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A tall tapering four-sided pillar with a pyramidal top.
Also known as: Memorial obelisk, Tapering pillar on a grave, Needle monument
A tapering shaft topped by a small pyramid. Egyptian in origin, adopted wholesale by nineteenth-century monument masons during the Egyptian Revival, and popular for practical reasons as much as symbolic ones: it is tall, impressive and comparatively cheap.
A tall four-sided pillar tapering upward to a small pyramid at the top, used as a monument form in cemeteries from the late eighteenth century onward.
Contexts: History
Ancient Egyptian in origin and adopted in Europe and North America during the Egyptian Revival, which followed the Napoleonic expedition and the wider nineteenth-century enthusiasm for Egyptian antiquity.
From the late 18th century
Its popularity owed a good deal to economics: an obelisk gives considerable height and presence for comparatively little stone and carving, which suited a growing middle-class monument market.
A useful corrective to symbolic readings of the form. Many obelisks are there because they were affordable and impressive.
A tall narrow four-sided stone shaft that tapers as it rises, topped by a short pyramid, standing on a square base.
Both are monument forms rather than applied motifs.