Revisiting the Monument: Fifty Years Since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture

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Edited by Ann Adams and Jessica Barker

• Ann Adams
• Jessica Barker
• James Alexander Cameron
• Martha Dunkelman
• Shirin Fozi
• Sanne Frequin
• Robert Marcoux
• Susie Nash
• Geoffrey Nuttall
• Luca Palozzi
• Matthew Reeves
• Kim Woods

Revisiting the Monument pays tribute to Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, which remains the most influential and comprehensive survey of funerary monuments to be published in the last fifty years. While Panofsky wrote a single, epic narrative charting the development of tomb sculpture from Antiquity to the Baroque, Revisiting the Monument is more akin to a series of short stories. The contributors are art historians with a keen interest in funerary monuments, whose research extends from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries and covers England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal. Each chapter represents a cross-section through the history of tomb sculpture, examining a particular tomb, group of tombs, or theme with wider implications for our understanding of funerary monuments. The methodologies extend close iconographic study of monuments to place them in their historic and social contexts, as well as in dialogue with other media. Recurring themes include monuments as sites of liminality, the reception and visibility of tombs, the relationship between corpse and monument, and the symbolic significance of materials. This collection of essays examines the great contribution made by Tomb Sculpture to the field, extends the debates begun by Panofsky, and suggests new avenues of enquiry within a rapidly expanding field.