An Eagerness for Heaven: The Celebration of Death, the Transito of Bishop Alpheran de Bussan and the use of the Castrum Doloris in Mdina Cathedral Christian Attard Keywords: Death, Cappella Ardente, Castrum Doloris, agonia, funeral Mass, Lorenzo Gafà, Francesco Zahra, Mdina. It has been convincingly argued that the Baroque managed to blur many distinctions. 1 In the typical Baroque space or work of art, polarities are swept aside and seemingly irreconcilable and staunch opposites fuse to the point that, transcendent and mundane, nature and artiice, sensual and spiritual, life and death, simply cease to hold their ground and low into each other in a constant lux. Some of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s (1598–1680) works would perhaps make for the most cogent examples of this idea but, in reality, this was a characteristic that could well be found across the Baroque spectrum. In Baroque, the secular and the sacred, likewise, lose their speciicity and somehow manage to coalesce; reality would become a conglomeration of symbols which, if properly decoded, may hint at a transcendent, if hidden, reality. Many of the sumptuous funerary monuments made in honour of the Grand Masters for example, could be read, very plausibly, within this key. From that of Nicolas Cotoner to that of Pinto, all are heavily emblematic and what, in the irst instance, seems naturalistic, may, on closer inspection, reveal itself to be alluding to something else. The nursing mother on Grand Master Perellos’s tomb is only just one typical example (Illustration 1). Of course, it was the classical world that would furnish most of these symbols 1 See, for example, Martin 1977.