Among the family mausoleums set along the western perimeter wall of the Vecchio Camposanto (Old Cemetery) visitors will find worthy of note that of the Devoto family, with the great statue-portrait of Giovanni Devoto, work of Giovanni Battista Villa, and the harrowing one of little Efisino Devoto, by Giuseppe Sartorio, considered quite rightly as one of the symbols of the cemetery of Bonaria. Creating this sculpture, in 1887, Sartorio demonstrated another distinctive aspect of his art, as noted by an anonymous contributor to the daily "L'Avvenire di Sardegna" who commented on the "admirable child, who in the Devoto chapel sleeps seated – a true jewel". In the representation of a child's death, the Piedmontese sculptor exalts to the full his tear-jerking realism, which he had learnt from Tabacchi, in an open display of feeling typical of romanticism. Efisino, a child of but few years, appears in his holiday clothes, seated on a chair, his head bowed, holding a wooden horse, his small plump legs crossed and his right arm hanging down. This is clearly a plastic transposition of a photograph taken immediately after his death. Here however the "hardness of the marble seems to have given way, not so much to the skilled chisel of Giuseppe Sartorio, as to the pitiful tenderness of the child's parents" (Salvatore Naitza) who, with the lament inscribed on the base: Naughty boy! Why don't you wake up?, express their grief in the face of an unfathomable, unacceptable loss. The epitaph on the base of the sculpture completes the memorial to the small dead boy:
EFISINO
BORN OF GEROLAMO DEVOTO
AND AGOSTINA NESPOLA
LIVED 33 MONTHS
21 MARCH 1887
EFISINO
BORN OF GEROLAMO DEVOTO
AND AGOSTINA NESPOLA
LIVED 33 MONTHS
21 MARCH 1887
Among the family mausoleums set along the western perimeter wall of the Vecchio Camposanto (Old Cemetery) visitors will find worthy of note that of the Devoto family, with the great statue-portrait of Giovanni Devoto, work of Giovanni Battista Villa, and the harrowing one of little Efisino Devoto, by Giuseppe Sartorio, considered quite rightly as one of the symbols of the cemetery of Bonaria. Creating this sculpture, in 1887, Sartorio demonstrated another distinctive aspect of his art, as noted by an anonymous contributor to the daily "L'Avvenire di Sardegna" who commented on the "admirable child, who in the Devoto chapel sleeps seated – a true jewel". In the representation of a child's death, the Piedmontese sculptor exalts to the full his tear-jerking realism, which he had learnt from Tabacchi, in an open display of feeling typical of romanticism. Efisino, a child of but few years, appears in his holiday clothes, seated on a chair, his head bowed, holding a wooden horse, his small plump legs crossed and his right arm hanging down. This is clearly a plastic transposition of a photograph taken immediately after his death. Here however the "hardness of the marble seems to have given way, not so much to the skilled chisel of Giuseppe Sartorio, as to the pitiful tenderness of the child's parents" (Salvatore Naitza) who, with the lament inscribed on the base: Naughty boy! Why don't you wake up?, express their grief in the face of an unfathomable, unacceptable loss. The epitaph on the base of the sculpture completes the memorial to the small dead boy:
EFISINO
BORN OF GEROLAMO DEVOTO
AND AGOSTINA NESPOLA
LIVED 33 MONTHS
21 MARCH 1887
EFISINO
BORN OF GEROLAMO DEVOTO
AND AGOSTINA NESPOLA
LIVED 33 MONTHS
21 MARCH 1887
Inscription
Cattivo perché non ti svegli?! / Naughty boy! Why don't you wake up?
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