Joan Fontbernat

Joan Fontbernat was a sculptor who worked in Barcelona in the early twentieth century, in the funerary workshop of Jaume Barba, whose daughter he married. Almost everything known about him concerns one work: El Petó de la Mort (The Kiss of Death), the 1930 marble on the Llaudet family tomb in the Cementiri de Poblenou, in which a winged skeleton kisses the forehead of a dying young man.

The attribution question

The monument carries the name of Jaume Barba, and it is usually catalogued under his name or his workshop's. Catalan historians, however, have suggested that the design was Fontbernat's. The argument is circumstantial but reasonable: Barba was by then an elderly man, around seventy, Fontbernat is described as the most skilled sculptor in the studio, and a workshop signature on a tomb did not necessarily identify the hand that modeled it. No document has yet settled the question, so the work is best described as from Barba's workshop, possibly designed by Fontbernat.

The work

El Petó de la Mort marks the grave of Josep Llaudet Soler, a young member of a Barcelona textile family. The youth sinks back, nude and limp; Death, a full skeleton with great feathered wings, holds him from behind and leans down to press its teeth to his brow. Lines by the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer on the base speak of the young heart failing and feeling the kiss of death. Catalan sources link the composition to a funerary relief by the Italian sculptor Lorenzo Maroni in Milan's Cimitero Monumentale, a reminder of how closely Barcelona's monument makers followed Italian cemetery art.

Where to see it

The sculpture stands in the Poblenou Cemetery in Barcelona, which is open to visitors. For more images of death as a lover, see The Kiss of Death statue and the collections Death in Art and Danse Macabre.