The institution of the pantheon has come a long way from its classical origins. Invented to describe a temple dedicated to many deities, the term later became so far removed from its original meaning, that by the twentieth century, it has been able to exist independently of any architectural and sculptural monument. This collection of essays is the first to trace the transformation of the monumental idea of the pantheon from its origins in Greek and Roman antiquity to its later appearance as a means of commemorating and enshrining the ideals of national identity and statehood. Illuminating the emergence of the pantheon in a range of different cultures and periods by exploring its different manifestations and implementations, the essays open new historical perspectives on the formation of national and civic identities.

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century's greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), though conventionally known as a 'painter of light', returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation and tragedy. In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure - one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment - Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative. Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist's paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright's deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history and mortality. In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain's most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The institution of the pantheon has come a long way from its classical origins. Invented to describe a temple dedicated to many deities, the term later became so far removed from its original meaning, that by the twentieth century, it has been able to exist independently of any architectural and sculptural monument. This collection of essays is the first to trace the transformation of the monumental idea of the pantheon from its origins in Greek and Roman antiquity to its later appearance as a means of commemorating and enshrining the ideals of national identity and statehood. Illuminating the emergence of the pantheon in a range of different cultures and periods by exploring its different manifestations and implementations, the essays open new historical perspectives on the formation of national and civic identities.

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.