Narrating Monumentality: The Piazza Navona Obelisk

Abstract

The Egyptian obelisks at Rome are monuments par excellence: as sites of memory they have been distinctive, but over time also prone to appropriation and recontextualization. Owing to their bulk, ancient (and modern) attempts to transport them have attracted much attention. This paper begins with a biography of the obelisk now at Piazza Navona and proceeds to a broader consideration of the qualities that constitute a monument. In particular, its physical transportation is examined in relation to transmuta-tions of context and audience in time and space. The social processes within which they have been implicated suggest reconsideration of the nature, and indeed direction, of biographic narrative. To what extent can narrative, in this biographic form, adequately represent monumentality?