Death
In 1942, during a visit by her close friend, Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, Modotti died from heart failure in Mexico City under what is viewed by some as suspicious circumstances. After hearing about her death, Diego Rivera suggested that Vidali had orchestrated it. Modotti may have 'known too much' about Vidali's activities in Spain, which included a rumoured 400 executions. An autopsy showed that she died of natural causes, namely congestive heart failure. Her grave is located within the vast Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City. Poet Pablo Neruda composed Tina Modotti's epitaph, part of which can also be found on her tombstone, which also includes a relief portrait of Modotti by engraver Leopoldo Méndez:
- Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
- bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
- combined with steel and wire and
- pollen to make up your firm
- and delicate being.
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“‘Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish never surrenders. To expire, mild-eyed, in one’s bed, transcends the death of Epaminondas.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)