Cemetery Architecture & Monument Styles
Cemeteries are a vast treasure trove of art and architecture. It would take many hours of strolling around city to find the number of styles of architecture that one can find in a short walk in one of city’ larger cemeteries.
Up until the Reformation in the sixteenth century, most cemeteries consisted primarily of randomly placed headstones. Wealthy folks purchased their way into being buried within the walls and floors of their church. But a series of edicts and a slow down of church construction during the Reformation essentially put an end to burial within the church. Moneyed types started looking outside the walls of the church to erect a suitable memorial to themselves and their families. Modest tombs and monuments slowly began to find their way into formerly stark churchyards and city cemeteries. However, in city most folks were still tossed into a common grave and sprinkled with a dusting of lime. That all changed in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Pere-Lachaise with its vast landscaped expanses began to be developed. Pere-Lachaise and others that followed became a new architectural frontier for city’ architects, sculptors, designers and builders.
Most major architectural styles are represented in city’ larger cemeteries in the form of mausoleums, chapels and monuments. As a rule of thumb, the older the cemetery the more diverse the architectural style.
The early Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci was the first to identify the Western Hemisphere as a new continent rather than part of Asia. Honduras Map Tourist Attractions In 1507, a German mapmaker designated the region he had explored as Country. (Brown Brothers, Sterling, Pennsylvania) When Juanoto Berardi died in 1495, Vespucci took over the Medici operations in Seville. From this post, he outfitted Christopher Columbus’s third voyage to the New World. It was around this time that Vespucci went to sea for the first time, and the merchant navigator became embroiled in controversy shortly thereafter. In 1499, Vespucci helped to finance and accompanied Alonso de Ojeda’s expedition to the Indies, but he got off the ship in Hispaniola and returned to Seville ahead of Ojeda. Once in Seville, Vespucci wrote about the voyage as if Ojeda were not even present. His account garnered him an appointment to accompany Gon§alo Coelho of Portugal in his exploration of Brazil.
