But something perhaps more wonderful and powerful
appeared to me there: spacious, dark
underground rooms, where in their niches, like
upright simulacra,
empty bodies of souls go around, and with those clothes
Even now, when the breeze was seen to breathe.
On the dead muscles and on the skin
so art sweated, so it drove
out every humour, that the ancient features,
Not only their flesh, the faces retain
After a hundred years and more: Death watches them,
And in theme it seems to have missed the blows.

Ippolito Pindemonte - The Sepulchres (1807)