Monuments

Objects that prompt a viewer to recall or otherwise think of a person, a group, a culture, an event, or a historical period. Monuments exist largely outside traditional art markets.

The word “monument” is derived from the Latin monumentum, which is a noun variant of the verb monere, which carries several meanings: to remind, to advise, to warn, to instruct. A monument, strictly speaking, may be defined as an object erected with such an intent: the Great Pyramid at Giza (c. 2570 B.C.E.), for example, was constructed so as to remind and advise its viewers of the political power of Pharaoh Khufu. So, too, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial (1982) in Washington, D.C., lists the names of over 58,000 Americans killed or missing in Vietnam as a form of both remembrance and admonition. Yet, a monument may also be defined as anything that produces remembrance, no matter its creator’s intent. The World Monuments Fund identifies what it considers the 100 most endangered monument sites, to which were added in 2002 the towns of Bagamoyo, Tanzania, and Falmouth, Jamaica, and the archaeological site at Wisloka, Poland, none of which were originally built as monuments.

This second type of monument is referred to today as a historical monument; the first type is called, somewhat redundantly, a commemorative monument. The purpose of this distinction, which is observed throughout art history and related fields, is to make clear that the label “monument” can be affixed to an object by either an object’s creator or an object’s viewer.

Even within the first type—an object intentionally created to commemorate something—a monument can take on a bewildering number of shapes. Monuments on and near the Mall in Washington, D.C., offer just a small sample: a monument may tend toward abstraction, whether the modern abstraction of Lin’s memorial or the more traditional abstraction of the Washington Monument obelisk (1854–1884). Figurative sculpture is central to the Jefferson Memorial (1938–1943) and the Lincoln Memorial (1915–1922), yet, so, too, are neoclassical architectural spaces. Words—whether simple plaques or extensive reproductions of speeches or writings—are also integral to these monuments. Throughout history, monuments have been marked by a similar heterogeneity: portrait busts, crosses, fountains, full-length figures, tomb markers, triumphal arches, buildings, bridges, plazas, and reliquaries have all served as monuments.

The relationship of the monument to trade or commerce is equally ambiguous. Art historian Penelope Curtis has defined a monument as “a complicated mixture of form, subject, site, scale, author, and public,” but she emphasizes the importance of a monument’s location as integral to its meaning. The monuments erected and destroyed over a century at Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, Germany, have derived significant meaning from their location at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel Rivers. Likewise, the Arras Memorial (1925–1928) by Edwin Lutyens cannot be separated from the many markers at the Faubourg d’Amiens cemetery commemorating those killed in World War I. Because they often lose meaning if moved and because they rarely double as art objects—objects that are created or viewed primarily for aesthetic pleasure—monuments almost never enter traditional art markets. Instead, when they are moved or change ownership, they tend to do so within a gift economy. The most famous public monument of the nineteenth century, the Statue of Liberty—formally Liberty Enlightening the World (begun 1875, dedicated 1886), by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi—was a gift, funded by the French and built in France, shipped to the United States, and erected in New York Harbor through subscriptions collected from Americans.

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The Great Wall of China—completed in 1644—was built by successive dynasties to defend the kingdom and its wealth against nomadic tribesmen of northern and central Asia. This photo shows President Richard M. Nixon touring the wall on his historic 1972 visit to the communist country. (Nixon Presidential Materials Staff/National Archives, College Park, Maryland)

Despite the vast numbers of monuments created throughout history, there exists a surprising consensus on the trajectory of the history of monuments. From antiquity to the eighteenth century, most monuments were constructed to glorify an individual, almost always a ruler. Typical examples are the ancient Egyptian pyramids; the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (c. 350 B.C.E.); Trajan’s Column (106–113 C.E.) in Rome; and the Capua Gate (1234–1240) outside Capua, Italy, which incorporates a figure of Frederick II, who commissioned the triumphal arch. Renaissance and Baroque monuments maintained the same focus, but did so in more allusive ways. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers (1648–1651) in Rome praises the reach of papal power through a coat of arms and a dove—the papacy—that dominates the Danube, Ganges, Plate, and Nile Rivers, all represented in human forms. During the eighteenth century, concurrent with the Enlightenment, monuments to so-called men of genius grew in number: Louis-François Roubiliac’s George Frideric Handel (1738) and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s Volataire Nude (1776) represent this new tendency.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The nineteenth century, however, revolutionized the monument. In the second half of the century, monuments began, through commemoration of some event, person, or persons, to express a modern Western nationalism. During this period—from roughly 1875 to 1914—a tremendous number of monuments in Europe and America were commissioned and built, so many that the period is typically labeled one of “statuemania.” Fifty monuments rose in Paris between 1900 and 1910 alone. The subjects depicted during this period were tremendously diverse, from Queen Victoria (e.g., in London [1901–1911] by Thomas Brock), to those killed in the U.S. Civil War (e.g., in Cleveland [1894] by Levi Tucker Scofield), to figures like Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo, but all were granted a sense of heroism and glory.

Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1884–1886) is often identified as the beginning of the end for the traditional monument: Rodin powerfully refused to make his subjects heroic, and he likewise pushed the form away from place-based remembrance toward an art object. But the monuments of fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia contributed as much to the form’s demise as Rodin: all three countries firmly associated the monument with the monumental, with a size and bulk largely unseen since the pyramids. Whereas Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich developed a sculptural abstraction, both Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin cultivated a monumentalism centered on depictions of themselves. All three yoked overwhelming size to oppressive political power. Although imposing war monuments to those killed in World War I were built beyond the battlefields—most notably the Royal Artillery Monument (1921–1925) in London by Charles Sargeant Jagger—World War II monuments were often only names appended to earlier war memorials.

In recent decades—especially after Lin’s evocative slabs of black granite—abstraction has become an increasingly favored form, as in the Oklahoma City National Memorial (2000) by Butzer Design Partnership, which consists of 168 bronze chairs intended to recall those killed in the bombing of the city’s federal building in 1995. Today, monuments in the West are erected almost exclusively to commemorate grief or tragedy.

J.E. Luebering

See also: British Empire; Greek City-States; Roman Empire; United States.

Bibliography

Choay, Françoise. The Invention of the Historic Monument. Translated by Lauren M. O’Connell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Curtis, Penelope. Sculpture 1900–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Levinson, Sanford. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Michalski, Sergiusz. Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–1997. London: Reaktion, 1998.