Bog Myrtle & Peat

They’re old bones at San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan. Legend states that they came from the martyred remains of Catholics killed by Goths in the 4^th century, but it’s more likely they were gathered in the aftermath of a terrible plague which swept the city in the 1600s. Skulls are heaped on every ledge of the side-chapel, and stacked in cruciform patterns which rise from the floor to the ceiling. Most are honey-gold, but some are streaked with chocolate brown and hashed with the shadows of mesh like books in a latticework dresser. 

Look closely and you’ll see that most of these skulls have been lacquered with something softly glossy, and there’s even a ripple of bristles from a brush’s slapped application. Perhaps this varnish is holding the heads together, because many have broken across the nose and the cheekbones fallen to powder. Elsewhere at the porous stump-ends of thigh-bones, the impression is more like pumace or dissipating flour. Not even bones can last forever, and if the mesh keeps the skulls from crumbling into the room, it also blocks the temptation to reach and touch these strangely tactile things. But in one corner, somebody has worked out how to push things through the wire and in amongst the bones. There is a single skull which has rose petals for eyes, and a heap of twisted paper where the yellow teeth once grinned.

I’ve read an explanation of how skeletons were cleaned and bleached in the sun before they were put to work again as decoration. I’ve even seen a photograph of a broad, sandy yard in Spain that’s heaped with limbs like cords of wood, and the knuckles splayed like knots and turns of fibre. It was taken in 1876, and there are teams of men who patiently turn each bone to gently face the sun. But of course it goes without saying that these extraordinary, death-packed monuments are yesterday’s news. San Bernardino alle Ossa is almost hidden on the edge of a piazza that is preoccupied by a finer, more impressive church. Both stand within a short bone’s throw of the Duomo itself, but this place is less than an eddy in the heavy, trendy streets of Milan, where acreages of shining shop-front glass are devoted to the exposition of little bags and silky shoes which aren’t for sale to the likes of you and I.

Even inside the church itself, there’s only a small A4 sign which points towards a side chapel down a narrow passage. The ossuary is not hiding, but it’s uncomfortable with discovery. And I hear that in many places where these monuments are found across Europe, locals have begun to feel a sense of slight embarrassment at the morbid extravagance of previous generations. This is interlaced with a pressing awareness that these are real bones and the bodies of human beings who lived and breathed and walked these streets. They can’t be wished away, but there’s no real desire to keep them.

I was on my own to sketch for an hour in the ossuary, then a man of my own age came in with his camera. He took some photographs, then he asked me a question in Italian. I replied in broken tones that he should repeat himself slowly so that I had a chance of understanding, but he sidestepped the request and tried again in English. “The small skulls”, he said. “Are they from children?” Part of me wanted to laugh and say “I don’t know mate, I’m so far off piste here that I could hardly tell you down from up”. But of course they were from children, and I said they probably were. Because how else could you explain why some skulls were half the size of others, and the hollows where their teeth had been like crayons stabbed in playdough, then long since dried. 

And I was so far off piste because death in Scotland has sometimes felt like a steady envelopment of darkness, and it’s all too easy for a man to lean away his from life like the rise of coming rain. In a contest of fatalism, nobody can trump Scotland – but it bothers me how Lorca wrote that “a man who is dead in Spain is more dead than a man who is dead in any other country” – he was writing about Granada, but the same morbid vitality runs around the Mediterranean like a scorch; and even the relentless descent into death can be won back for a final moment’s shouted significance. It jars against Scotland’s sullen, slate-grey shades, and reminds me of an outside world where the brights are brighter and the darks unimaginably black.

You could guess that San Bernardino alle Ossa is a statement of life’s brevity, and if we don’t know who these people were, there’s no specific sadness beyond the wider reminder of mortality. I was overwhelmed by those bones, but I couldn’t immediately understand why. There are ossuaries in Scotland, but they belong to a world of archaeological distance – thousands of human bones were found on the shelves of neolithic chambered cairns on Orkney, and countless tombs and monuments from Galloway to Shetland hold compartments and departments of skulls and ribs and scapulae, ritually retained for generations after death. It’s in us all to engage with the dead, and the concept’s nothing new. So perhaps I was simply floored by aesthetics – the showiness and extravagance of that calcium bouquet in heart of a modern city, endorsed and engorged with frescoes, decorative scrollwork and gilded fol-de-rollery which are utterly Italian. If modern Scots built monuments to anything in the natural span of human life, it would be certainly be death –  the difference is that we would place our trust in simplicity – and the resignation of a gesture towards absence.