Who knew death could be so elegantly ornate?

I saw these photos several years ago and recently ran across them again. Seeing them the second time leaves me just as bewildered and bling-struck as the first time I saw them. For me, I am astonished by the beauty but I am more confounded at how people of that time could be so utterly poverty stricken while the church was bedazzling corpses with fortunes in jewels. It is macabre on so many levels. According to the very fine website, Atlas Obscura, these jeweled skeletons were found in catacombs beneath Rome in 1578, and were believed to be Christian martyrs. Its not clear that they were. But churches had lost their saint relics in the Reformation and these served as an advantageous replacement. The  identities of most the skeletons were unknown.  Churches that received skeletons then spent years covering their bony strangers…