Skin shrouds skull and skull shrouds face. The unmade façade veils the envisaged face, revealing the concealed. Cut, carved, polished concedes to formed, fired, rough.
The quarry wall still stands. The mud never becomes the mountain. 

Inside the tomb height buries the intruder. A grey grid cage holds them captive. The white stone that would have faced the outside has become melancholy pose and expression. It emerges from the wall as motif. It sits and reclines as figure. It closes as sarcophagus.

The four corners are described by giant Corinthian pilasters cut from mineral grey sandstone to carry the cornice above and hold the marble aedicules between. The aedicules’ own pilasters support a curved tympanum, broken, incomplete and plainly empty apart from the cascading succession of recessions that hang within. These abstract portals tear out and into a compositional whole that clings inside a frame from the cut-up capitals of no order. But the frame holds nothing besides a winking eye and a lid-like laurel draping weightlessly below towards a massive smooth ashlar block. This mighty block might have fallen out of the space above, to weight the composition down and hold it to the perilous ledge above the door. Pass under it at your own risk, the block might still fall further. The ledge is barely propped up by only the slightest articulation and by the thick melting scrolls that droop more than they lift. 

During daylight hours, light drops in from above as lux aeterna, setting into stone from a position fixed by the unyielding room. An oculus perforates the dome over four heavy apertures on the false drum that lean in gently to direct light onto the tombs below. The lower windows are curbed or blocked. 

Staged lighting steers towards the tombs’ place that is set solid, permanent. Four recumbent figures answer the light as Night, Day, Dawn, Dusk. But are they heaven and earth and heaven and earth? They are woman and man and man and woman. They are age, youth, age, youth. They are slack, firm, slack, firm. They are passive, active, passive, active. They look down, out, down, out. They close, close, open, open. Each cycles with its pair and each pair with its other, spinning the base level of the room into a grave, downcast atmosphere that is only heightened by the architectural lift towards the dome above.

The facing sarcophagi lids are buried by the larger-than-life graven weight of the figures and by an uneven crystalline ground that recollects their Apennine source. From rough-hewn to carved, etched, smoothed and polished, the surface index registers a scale from reflected to absorbed. The polished lifts and radiates towards the eye, glowing apart from the dull rough surface that cuts deeper and sinks by swallowing light. 

We are told that so-called Night bathes in moonlight. A sunken star and emerging crescent moon nest in her hair. An owl perches beneath her arched leg. The owl and fruit and mask are all subdued by the marks of the chisel to make her emanate as light. Her torso and left leg glint as glass. Her head falls heavily into shadow upon her hand but her lids do not fall shut. The hand that carved her also wrote her epigram:

Caro m’è ‘l sonno, e più l’esser di sasso,
mentre che ‘l danno e la vergogna dura;
non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura;
però non mi destar, deh, parla basso.

My sleep is dear to me, and more dear this being of stone,
as long as the agony and shame last;
not to see, not to hear [or feel] is my great fortune;
so do not wake me, please, speak softly.

The head of so-called Day peaks over his mountainous right shoulder, appearing detached and unresolved. Resolution sharpens the eye towards points of life in all the figures whereas the rougher, blunter surfaces fall back to sleep as dull stone. All the sculptures have been awakened out of their quarried blocks into varying states of arousal. The less finished parts recall the imprisoning masses of the unfinished Slaves of the Accademia that are eternally caught in a wrestle for freedom. The four allegories are also imprisoned in their own elusive roles. All their bodies contort. All their faces wear discomfort.  

So-called Dusk has grown weary from the day. His flesh spills and his hands are bent limp. The flow of chisel marks over his shoulder guide our attention toward the place of his maker. All the marks can be read and indexed. The surface is used to push and pull in and from focus, to soften and harden, to steer us over and across and down and through and around and in, but not underneath. Cut it finer and the marble becomes translucent like hand and skin. But this marble skin reaches all the way through. It is bone, organs and blood. All are stone; only the veins stained with imperfections break the rule. 

So-called Dawn awakes under a leaden veil. A thin bandage of cloth cuts into her ribs but not to cover or protect but to bind and lay bare. Her genitals and breasts blur and smooth detail away from certainty. An arrowed navel sinks deep into her stone belly describing the cut umbilical. She lies in near symmetry to Dusk. His right leg crossed forward, his foot suspended. Her left leg bends back pressing her foot into the ground instead. Her arms are full of strength and her hands are purposed. The right claws and burrows and the left pulls at the veil, its digits spiralling like logarithms. 

The seated effigies above belong to a different sphere. They are clothed and removed. They gaze towards the Madonna but their eyes are emptied and blinded with intent. The blind windows on either side are empty by abandonment. 

Daily at 13:50 the graven room is abandoned. Later it will fade to black. Beyond its bounding walls 47,000 bulbs stand and hang and wait to cut each night. Guided by eye and measured by sun, a single hand turns two keys to light the street. The warm sodium glow that flickered before as candle and oil is becoming stark cold LED. Their steady glare and interrupted shadows animate the out-of-doors. But behind the blind windows and unmade façade the entombed room does not move. It is bound and mute. Its stone memorial figures remain caged, unchanged but still ever-transforming.