The silent rhetoric of the body : a history of monumental sculpture and commemorative art in England, 1720-1770 /
Matthew Craske.
- xiii, 528 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 496-514) and index.
Introduction -- A new theatre of death and commemoration -- The decline of heraldry and the rise of the trophy and the 'image' -- Roubiliac and the presentation of the military image -- Reform : the rise of a polite, commercial and cosmopolitan culture -- The 'silent rhetoric' of Rysbrack's noble masculine bodies -- Counter-reformation : 'Sculpture waves her hand' to produce a new rhetoric -- Post-reform : the fruition of nationalist stratagems -- Pillars of Absalom -- Gratitude and legitimation -- Monumental nostalgia : the politics of dynastic discontinuities and domestic tragedies -- Gratitude and grief : feminine donor figures -- Communities of matronal and maiden virtue -- Male bereavement -- 'A humbler stone' : monuments to entrepreneurs and merchants -- The professional pillars of state : monuments to the great office holders of the church and judiciary.
"This illuminating and original book is the first to examine eighteenth-century British funeral monuments in their social, as well as their artistic, context, looking not only at the sculptors who created the monuments, but also the people who commissioned them and the people they commemorated. Matthew Craske begins by analyzing the relationship of tomb designs to the changing and diverse culture of death in eighteenth-century England, and then explains conditions of production and the shifting dynamics of the market. He concludes with a masterly analysis of the motivations of the people who commissioned monuments, from aristocrats to merchants and professional people."--Publisher description.