above the Calder valley in West Yorkshire lies the village of Heptonstall, and in its churchyard lies, rather incongruously, the grave of famous American confessional poet, Sylvia Plath. Hers is a wretched tale of depression, ending ultimately in her suicide in February 1963, but her literary legacy is a powerful one, albeit only fully recognised posthumously (she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, twenty years after her death). The majority of the poems on which her reputation now rests were written during the final months of her life.
Plath had arrived at Cambridge University from her native Massachusetts and had already won awards for her poetry when she met young Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes in February 1956. By June they were married. They moved to the States for a couple of years before returning to London, where Sylvia had her daughter Frieda, and later Tawnton in Devon, where her son Nicholas was born. In July 1962, she discovered that Hughes was having an affair and the couple separated.
Plath had already experienced difficult problems with her mental health and had already undergone electroconvulsive therapy by the time she’d met Hughes. The separation precipitated an even-further downward spiral. She consulted her GP, who prescribed her anti-depressants and also arranged a live-in nurse to be with her.
The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she found Plath dead with her head in the gas oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. She was 30 years old.
I have selected this poem, Daddy, read aloud by Plath herself. Its theme is her complex relationship with her German father, Otto Plath, who had died shortly after her eighth birthday. It is haunting and disturbing, with dark imagery and the expression of an inscrutable emotional trauma that we can only guess at. Plath’s rendition of her poem, with its disquieting multiple use of “oo” vowel sounds, gripped me, when I first heard this, all the way through to its raw and brutal conclusion.
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene
An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sylvia Plath
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