In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dramatic social, political and artistic changes swept across Italy. These changes found expression in some of the most remarkable sculpture ever made. In the cemeteries that were constructed all over the Italian peninsula, starting from the Napoleonic period, funerary sculpture by renowned contemporary artists developed from relatively conventional Neoclassicism through ever more astonishing forms of Realism, informed in turn by Symbolism and by Art Deco.
The emotional charge of this sometimes symbolic but more commonly hyper-realistic, often erotic and always arresting work is caught in this collection of more than 450 specially taken photographs with a scholarly text by Sandra Berresford analysing the iconographic, cultural and art historical background to the works.
Additional essays by Fred S.Licht and James Stevens Curl introduce the funerary art tradition and the European cemetery movement, while Francesca Bregoli and Franco Sborgi discuss the parallel Jewish tradition and the complex iconography of angels. This is the first study in English of this important collection of artworks, and the most comprehensive in any language. It also includes an extensive bibliography and a gazetteer of Italian cemeteries to visit.
