Cemeteries as Museums, Museums as Cemeteries: Exhibiting Funerary Sculpture in Spain, ca. 1880 to the present

Abstract

The nineteenth-century idea that cemeteries are 'museums of sculpture’ has, today, become a cliché, and is often used as away of packaging a visitor experience which is otherwise difficult to classify or sell. This paper critically examines some of the interrelations and differences between these two institutions - cemetery and museum - as spaces for the exhibition of figurative sculpture in Spain, focusing on the powerful fact that cemeteries are repositories not only of sculpted bodies, but of dead ones. I discuss how funerary sculpture was adapted and re-worked for exhibition in conventional art spaces, and consider the corresponding shifts in meaning. I also examine examples of highly 'mobile' works of funerary sculpture, which have been repeatedly de-contextualised and re-contextualised as they have moved between cemeteries, museums and art exhibitions, gaining or losing real bodies in the process.