Italian Memorial Sculpture 1820-1940

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.
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.

Sandra Berresford was educated at the Courtauld Institute and now teaches in Italy. She specialises in 19th- and 20th-century Italian art and has published on Leonardo Bistolfi, Ettore Ferrari and the Italian background to Medardo Rosso.Robert Freidus is a graduate of the Wharton School. He ran a gallery in New York's Soho, specialising in sculpture and photography and is now working on a collection of English New Sculpture.Robert W. Fichter is Professor of Art at Florida State University. His photography has appeared in numerous exhibitions and books.Francesca Bregoli received her PhD in History at the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation entitled 'Mediterranean Enlightenment: Jewish Acculturation in Livorno, 1737–1790' (2007). She received a Laurea in Oriental Languages from the University of Venice, Italy (1998) and a Masters in Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (2001). Her research interests include early modern cultural history, Jewish-Christian relations, and the history of the book. She published the Italian annotated translation of the Sefer ma'aseh be-reshit by El'azar from Worms (2002) and several articles.Fred Licht was formerly professor of the History of Art at Florida State University.A distinguished writer with many books and articles to his credit, Professor Emeritus James Stevens Curl has made considerable contributions to an understanding of the Victorian era with such works as Piety Proclaimed: An Introduction to Places of Worship in Victorian England and The Victorian Celebration of Death. He has acquired an enviable international reputation for thoroughness of research, impeccable scholarship, and lucidity of style, and has not been afraid to venture into paths unfrequented by those of a more timid disposition. Starting in the early 1960s, he was one of the first serious researchers into the history of the 19th-century cemetery, and in 2000–01 edited Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins & Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824–2001, the most comprehensive monograph of any British cemetery. Now in his eighth decade, his acerbic wit, intellectual curiosity, robust views and fluency of expression remain undiminished.