The Angel of Grief is sizable as mortuary monuments go.
“If she could stand up, she’d be a center on the women’s basketball team,” campus archaeologist Laura Jones says of the statue—a replica of one Jane Stanford commissioned for the family cemetery in the Arboretum as a memorial to her brother Henry Lathrop. “She’s a bigger-than-normal woman.”
Jones ought to know. More than once in the past few years she has clambered onto the statue and tried to duplicate the pathos-laden pose of The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life, carved from a single, seven-ton block of Cararra marble by the Bernieri Brothers of Tuscany. And she’s done it all in the cause of conservation.
To replace the forearm stolen by vandals and repair the damaged wing tips of the memorial—erected after the 1906 earthquake claimed the original—Jones hired architectural conservator David Wessel and sculptor Marcel Machler. Wessel applied a cleansing poultice to the orange-brown bacteria that had accumulated on the marble during decades of neglect, and he designed a stainless-steel pin to hold the replacement arm in place. Machler, using Jones’s draped left arm as a model, fashioned three different clay and plaster extremities before carving the just-right final proportions from his own block of prized Cararra.
There was no official project budget for the renovations to the cemetery area, which includes a cactus garden and the mausoleum where the Stanford family is interred. But three staff members—Jones, associate vice provost for facilities Chris Christofferson and Michael Fox, manager of technology and special projects coordinator for facilities operations—wanted to make sure the University did not neglect its heritage. They cobbled together money over five years, completing the final piece—the angel—in time for Founders’ Day last spring.
“It was funded on a shoestring and coordinated with an enormous amount of volunteer time,” Jones says. “But it’s what we think the Stanford family would have wanted.”
