ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the work of those who 'just' published monuments - indefinitely and indiscriminately - as did the Society of Antiquaries in the first 100 years following their revival in the first decade of the eighteenth century. It argues that, as well as challenging stereotypes of the antiquary as acquisitive and backward-looking, the quintessentially antiquarian activity of publishing monuments had a considerable bearing on aesthetics. Antiquarianism should be viewed as an aesthetics in its own right and one that defies existing labels. An improvement, perhaps, on written descriptions, the plates in Vetusta Monumenta do not seek to seduce the viewer into a trompe l'œil effect. Vetusta Monumenta began publication in 1747 as the first of a series of volumes. Publishing monuments only made sense if open-endedly launched into the future, for the ultimate goal was to approximate antiquity. Monuments did not originate necessarily in the literature of the ancients, nor were they the synecdoche of power.
