ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the significance of public monuments as embodiments of human values and how monuments establish a continuity with the past and with the rest of creation. It explains that the urge to monumentality was born more than 100,000 years ago with the human species’ achievement of anatomical modernity. The book demonstrates how that psychology explains the divide between the self as its own creation and the self as created and sustained by society. It focuses on the city of Venice as a monument whose survival is threatened by the elements as well as by improper restoration techniques. The book explains how the Russian autocracy used statues to present its changing imagery in the late 19th and 20th centuries. It addresses the dialectics of the social, economic, and political burdens that come along with that interaction.
