Forest Lawn Glendale

After the San Diego Temple, we still had some time before we could head to my G-ma's (because she was in church). We needed another Sunday activity, so we decided to go to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. It's a 100-year old, 300 acre cemetery that you absolutely must stop by and visit if you're in the area. I've been there several times with my family (my great-grandparents Frederick and Hattie Murset are buried there) but it had been a long time.



We didn't know where their graves are (turns out you can look up their location on their website here) and since there's 250,000 people buried there, we decided to just go see the artwork. The founder of Forest Lawn believed strongly that death was just the beginning of a new joyous life and strove to make this a place of beauty and refuge. There are about 1,500 statues there, and 10% of them are reproductions of famous works of art. He was a great patron of the arts and was so respected by the Italians that they allowed him to have casts made of seven of Michelangelo's greatest sculptures, and the resulting exact replicas--done in Carrera marble--are in the Great Mausoleum. Actually, there are six in the Mausoleum and a replica of David is out on the grounds.

 

I have always had a great love for fine art (I have been obsessed with Michelangelo for 15+ years) but have always lived in rural small towns where art is hard to come by (and then it's folksy). I don't know if I'll ever get to go to Florence, but in the Memorial Court of Honor, it's almost like being there. So perhaps I can be forgiven for being nearly struck down with awe.

 Visitors are not allowed to take pictures inside, so I got these images from Google of the originals:

 Moses is right there as you walk in, looking like a Greek god (well, he does). The statue is nearly 8 feet high and is just magnificent. The horns on his head came from a misinterpretation of the rays of light described in the Bible--they translated to mean "horns" in Italian. 

 Moving down the hallway...

 

 At the end of the hallway is this angel statue (not by Michelangelo). The stone pedestal now has Elizabeth Taylor's name inscribed on it in gold. She is actually buried elsewhere in the building in a private area, but her family purchased that spot for a public memorial. Michael Jackson is also in there somewhere on a lower, private floor. Walt Disney has a spot outside--in fact the whole place is packed with Hollywood stars. The people at Forest Lawn discourage celebrity tomb seeking, though.

 

There are little alcoves all throughout the building like this, with people buried in the walls. It's so beautiful that you hardly stop to think about how creepy that is.

 

 This is what the inside of the Memorial Court of Honor looks like. I doubt if there's a more beautiful room anywhere. Every other time I've been there, you have to go in a group every half hour, and then there's an unveiling of the stained glass window on the far wall. There are chairs set up in the middle of the room. This time, they just let us right in, and there was no one else there. It was perfectly quiet and it just felt like we were on holy ground, is all I can tell you.

 This stained glass window was created for the Mausoleum in Italy of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper fresco, using his original sketches. It is massive!

View from the opposite direction

Michelangelo's Dawn and Dusk and Day and Night statues are along one wall (minus the statues of Lorenzo and Guiliano Medici, these photos are from Florence)

His Pieta, which he completed when he was 24 and currently resides in the Vatican behind bulletproof glass. It has always been my favorite statue. Absolutely incredible.

 Madonna de Brugge

 

 Madonna de Medici. I really loved this one because it's unfinished, and you can still see the chisel marks. (The men on the Day and Night and Dawn and Dusk statues are unfinished, too.)

Anyway, *sigh*. It was a very moving experience. European art is lost on a lot of Americans, but not on me. In fact there was more to see!

Mark and Luke did not last inside as long as Madelyn and I did. We found them milling about outside waiting for us.

(There's Louis L'Amour...)

 

We went further up the hill to the Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection There's a chapel with huge vaulted ceilings, and then behind that is a building that houses the largest canvas oil painting in the world by Jan Styka. The Crucifixion is 195 feet long and 45 feet high (!). There's a special auditorium and presentation that tells the story and unveils it little by little that plays every hour, but we didn't stay to go to it. I've seen it before, though. There's also a huge painting of The Resurrection by Robert Clark.

We did go next door to the Museum, though.

They have the most amazing original stained glass panes--some dating back to the 1200s. 

 

 The armor was a replica, though. I think the boys would like to have a suit of their own.

Lots of bronze statues, a moai from Easter Island (which I somehow missed)

And William-Adolphe Bouguereau's original Song of the Angels is there on display. He's one of my favorite painters.

Oh, and a replica of the Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti, gilded with gold.

This is one of several churches on the property that are modeled after famous European ones. This is the Church of the Recessional, which is a reproduction of the parish church of St. Margaret in Rottindean, England, where Rudyard Kipling used to go.

Then we walked back out to the parking lot and had an, "Oh yeah, we're in Los Angeles" moment.

I don't know how on earth I missed it before, but there's a reproduction of Edvard Eriksen's The Little Mermaid statue (in Copenhagen) just inside the gates at the entrance of Forest Lawn.

 

 Mark pulled over and I went running out to go look at it. It's such a beautiful and iconic statue--I've always wanted to see it.

There are a lot of people who poke fun at Forest Lawn for being too grandiose and over the top. But darned if I wouldn't prefer to be buried in a place like that over my local cemetery.