Before Peter identified the God-fearing (but non-Israelite) household of Cornelius with Jesus (Acts 10:48), a messenger of God assured the Roman centurion that his prayers and charitable acts had gone up before God as a memorial (μνημόσυνον, mnēmosynon) (Acts 10:4).[1]

After the woman with the alabaster box poured precious ointment on His head, Jesus predicted that it will be a recounted as a memorial (μνημόσυνον) to her wherever the Gospel will be proclaimed (Matthew 26:13, Mark 14:9).

That word is also the Greek root of “monument” (monere, the Latin, meaning “to remind, advise, warn”). The artifacts we Anglophones call monuments commemorate, remind, and warn. To create, behold, and contemplate a monument is to lift up in our minds the figures they commemorate. Photos of behemoth monuments that dot the former Soviet Union’s landscape convey but an inkling of their evocative power. Successor states have removed, warehoused, or destroyed some of these reminders of a dark past, lest they occasion the veneration of evil. All things being equal, however, aides to memory are beneficial.

My friend, the art historian Dr. Donald Martin Reynolds has devoted his life to studying monuments and, at Columbia University for over three decades, imparting his profound appreciation of them to generations of students. Earlier this year Routledge reissued “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark”: Public Monuments and Moral Values, an anthology of 22 scholarly essays on the monumental form which their authors originally read at two symposia Dr. Reynolds had convened. (Besides the Introduction, he also contributed Chapter 7, “The Value of Public Monuments.”) Its topics include “Arch, Column, Equestrian Statue: Three Persistent Forms of Public Monument,” “The Psychology of Public Monuments,” “Venice: Time and Conservation,” “Statues of the Tsars and the Redefinition of Russia’s Past,” “Monument to Russian Martyrs under Stalinism,” “Monumental Revisions of History in Twentieth-Century Germany,” “Eternal Celebrations in American Memorials,” and “Cathedral.”[2]

The reissued book’s title is from Proverbs 22:28. The Hebrew word for “landmark” is גְּב֣וּל (gebuhl): monuments are not only memorials, but also historical and cultural landmarks that delineate one worldview’s “turf” from another as landmarks demarcate one territory’s boundaries from another’s. Forbidden memorials tell us as much about a society as do the ones it insists upon erecting.

Dr. Reynolds, believing that we depreciate such markers at our spiritual peril[3], compiled The Remarkable Prescience of a Biblical Imperative, which tells the story of (and documents) his passion for architecture in general and monuments in particular. When he sent it to me, he gave me permission to share it. Clicking on Remarkable Prescience  will download a PDF file.

This post is an inadequate token of my appreciation of Don and his wonderful wife Nancy Zlobik Reynolds for their years of friendship and fellowship at The Shrine of the Holy Innocents in Manhattan and for having invited me to many of his conferences, not all of which, I regretfully recall, I accepted. I hope it piques the interest of many others in his rich legacy.

Notes

[1] The English “to be baptized” does not translate but merely transliterates the Greek βαπτισθῆναι, baptisthēnai. The root baptizo (from bapto) conveys the idea of identification of one thing with another to the point of merger (e.g., when white linen is dipped into a bowl of dye). “To be identified with” is better than “to be baptized.” In the River Jordan, John identified Jesus with the submissive company in Israel (Matthew 3:13-17). The reality to which the ceremony refers is key, but since churches merely pour their distinctive dogmas into the symbol “baptize,” they see little need to translate.

[2] Dr. Reynolds’s other books include Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture, Garland Publishers, 1977; Masters of American Sculpture: The Figurative Tradition from the American Renaissance to the Millennium, Abbeville Press, 1994; Monuments and Masterpieces: Histories and Views of Public Sculpture in New York City, Wiley, 1988, revised 1997; The Architecture of New York City, Wiley, 1984, revised, 1994; For Our Freedom and Yours: The Art and Life of Andrew Pitynski, Portrait of an American Master, 2015. His Introduction to 19th Century Art and Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1988 and 1992, has been translated into in several languages.

[3] In July 2020, for example, when a great hue and cry arose demanding that James Earle Fraser’s equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt be removed from the grounds of the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Reynolds appealed to the Executive Director of the National Sculpture Society to request that New York City “realize the integrity of John Russell Pope’s original plan for an Inter-Museum Promenade through Central Park thereby connecting those two great cultural institutions of international renown, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” A few months later, his account of this effort was published as “The Original Plan for the Theodore Roosevelt Monument,” Sculpture Review, Vol. 69(3), September 1, 2020, 37-41, doi/10.1177/0747528420967271.