For the family Sorrentino the sculptor Orengo has conceived a sarcophagus surmounted by a feminine figure who ascends into Heaven, according to Bistolfi’s style. The symbolist culture has assigned several meanings to the woman: source of life and in the meantime bearer of mystery, sensuality and Eros’s symbol, but also a melancholic warning of the beauty’s transience. It is also a privileged means of expression of the decadent idea of the Death. In a monument like this, when the symbolist sensuality matches with the religious allegory – the young woman who is rising up represents the soul’s ascent into Heaven – the allegory fades into the background: in fact, the symbolism of some images tend to make their meaning more implicit. This kind of indefiniteness is typical of the modernist and post-modernist funerary iconography, which represents the relation with the Death in a more subjective and internalized way, far from the analytical character of the Realism.
sb