The Grave in Rome
She died in December 1918 at the Tempio Hermione in Berlin-Lichtenrade, in the last weeks of the empire whose founding Kaiser she had painted as a skeleton. She was not buried there. She was taken to Rome — the city she had lived in for years, and the one place her career had been possible on her own terms — and laid beside Konrad Telmann, who had died there in 1897.
The stone is flat in the grass in the Protestant Cemetery, the burial ground of foreigners in Rome that also holds Keats and Shelley. A bronze relief of Telmann, bearded, is set into the marble above the inscription; her name follows his, and the lettering has weathered to the edge of legibility.
