This thesis explores Spanish cemetery sculpture during the Bourbon Restoration. It looks closely at works which have been marginalised from sculpture studies for their religious, funerary and Spanish character, and for the period in which they were produced. Arguing that cemetery sculpture was central to sculptural development in Spain, rather than tangential to it, it explores how funerary works overlapped and intersected with exhibition sculpture, public monuments, anatomical sculpture and other genres. It uncovers new intermedial connections with theatre, literature, print culture and painting, and shows how Spanish cemetery sculpture was integrated in a cross-border, bourgeois cosmopolitanism, even as it looked to traditional motifs and its own golden ages for inspiration.
This study examines the specificity of funerary sculpture in this period, in Spain and more widely, by thinking about the multiple bodies which converge at the tomb: sculpted, dead, and living; earthly and heavenly; present and absent; and visible and invisible. It delves into those relationships between artists, patrons, viewers and the deceased which are particular to the cemetery genre, and explores the impact of the fundamental distinction between self-memorialisation and commemorating illustrious dead men. By examining gender representation, religious orthodoxy, class tension, and theatrical associations, it reveals how the genre was considered inherently problematic; and explores how sculptors, patrons and critics navigated this moral minefield differently.
The thesis consists of five chapters, each of them a case study. It focuses on technically and conceptually sophisticated sculptures created by Mariano Benlliure, Julio Antonio, Rosendo Nobas, Antonio Pujol, Enric Clarasó and Quintín de Torre.
