Silent Rhetoric of the Body

This illuminating and original book opens up a neglected corner of eighteenth-century art – the funeral monument. In the last forty years, studies of the satires of early and mid-eighteenth-century England have multiplied, whereas its funerary monuments have been neglected by all but a small group of enthusiasts. This book redresses the balance and demonstrates that tombs and inscriptions are of manifest worth to the student of eighteenth-century English value systems, providing as they do an archaeology of ideal types. Across the genres of art, there is, perhaps, no better register of shifting notions of correct behaviour, in life and in death. Matthew Craske looks closely for the first time at tomb sculptures in their social context. He discusses a large number of monuments by many different sculptors, all with a knowledge of the person commemorated and the circumstances behind the commission, resulting in a work of great scholarly density and originality that probes the motives behind the imagery and the epitaph. He begins by analysing the relationship of tomb designs to the changing and diverse culture of death in the eighteenth century, and then explains conditions of production and the shifting dynamics of the market, concluding with a masterly analysis of the motivations of those who commissioned monuments, including women and ranging from aristocrats to merchants and professional people. This handsomely illustrated book presents a unique history of death, fame, example and attitudes to loss, as well as a remarkable art history.