Death and Architecture: An Introduction to Funerary and Commemorative Buildings in the Western European Tradition, with Some Consideration of Their Settings

The subjects of commemorative structures and of cemeteries have suffered a curious neglect in recent times. Yet travellers from Herodotus to Baedeker have sought out tombs and mausolea of earlier times as self-evidently significant and worth seeing. The contemporary traveller misses much if cemeteries and the architecture of death are avoided. Professor Curl is recognised as a pioneering scholar in several fields of research, not least that concerned with a celebration of death in architectural terms. In this handsome work his wisdom and compassion are brought to a subject that all too often is dismissed as unimportant: he demonstrates that in fact death has inspired some of the noblest monumental buildings ever conceived in the West, and his text is judiciously fashioned to this end. Wearing his learning lightly, he is never lugubrious, and entertains without descending to the banal. From the great monuments of antiquity to the bathos of modern disposal, his sweep is broad, his grasp of his subject is sure, and his sensitivity suggested subtly within his modest literary style. Death and Architecture will interest many people, and it is not aimed at a specialist market. After all, every creature that is born must die: death is the only certainty in life, a fact grasped in countless earlier generations, but not given much consideration today. This richly illustrated book emphasises the importance of funerary architecture in the development of architectural style. Its message rings out as clearly as the Last Trump: the tomb has been the chronicler of taste throughout all history.