ABSTRACT
The power of statues to serve as commemorative monuments surely depends above all on their publicness. Statues have sometimes been set up to honour prominent individuals in private settings, but such works inevitably and quite deliberately refer to statues set up in the public sphere; such statues are also exclusively to be found in the houses of the rich and powerful, who enjoy both the wealth to afford them and the space to display them. If even such an ostensibly private statue can be thought of as a public monument, it is worth interrogating more deeply the nature of the relationship between statues and publicness for those that stand in settings to which a larger community has access. The erection of statues in public spaces weaves the figures they represent into a narrative about who the public is, how the public sees itself and what its shared values are.
