Title: Saving graces
First published: 1995
Description: Many cemeteries in Europe are highly maintained sculpture gardens strewn with shockingly sensual sculptures of women. They are perfect, idealized creations - young, gorgeous, elaborately posed, and beautifully sculpted. Often naked or barely clothed, and consumed with grief for the dead, they are both a stunning and a compelling presence among the other gravestones. David Robinson's exquisite photographs reveal the angelic beauty and mystery of these lifelike sculptures.

In her foreword, Joyce Carol Oates explores the many implications of these grief-stricken, extremely provocative female figures - our obsession with mortality, the rituals of mourning, the conflation of death and the erotic, the perfect female form as a male fantasy and a symbol of status.
Subjects: Women in art, Sculpture, European, Sepulchral monuments, European Sculpture, Symbolism in art, Sculpture, modern, New York Times reviewed, Modern Sculpture
Places: Europe
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: NB1859 .R63 1995