The artist’s former assistant discusses Freud’s passion and painting techniques with London Art Studies.

This collection of essays examines the great contribution made by Tomb Sculpture to the field, extends the debates begun by Panofsky, and suggests new avenues of enquiry within a rapidly expanding field. David Dawson reveals how Lucian Freud painted in private.

Recurring themes include monuments as sites of liminality, the reception and visibility of tombs, the relationship between corpse and monument, and the symbolic significance of materials. The methodologies extend close iconographic study of monuments to place them in their historic and social contexts, as well as in dialogue with other media. Each chapter represents a cross-section through the history of tomb sculpture, examining a particular tomb, group of tombs, or theme with wider implications for our understanding of funerary monuments. The contributors are art historians with a keen interest in funerary monuments, whose research extends from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries and covers England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal. While Panofsky wrote a single, epic narrative charting the development of tomb sculpture from Antiquity to the Baroque, Revisiting the Monument is more akin to a series of short stories. The full book is available to download in high-resolution here: Revisiting the Monument pays tribute to Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, which remains the most influential and comprehensive survey of funerary monuments to be published in the last fifty years.

Lucian Freud by David Dawson