Photo credit: The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
Monuments may be relics of older civilisations, like Egyptian obelisks or the triumphal arches of Rome, or they can be newly built to commemorate an event or a person, perhaps as part of a formal urban or rural landscape. Such monuments will be planned to contribute to the visual appeal of a townscape or park, so they will naturally appeal to artists.
Idealised and romantic landscapes include monuments to contrast with nature; these are often tombs, symbolising the shortness of human life.
Monuments, real and invented, feature in the work of the prolific view-painters of Venice and Rome in the eighteenth century. In all centuries, landscape artists use monuments as focus points of their compositions.
