Overwriting the monument tradition

Abstract

Verity Platt presented “Classicism and the Statue Crisis in the Age of Black Lives Matter” at the University of Southern California on October 28, 2020, and published “Why People Are Toppling Monuments to Racism,” Scientific American, July 3, 2020. Hallie Franks, Ann Macy Roth, Patricia Eunji Kim, and Eric Varner participated in the roundtable “Monuments and Memory” at New York University on October 29, 2020. 3. S. Drimmer, “Seeing the Bigger Picture on Public Memorials to Women,” Hyperallergic, November 27, 2020, https://hyperallergic .com/601877/. There is a certain narrative of the history of monuments that traces power from Greek and Roman antiquity to today. In this narrative, figural representation predominates, especially when it comes to monumentalizing the powerful and the dead. Figural monuments designed to memorialize a single person were often erected after that individual’s death, functioning less to mourn the deceased and more to celebrate the political world he had embodied, a practice that encodes and perpetuates systems of patriarchal and civic power. Ancient ruler-portraits of women and nonbinary people are comparatively rare; in examples where women have ruled and are monumentalized, such as Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of ancient Egypt, they adopt the visual codes of patriarchal power. Although each specific, local context reveals cultural and political differences, similar patriarchal figural monumentalizing practices have been maintained across centuries and cultures, constructing a heritage that is of particular interest today. Recent work in the field of classics has explored the resonance between nineteenth-century Confederate monuments and the robust ruler-portrait tradition from ancient Rome. This work traces a lineage from portrait