The Elegy
Details
The story
This is the quiet corner of the ceiling. One child lies stretched out on the ground, motionless, and another stands with a hand raised to its face. In the tradition De Wit drew on, the elegy was the poem of mourning, a lament for someone who had died. That explains the stack of logs rising behind the group, a funeral pyre of the kind on which the Greeks and Romans burned their dead.
