Gravestones for All People

As with the rest of architecture, funerary architecture experienced a "battle of the styles" in the nineteenth century, with Gothic, Roman, Egyptian, Romanesque, Renaissance, and other revival styles creating an eclectic assemblage. In this way, an ordinary American with enough money could create a monument whose very material facts - granite, quarried and dressed - spoke to the person as an enduring monument.

Great pyramids have been erected throughout Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, Canova, the great eighteenth-century artist, is buried in a pyramid, which, in turn, follows earlier precedents going back to the first acts of Egyptomania in Rome, where one can find pyramid tombs. The association is about permanence, mystery, power, and lucre, rather than the worship of Ra, the Egyptian sun god, or provisioning the pharaoh on his voyage through the afterlife.