One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic 9780300150223

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One True Theory & the Quest for an American Aesthetic

One True Theory & the Quest for an American Aesthetic Martha Banta

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2007 by Martha Banta. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Postscript Electra by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Banta, Martha. One true theory & the quest for an American aesthetic / Martha Banta. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-12297-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics, American.  2. Arts—United States.  I. Title. II. Title: One true theory and the quest for an American aesthetic. III. Title: 1 true theory & the quest for an American aesthetic. BH221.U5B36  2007 700.973'09034—dc22 2007012623 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, introduction to Nature (1836) It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. —Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species (1859) A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of applicability. All my attempts, however, to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge [of radiation energy] failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built. —Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes” (1947)

Contents

Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  xiii Part One. An American Aesthetic and Its Travails   1 The Burning Question  1 Measuring Up to Veblenism  7 Lagging Arts/Advancing Sciences  11 The Economics of Cultural Deficit  14 Angers of Influence  21 Technics, Technics!  24 Nature, God, Art, Science  28 God’s Time/Government Time  30 Raw, Ripe, Rot  36 Transitions without Resolutions  41 Anxieties of Modernity  47 Case Studies: Adaptations to Veblenism  50 “The Normal Man”  54

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Contents Part Two. Capitol of Best Intentions   58 The Perfect Republic: Comparative Perspectives  58

Creation Ab Ova: How Washington, D.C. Came About (1783–1790)  64 The Southern Factor  66 Celebratory Histories: Old and New Style  70 Republican Virtue on Display  75 Waiting for Greatness to Happen (1820–1860)  81 From a National Aesthetic to Nationalist Art  88 The Washington Problem  93 Reacting to Rome et al.  100 A History of One’s Choosing  108 Montgomery Meigs and the Remaking of Washington, D.C.  115 America’s “Freedom”/ Venice’s “Justice”  120 The New Washington, D.C.  129 The White City  136 The Unbearable Lightness of the Void  140 Aesthetics of Death: The Mall and Beyond  145 Washington by Moonlight  160 Paraphrases of the Ideal/Allegories of the Real  165 Part Three. Aesthetic Lives: The Literary Approach   177 Beyond the Terrace  177 Math and Emotion  178 Bifurcated Minds  182 Pride of Knowledge  184



Contents Costs of Knowing  186 Theories Incarnate/Forms Divine  190 Les Objets d’Art  196 Aesthetics of Fellowship  202 Create, Decay, and Destroy  206 Fatal Muses  212 Rivals to the Death  216 Piercing the Wall  220 Notes  229 Index  302

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It was almost twenty years ago that I came across a footnote in Richard Brodhead’s The School of Hawthorne that caused me to think, “Perhaps there’s an essay in this!” Other matters intervened until the moment I pulled out a large carton packed with photocopies of the engraved reproductions cited by Brodhead that had appeared in the Century from the 1880s to the early 1900s, concurrent with essays that hoped to elevate American literature to the heights of esteem enjoyed by Old Master painters. In my mind I thank, once again, Linda Lohn. While completing her UCLA doctoral dissertation, she had also served me well as my research assistant in assiduously gathering, filing, and annotating this material. Because of her careful work I was able to pick up where I had long ago left off—now free to begin writing a book-length study (not an essay) inspired in part by this cache of dusty copies. It can be a wonderment to look back, as I do now, to consider the other, often strange loops and turns that take one from Point A, with the inception of an idea, to that point at which a book finally emerges. Thus it is that I, in no particular order (since there was at first no precise sequence in this process), remember with gratitude the people, the events, and the institutions that have helped me on my way. Conversations with Daniel Peck about his own research into relationships melding antebellum landscape painting, literary works, and the role played by the Crayon opened up possibilities for my endeavor. The ardent constituents who enlivened my graduate seminar on the politics, culture, and creation of Washington, D.C. made their own contributions. The dense attention that Gregory Jackson gave to his penetrating readings of early drafts gave me a keen sense of effective strategies for argument. There was the happy occasion of Nina Baym’s retirement celebration. I delivered a paper sampling central themes

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that grew into the article “Raw, Ripe, Rot: Nineteenth-Century Pathologies of the American Aesthetic,” which later appeared in a special issue of American Literary History (17, no. 4 [2005]: 666–86). Financial aid for my research was supplied by UCLA Academic Research Grants. The good folk of Readers’ Services at the Huntington Library aided me, as ever they do, in my research. Not to be overlooked are the judicious comments offered by the anonymous readers of my manuscript for the Yale University Press. I am particularly appreciative of the steady support and sound advice I had from John Kulka, my editor at the press. Together with his able staff, he was fully engaged in smoothing the way of this somewhat unorthodox project. Finally, I think back upon two events and their initiators that were unlikely sources of energy for a book that surveys the twists and turns taken by nineteenthcentury American Art Thoughts. I thank Mino Vianello who, out of the blue, invited me to present a paper at the 2003 Thorstein Veblen conference held in Bevagna, Italy. That a professor from the splendidly titled Dipartimento di Contabilità Nazionale e Analise dei Processi Sociali of the Università degli Studi di Roma saw fit to ask a literary type like myself to make such a contribution was not only a surprise, it proved the catalyst I needed to pursue relationships between humanistic concerns and traditions of scientific inquiry. I also wish to express my continuing gratitude to Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, my mentor while I was a visiting professor in 2002 at the (also elegantly titled) Dipartimento di Studi Anglo-Americani of the Università Ca’Foscari di Venezia. A fellow Jamesian and true friend, Rosella was the means by which I was given the chance to climb the staircase to the upper floors of the Palazzo Leporelli (née Palazzo Barbaro) of James’s The Golden Bowl—an ascent that figures as the conclusion of the journey undertaken by this book. Thus I give sincere thanks to all who furnished some of the traces (or, to use the term I take into my discussion, the palimpsests) that track the presence of Veblen and Venice, the Crayon and the Century, that help make up this manylayered study.

Introduction

If the surge in the use of the word crisis in titles coming out of the trade and academic presses can be taken as valid evidence of the current mind-set, then many aspects of our lives are under duress, even those that attend to the arts and literature—activities falling under the rubric of the humanities. But in times marked by physical annihilation, economic collapse, and social injustices, the humanities seem petty players. Even their relation to what constitutes verifiable truth and reality is suspect. The situation is stronger for those who, when they cry “crisis,” can call up statistical data that back the hard facts. In a world filled with “real” crises, it is easy for advocates of the strict principles of scientific inquiry to dismiss expressions of angst coming from the halls of academe or the artist’s studio. In comparison, the humanists’ pleas for attention seem to have no more validity than the disgruntled opinions of particular cultural groups jotted down in political exit polls. One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic has no need to insert “crisis” into its title. Nevertheless, its materia prima focuses on the anxiety that beset the humanities during the late 1800s once it appeared that the arts were on the way to being reduced by the new sciences to the ranks of the irrelevant. Membership in the culture of chagrin over the uncertain status accorded the plastic arts and literary works was not limited to any one nation, but Americans might take a certain pride in having to face down the forces of indifference, incompetence, ignorance, or antagonism from fellow citizens, from obnoxious critics from abroad, and from the arrogance of rival intellectual disciplines. There is a difference between then—the years when America scrambled to be born and tried to feel no shame in having to do so along all public fronts— and now. In recent memory the language used to describe things-gone-wrong

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is often uttered in tones of embarrassment just short of abject apologies. “The Muses’ Farewell,” a lecture George Steiner delivered in 2000, has been picked up to prove “that a crisis in the situation of literature is a regular topos in literary texts.” This litany of failure indicates “some decisive defeat of humanism from which we may not recover,” a defeat confirmed by the bestiality of the Holocaust, which called up Steiner’s ironic query, “where were the Muses?” John Guillory’s Cultural Capital sounded a note of doom when he announced that “the category of literature has come to seem institutionally dysfunctional” because of “the emergence of a technically trained ‘New Class,’ or ‘professional-managerial class.’” Guillory tapped another nail into the humanist coffin: “the category of ‘literature’ names the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system.” In 2003 Terry Eagleton served as yet another witness to the “crisis” faced by humanists once literature is taken over by theory. To paraphrase Eagleton, this leads to the painful awareness of futile attempts “by the humanities to think their way out of a co-option by military and industrial structures that had already taken place.”1 Take note that in every instance, the designated foes are technology and theory, accomplices to the acts of the military-corporate establishment. Dissenters against humanism-as-usual by Guillory, Eagleton, and Steiner see no way for an age-old tradition to escape from being either annihilated or subsumed within the “bestiality” of a brutal sociopolitical system. Missing in these polemics is the sense that technology and/or theory might be partners in humanistic endeavors; lacking is the belief in good genealogies in which similar intellectual DNAs link the sciences (applied or theoretical) and the plastic arts and literature. Faith is absent that all creative activities might be embraced within one true theory. This faith was given prophetic voice in 1836 by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he declaimed, “All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature,” “an idea of creation” whose test is “that it will explain all phenomena.”2 But has such a faith ever had a chance to succeed? New histories of hostility between the professional disciplines were being written once the forces of specialization began to set the hard facts favored by the scientific temperament over against the soft feelings of the humanists. Still, the humanities had held their own throughout the nineteenth century, backed by the authority claimed by the Matthew Arnolds and the John Ruskins, and into the twentieth century by the Leavises and the Clement Greenbergs. But as Robert Scholes has recently suggested, the time has passed for literary scholars housed in the universities to exert their power. Others admit that the freelance critics once in command over the arts and literature are in disarray.3 Nonetheless, across the shifting template of the 1800s, there were those Americans (the



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kind who cared greatly about the sort of cultures their nation was in the process of creating) who believed it was their duty to piece together a viable system of aesthetic values, the more unified the better. They wished to rise to the high optimism of Emerson’s challenge to uncover a theory of nature that would include all of life at its most inchoate and creative, as well as to incorporate the wonder of Darwin’s entangled bank, singled out in one of the opening epigraph selections, as the model for a brand of scientific humanism sympathetic to America’s needs. Although Albert Einstein’s efforts to prove the validity of a unified field theory lay in the future, his desire (as Platonic by nature as Emerson’s) matched the hopes of many mid-nineteenth-century enthusiasts to unveil a theory blessed by a simplicity applicable to all the laws of the universe. Philosophers and historians might ask: Had there ever been a Golden Age—a time before the Fall from Eden, the collapse of the Tower of Babel, the splitting in twain of the Primeval Egg? Could that Golden Age ever return so that painting and poetry, engineering and physics, could be reunited? The Americans whose words are central to this book sought a good answer to the second question but said, Alas, no! to the first. In their view, the national structures and cultural bent of the nineteenth century had emerged from the Brass Age or, at best, the Age of Iron—eras of primitivism bereft of the splendors of a Greece or a Rome, which knew perfection before falling into rot. Americans dedicated to aesthetic reforms were fiercely confident that the nation’s intellectual and creative life could evolve from “rawness” to “ripeness,” yet they were disturbed by memories of Europe’s achievements in the arts, which mocked their own small accomplishments. Only by wedding themselves to a vocabulary of aesthetic agronomy that viewed evolution as an organic system could they invoke a powerful vision for the future that avoided the “rot” that followed if American “rawness” were succeeded by European “ripeness.” “Ripeness” characterized the thought in evidence on the Continent and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was on display in the series of abstract systems that led to and continued beyond the great model offered by Isaac Newton’s Principia. Those who rushed to find “a single principle that would account for the diversity of phenomena” applied their energies to the sciences, the arts, and the design of political institutions. The intellectual ferment leading to the American Revolution meant the importation of Enlightenment ideals to the far side of the Atlantic.4 Never absent, however, from this mix of models of English and French thought and practice adopted by the new republic was the memory of Italy’s past. The example of Italian emperors and popes who had brought splendor to their civic centers through works of aesthetic perfection absorbed the writers

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who figure throughout this book. For Americans with an ardent wish to league a commendable aesthetic with a workable body politic, Italy was hugely useful as an inspiration and a warning.5 The line of this narrative witnessed the loss of moral grace once the ideals of the Roman republic were banished by the rise of decadent caesars, local tyrants, and corrupt papal powers. To bring this story into the volatile present, admonitory “festoons” of references to the crimes of the Italian past were strewn over any inventory of its great achievements.6 It had all seemed so simple in the mid-1400s when Leon Battista Alberti showed the way to the humanists who converged upon Florence. At that moment, it seemed as though “Nature, the mistress of all things, had grown old and weary,” and that the Golden Age, when “[p]ainters, sculptors, architects, musicians, geometers, rhetoricians, augurs, and distinguished and remarkable intellects” flourished together, had vanished. Yet Alberti placed his faith in the revival of interest in geometry, since the “hard sciences” of engineering and architecture could be applied to the benefit of the disciplines of painting, literature, and rhetoric.7 Five hundred years later, nothing was that simple to the Americans after the Civil War who struggled to see how one could merge engineers, journeymen builders, students of the natural sciences, poetry, painting, and the new technologies into one sweeping endeavor—one that would also include, in obedience to Emerson’s notoriously impossible challenge, “language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.”8 Whenever the citizens of this upstart republic were overly cocky about the mythic age they had created in the New World, Europe was ready to show its disdain. In Horatio Greenough’s words, Europeans judged the American democratic system as competent only in the training of war and trade.9 (In 2003 this staple of attack against American materialism, utilitarianism, and imperialism was still deployed by Terry Eagleton, Englishman.) Resisting, and resenting, slurs by its foreign contemporaries, as well as the perceived indifference of its own populace, America’s self-appointed analysts of the state of the nation’s culture set out to create something of worth. One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic traces the gains and losses taking place within three different testing grounds. Part One, “An American Aesthetic and Its Travails,” spans the 1850s through the early 1900s, years when a national aesthetic struggled to be born—a time when a vocabulary of hope projected a distant future when the Emersonian Me (the creative efforts of mortals) would live in happy harmony with the Not Me (the forces of Nature existing beyond human control). During these decades awkward efforts were made to bring a viable aesthetics to bear upon the fields of sculpture and painting, to professionalize art criticism, to found schools for the training of novice



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artists, to launch galleries exhibiting their products, and to ready America’s citizenry to appreciate (and to purchase) art of accredited worth. These were the years when it appeared that the fields of natural history, religious thought, and artistic concerns might coexist without undue friction. Only later would divisions begin to expose how unlikely it was that accommodation could be made once the prevailing Art Idea found itself elbowed out of the way by models of scientific inquiry committed to advancing new systems of technological knowledge. A number of contemporary positions on the state of the plastic arts and of the sciences are put forward in Part One, but two voices resonate with particular insistence—first, William James Stillman, former pupil of Frederic Church, founder and coeditor in the 1850s of the Crayon (the nation’s first independent art journal), and essayist for Century Magazine in the 1880s and 1890s, and second, Thorstein Veblen, social scientist and economist, whose skepticism regarding the intellectual contributions of the humanities began to make its mark throughout the 1890s and into the 1900s. By the nineteenth century’s close it was a commonplace to weigh the relative value of nebulous questions concerning how best to distinguish good from bad in painting and sculpture versus questions devoted to the establishment of clear principles of scientific inquiry. Part Two, “Capitol of Best Intentions,” turns to the often oxymoronic attempts to apply a political aesthetics to the construction and embellishment of the national capital—an experimental city constructed in fits and starts along the banks of the Potomac after 1800, smoothed out by the final acceptance of the McMillan Plan under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, with further amplifications carried out along the Mall into the present. If William Stillman and like-minded art connoisseurs worked to forge a set of principles to define a national aesthetic for American art, the men in power in Washington, D.C. wanted the new city to express ideals and achievements that were manifestly nationalistic. The main players in this section are the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives whose decisions are ponderously inscribed in the congressional proceedings, capturing the language—often heated—of debates over which government funds to allocate for what projects (or whether to allocate any at all), as well as the conditions under which army engineers and ad hoc designers were assigned to erect and to decorate the White City of the republic. The U.S. Capitol became the primary vessel (some said the dumping ground) for paintings and sculpture devised to announce America’s worth to the nation’s citizens as well as to its foreign denigrators. It is under these circumstances and the demands they embodied that America’s agitated relations with past Italian

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achievements took a new turn. The idea of Rome borne through myth and legend and the actuality of its role as former capital of the Western world obsessed many of those responsible for the new city created near the Tiber Creek of Washington, D.C. Members of Congress hoped to match the arts and architecture of the U.S. Capitol to the major civic structures erected during the celebrated years of Italy’s past. Rome the republic led by its Senate had been “good.” Rome the empire dominated by its tyrants had been “bad.” Rome as the seat of papal power, and Florence as the domain of the Medicis, was worse. Yet, again and again, as the congressional proceedings reveal, it was impossible to disregard connections between the Capitol, designed to express America’s “Best Intentions” for its future, and the glories and failures of the nation’s past. Impossible as well to ignore the ambiguities underlying those intentions and that past, which continued to mar the memorials and monuments to past wars that threatened to turn Washington, D.C. into a city of the dead. The post−Civil War years set the scene for Part Three, “Aesthetic Lives: The Literary Approach.” During the decades when the sciences made a strong case for the vindication of their methods against what they viewed as the vagaries of an effete literary culture, a series of novels was published whose protagonists follow the principles by which they define their lives (and with striking frequency, go to their deaths) as artists. The novels (carefully selected for the eclectic value of their range) include Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Tragic Muse (1890) by Henry James, Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1895), and Theodore Dreiser’s The “Genius” (1915). Emile Zola’s His Masterpiece (1886), Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed (1890), and (in brief ) Virginia Woolf ’s To The Lighthouse (1927) are also brought into focus because of the insights they offer into contemporary aesthetic issues extending beyond American boundaries. Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904) has its own part to play in displaying the often brutal codes by which the pursuit of the artistic life has costs it must pay. All are narratives bedeviled by the question of whether arduous work or freefloating dreams are the truest means to art’s creation. They assess the value given to an aesthetic life that relies on the turn taken when the artist makes his or her own person and environment into exquisite objets d’art. Like the figures featured in Parts One and Two, the authors and characters alike express an urge to construct an all-inclusive theory joining art with life to the extent hoped for by an Emerson, a Darwin, or an Einstein. Part Three augments arguments that propelled Parts One and Two. Among the new takes on abiding issues are sharp distinctions between knowing and knowledge; uneasy relations pitting formalism, forms, and things against one another; and rising tensions within disciplines struggling to bring honor to their



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practices and purposes. There were brief moments of hope that the time would come when, like the lion with the lamb, the sciences and the arts—those two brave masters of creation—would once again lie down together in mutual respect. But the overriding question remained: Which of the arts (if any) and which of the sciences (if any) best serve Life in a world rushing toward Modernity? The following pages are marked by certain absences. Among the acknowledged blanks are the mapping of certain well-traveled roads by previous scholarship. Although many of these sources are cited in the endnotes, the main text can only nod to studies centered on the rise of landscape art, on feisty attempts by members of the literary world to answer the impertinent question “Why read an American book?” on touchy resistance to snide dismissal by self-appointed tastemakers, and on sharp curatorial appraisals of specific works emerging from selected studios in the arts community. Other routes, less taken, command more attention as I examine just how generations of interested parties talked about what an American aesthetic might mean, whether or not it could ever be attained. What is present (at times, cringingly so) are certain strong factors that must be taken into account. There is the resolute maleness of the positions stated throughout these discussions. The first American critics to speak out about the situations they found within the country’s nascent art world were men. The Washington politicians, the engineers assigned from the Army Corps to give material bulk to the new capital, the sculptors hired to supply statues of the allegorical figures that proclaimed the nation’s proud past placed upon Capitol’s tympanum, and the reformers who pushed through the McMillan Plan under the hand of Theodore Roosevelt: all were male. (That they were not always American-born was a sensitive matter to the men seated in Congress who, with xenophobic reluctance, found they had to import masons, sculptors, and decorators from Italy since few Americans had the requisite skills.) Men set up the first schools for the training of novice artists, and men devoted themselves to giving legitimacy to the strange new discipline of art criticism. The role of women is central, however, in the novels under scrutiny—often present as muses who either elevate or tear down a man’s career. And yes, many of the paintings and sculptures that came under the art lover’s eye centered on feminine figures whose “sweet maternity” offered relief from the pleasure taken in “robust manliness.” Still and all, as a consequence of the cultural, social, and economic givens of the period, the American art scene was largely in the hands of its men. The years leading up to and including the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the post-Reconstruction era were marked by the shame of Jim Crow triumphs in the

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courts and the lynching parties hosted by Night Riders on the back roads of the South and the North. The time span covered by this account stops just short of the impact occasioned by incoming waves of talented immigrants who set out on their own quest for a personal aesthetic, with striking consequences for the nation’s art. But it was the American of earlier decades who thought he “knew” which men were intended to lead “the people” toward a culture that had more on its mind than how to make money. Proudly self-defined as of “English stock,” it was the man of education and self-attributed breeding who preached the gospel of “republican simplicity” and the saving graces of an evolved aesthetic sensibility. As the 1880s neared their close, certain Americans from “below” began to push to the forefront. While safely categorized as “manly” men of Anglo-Saxon heritage, they launched blunt cultural battles against the reactionary forces that stalled attempts, not just to achieve beauty but to make sense of modern life. Nonetheless, the infant aesthetic scene was resolutely in the hands of white men—in the hands of those Anglo-Saxons who were, in Theodore Roosevelt’s words, “True Americans.”10 On plunging into the alien territories covered in this account, it helps to pay attention to the tones of voice and the choice of diction used in arguments that backed the quest for an American aesthetic. Through auditory keenness, it is possible to differentiate the personalities, backgrounds, aims, and methods used by, say, John Adams, William Stillman, Sam Huston, George Innes, Henry James, Montgomery Meigs, Thorstein Veblen, Frank Norris, or James McNeill Whistler. At the start of the nineteenth century, the gentleman with cultural matters on his mind carefully modulates how he voices anger, resentment, and hope over fluctuations in the progress of his ideals. By century’s end he is replaced by writers—many emerging not from the universities but from the newspaper world—whose mode of expression pays little heed to niceties of address. Trained to incorporate the rigors of scientific inquiry or the demands of social activism, they demand the status denied dilettantes who gush over the arts, the expatriate “Poodle Men” adrift in Europe, or the belletrist types cosseted by the academies. But even they could be dismissed by men like Uncle Joe Cannon, senator from New York State, whose down-home voice spoke abrasively against any enterprise out of touch with the real business of America. Yet—this is the rub—due attention is given to what men on the margin (gentlemen or not) accomplished in the face of the obstacles—the “crises” within the realm of intellectual endeavors— in their attempts to define an American aesthetic, whatever its many forms. In the early years it helped if participants in the quest had some experience in the arts, in the reigning scientific and philosophical issues, and in the literary movements currently on view. But even those well versed in the cultural life of



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midcentury America and abroad, and who held some familiarity with languages and ideas that crossed national boundaries and straddled the centuries between the classical past and the volatile present, might lack understanding of how political systems function, the drastic changes driving the buildup of late capitalist systems, and the social demands resulting from the new technologies. There was simply too much “new” to be known. Yet these elements made up the cultural systems to which the nineteenth-century American Art Idea had to respond, wittingly or not. I make no attempt to chronicle or to dissect in full all the intellectual issues that leave their traces throughout the following pages or to review the twice-told tales that furnish the basis upon which future arguments may be mounted. It would be a fool’s errand to strain to include histories of the sciences (theoretical and applied), of literature, of the plastic arts of Italy and the United States, of the political structures adapted here and abroad over the centuries, of the theological debates that defined Nature, God, the soul, and churchly institutions, or of the philosophical positions that upheld or overturned how the mind makes distinctions between truth, reality, and illusion. Speaking as a sociologist and economist, Thorstein Veblen readily admitted as much when speaking in 1908 regarding his own particular area of concern. “Modern science demands a genetic account of the phenomena with which it deals, and a genetic inquiry into the scientific point of view necessary will have to make up its account with the earliest phases of cultural growth. A life-history of human culture is a large topic, not to be attempted here in the sketchiest outline. The most that can be attempted is a hasty review of certain scattered questions and salient points in this life-history.”11 The minihistories covered in the following pages can, however, be banded together to reach a broader and deeper view, not devoid of coherence. The emergence of any single aesthetic theory per se is not the point. What matters is to offer a record of the myriad cultural pressures that led to a series of aesthetic statements crucial to meet their times and circumstances. The consideration of times and circumstances made it mandatory for humanists of all stripes to possess an intuitive time sense—one that reveals itself in a reliance on grammatical signs that indicate what had been and is yet to be attained. Some spoke of the future in tones of quiet resignation. Others were sparked by Emersonian confidence to announce that old forms would be made “plastic and new” once it was shown “that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.”12 Among the phrases commonly in use were Yet to come, about to be, and ought to happen. A certain poignancy is revealed by these terms, which measure the moments before the United States can claim that its

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culture has caught up with the rest of the Western world. Most striking, perhaps, is the unavoidable use of the past tense to prompt present action. How could one sidestep references to the primitivism of the country’s colonial culture unless these signs could be converted into marks of national virtue? Were they not proof of New World innocence that the Old World had long since lost? Fervent belief in the moments of glory imbedded in America’s past gave the rationale behind the sculpted deeds of stalwart heroes in the times of settlement and revolution that filled the facades and corridors of the U.S. Capitol. Still, there was pain in having to admit all that was lacking in American life. It was a pain made more piercing on taking account of the age-old cultural riches arrogantly spread across the face of Europe, crowned by those flaunted by Italy’s past. What a pity that the writers for the Crayon and the speakers in the House of Representatives seemed unaware of the seeds of the American Art Idea that coincided with various stages of the cultural time line that stretched from Jerusalem to Athens and beyond. If they had been familiar with the changes laid out with immaculate detail by John W. O’Malley in his Four Cultures of the West, nineteenth-century Americans might have realized that good times come whenever Culture 3 lives alongside Culture 2 and Culture 4 is appended as a happy bonus.13 Shielded by this self-awareness, they might have fended off the anxieties of the post−Civil War years once Culture 3 was downgraded to a debased Culture 4—the culture placed under attack by latter-day advocates of Culture 2. Here is a brief decoding of O’Malley’s argument, useful for an understanding of the sense of crisis that inflicted late-nineteenth-century Humanistscum-Aestheticians, forerunners of the unhappy victims of more recent assaults against the humanities. I pass over O’Malley’s dissection of Culture 1—the prophetic urgency of “Jerusalem” marked by contempt for the foolish inadequacy of worldly wisdom in the face of the “inscrutability of God” that lies “beyond argument”—to pick up on Culture 2 by Plato and Aristotle, lovingly depicted by Raphael’s “School of Athens.” On the one hand, Culture 2 was devoted to philosophical reasoning in pursuit of absolute Truths and eternal Ideas. On the other hand, its academies gave great importance to observations of the physical world as well as to meditations on the metaphysics of the soul. With Culture 3 “Athens” was transplanted to Renaissance Florence, which embraced the study of poetry, drama, history, and rhetoric committed to useful wisdom and the promulgation of goodness. In due course came Culture 4, the domain of Beauty, augmenting the principles of Truth and Goodness, the salient features of Cultures 2 and 3. For a time Cultures 2, 3, and 4 coexisted without undue strife, while the somber shadow of “Jerusalem” lay off to the side.14 Dissention began once diverging pur-



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poses led to arguments over what constitutes the true, the public good, and the enjoyment of the beautiful. Concepts hardened as to how to define “reason” and “philosophy.” Educational systems split into the paths taken by “the academy” and “the university.” Eventually, post-Kantian and post-Darwinian theories of scientific endeavor proliferated; they led to modern versions of the “Athens” of Aristotle, one of whose major spokesmen was Thorstein Veblen. Drastic realignments within the intellectual community weakened the chance of collaborative efforts between the original cultures. In the eyes of practical men, “philosophy,” “the university,” and “aesthetic pleasures” lost credence. Such cultural concerns had little of use to offer the technological approaches the Veblenians were busily constructing.15 Before and after William Stillman left the Crayon in late 1856, the art journal continued to hold tightly to the Emersonian faith that all the cultures of all the “Athens” of the past could and should join forces. How else could Nature, God, Science, and Soul be embedded in a single set of aesthetic principles that enfolded the sciences, the philosophies, and the arts as the rightful heirs of contemporary Western cultures? (Crayonites did not always beat the nationalistic drum as loudly as the U.S. Congress would have liked, but they had no doubt but that “America” represented the Anglo-Saxon traditions essential to the advancement of all cultures.) In the Crayon of September 1857 “The Comprehensiveness of Art” looked to the happy time when the clear evidence provided by successfully executed art would both advance the nation’s “social life” and prompt recognition by the “math plodders and cold statistics” obsessed by fact-layered theories. It was as Horatio Greenough declared: “these States need art as a visible exponent of their civilization”; therefore, Americans must realize that “the appreciation of an aesthetic theory without substantial art is as difficult as to follow a geometric demonstration without a diagram.”16 Challenges always face the quest for any kind of aesthetic, American or otherwise. Tensions tightening over the question “Does art originate in what the eye sees or what the mind imagines?” retold the old story of debates over the value of objective or subjective experience. In fifteenth-century Florence, Cennino Cennini (c. 1400) believed the purpose of art is to “discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects,” while Leon Battista Alberti (1435) countered by stating that “the painter has nothing to do with the things that are not visible.”17 In nineteenth-century Paris, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s “Definition of the New Art” (1865) called on painters to transcend the merely material, even as they resisted efforts to divorce reason from intuition. In a letter of 1861 Gustave Courbet held that “[n]o abstract, invisible intangible object can ever be material for a painting.” Jules-Antoine Castagnary’s 1863 review of

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paintings at the annual Salon vouched for the naturalist school over the classical or the romantic: “its only goal is to reproduce nature by bringing nature to its maximum power and intensity; it is truth counterpoised by science.”18 As the field of pure mathematics advanced whereby the observer might “see” things formerly judged to be abstract, invisible, and intangible, the nature of the debates necessarily changed. Long before Heisenberg’s theory was laid upon the table (Mr. Ramsay’s, perhaps), objective proofs offered by the material eye could be questioned, while it was conceded that the mind’s eye could either lie or discover truths. As long as there was space for a knife’s blade to slip between seeing and imagining, facts and ideas, full reconciliation between the sciences and the arts seemed impossible. The quest to gain an all-encompassing command over the world’s bafflements threatened to come to a dead halt. Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse is tormented by his anxiety that he will never be able to grasp a schema that encompasses all the world’s letters from A to Z. He is stuck at Q because of his reliance on the “muscular integrity” of the kitchen tables of life and of his inability to respond to the world’s beauties. It is unlikely he will ever arrive at R, much less Z.19 Who or what decides success would appear to rely on the ability of the individual sensibility to set its goals, determine appropriate methods, survive its crises, and get to a laudable conclusion. Culture 1 (the unyielding voice of “Jerusalem”) declared that the end is in the beginning and that mortals must bow to the absurdity of all human affairs in their acceptance of God’s “impossible” wisdom. Faith in the ultimate reality of transcendent wisdom that flows forth from an “Other” threads its way through the alternate cultures outlined by O’Malley—a belief that bred many anxious moments of doubt over the objective truth of Truth. Although mid-nineteenth-century Americans were entering upon a postKantian culture, the Crayon constantly reiterated its firm belief in “the Soul,” couched in the nondenominational terms of the ethos of transcendentalism. By the later decades of the century, the Soul began to fall by the wayside, replaced by Mind, or by Brain, aided by the sometimes awkward merger of physiology, psychology, and philosophy by men as diverse as William James, Emile Zola, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser. At this point, another “Other” came to the fore in the writings of Henry James. A complex concept of Consciousness defined the innate powers of comprehension by whose means one continued to examine modern versions of truth, goodness, and beauty. The quest for a viable aesthetic theory never lacked for obstacles to overcome and fallacies to avoid. In 1914 Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism analyzed the four most damaging fallacies that appear, with fascinating if numbing repetitiveness, in the examples that lie ahead: the Romantic Fallacy, the Me-



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chanical Fallacy, the Ethical Fallacy, and the Biological Fallacy.20 (Also add the Intentional Fallacy that drove the homiletics of the Capitol’s architectural and decorative elements favored by Congress.) Throughout the 1800s other unsettling issues nagged at the William Stillmans (early) and the Thorstein Veblens (late). Opposing sides tried to define an arts aesthetic capable of being brought into rapprochement with the newer sciences. Self-appointed spokesmen had to decide which kind of science and which kind of art they were talking about. Only then might they move toward devising workable theories with the feel, if not the truth, of the circumstances with which each had to deal. Another problem was the ardency with which connoisseurs of the arts named beauty as the primary goal. It was difficult enough for beauty lovers to live within a utilitarian society driven by hard facts. They also had to distance themselves from the banalities of taste mongering mouthed by what they viewed as a naive public. Then there was the specter of philosophical determinism, the bête noire of the late nineteenth century. What manner of universe shaped the “beauty” the artistic mind might seek? If human willpower lacked the ability to contest the-way-things-are, perhaps there was little chance to create art, much less to celebrate beauty. The transcendentalist flavor of the Crayon throughout the 1850s was generally marked by cheer. Under the guidance of God and the willing cooperation of the Soul, Nature’s realm was good and filled with the beauty of innocent “rawness.” But after the Civil War the very look of things in the quotidian took on a harsher edge. By century’s end the world images provided by Jack London or Frank Norris were neither benign nor picturesque. Obligatory references to God, the Soul, and human Will disappeared, replaced by a vortex of yeasty flow and the cruel rush of machinelike forces. Locked within the rule of an “iron-block” universe, “beauty” had to be redefined, based on subjective choices drawn from the triad laid out by William James: the scientific, the sentimental, and the sensual. According to James’s lecture of 1884 “The Dilemma of Determinism,” we can elect “the gnostical point of view” (neither pessimistic nor optimistic and filled with thrilling melodramas), “pessimism” (grim determinism whose denial of choices relieves us of moral duty), or “indeterminism” (a loose play of parts that urges decisions based on what we will do with what we have).21 Near the conclusion of Emile Zola’s His Masterpiece, Claude—his hero of the Paris art scene—is tormented by the desire to pierce the wall, to go “beyond” the material world’s collection of images. Claude’s was neither a unique nor recent urge. Apelles’ masterly art, medieval penetrations of the heavenly realms, the geometric tricks of Renaissance vanishing-point perspective, and the wit of trompe l’oeil illusions were techniques for breaking past material boundaries.

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Constantino Brumidi’s allegorical canopy above the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol elevated George Washington into “Apotheosis.” William Morris Hunt’s “visionary” mural for the New York State Capitol, “unencumbered by any material appliance,” was a “cloudy pageant.”22 America’s impressionists returned to Boston from Paris ready to let light flow into their New Englandy world. The desire goes on, shared alike by art and by science. Mark Rothko’s chapel suggests realms at a remove from the city of Houston. Aided by the finest of technical instruments, today’s scientists use astrophysics to go beyond “the Beyond,” bringing back sublime images of galaxies whose glories match anything offered by the high arts. In the teasing implications of Henry James’s late essay “Is There a Life After Death?” the musings of this happy agnostic suggest what “the Beyond” might be like once the body succumbs to mortality. James’s imagination took no interest in a serene empyrean that cosseted the immortal Soul. He would continue “after death” to gain “pleasure under difficulties” (a favorite concept of his) if Consciousness kept on experimenting, inquiring, and probing as it had during his lifetime.23 Henry James’s contributions leave their marks throughout One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic. James appears as theorist, as practitioner, and as analyst, by means of his prefaces, his essays, and his fiction. The fact that James is showcased on many occasions did not mean that he had all the answers. Hardly! But the presence of that experimenting, inquiring, probing consciousness demands to be taken into account. With the appearance of James’s “The Art of Fiction” in 1884 aesthetic criticism received its first truly “modern” expression, while the principles of “selection” and of “composition” moved the practice of literature nearer to the rules governing the new sciences. (As we will see in Part Three the consequences of James’s interventions have, nonetheless, proved to be highly controversial.) The Crayonites ardently desired to formulate a workable American aesthetic, but their efforts were singularly ineffectual. Their heartfelt but muzzy reliance on vague phrases that called upon the beauty, goodness, and truths located somewhere, somehow, within the realm of Nature failed to provide a viable theory for art lovers, whether in America or Europe. James’s “The Art of Fiction” got down to business and demonstrates what such a theory might look like. For James, to theorize fiction as an art form meant that the critic/practitioner had to approach the task through intellectual rigor and precision. The problem did not lie in the lack of fine works of literature. The problem was the absence of a set of clear principles able to guide those who create literature and those who judge it. Authors must be “serious” about their work. They needed “a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it,” all of which comes as “the result of choice and



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comparison.” If an author remains a “naïf,” his only satisfaction lies in believing that “a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding.” James may not have fully realized this at the time, but his definition of the process for arriving at a valid aesthetic brought it into the same area of activity laid down by Thorstein Veblen as the foundation for valid inquiry, whatever kind of science was involved. “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views, and the comparison of standpoints.”24 One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic concludes with a reading of two late novels by Henry James, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. They are set against a series of late Renaissance paintings graced by the geometric wisdom of perspectival vision. They demonstrate their own relation to the line of scientific inquiry prompted by Leon Battista Alberti—one that follows through to Giovanni Piranesi and M. C. Escher. They carry us to the stage where science, art, and modern consciousness experience the creative abysses that project an aesthetic braced to bridge these abysses. But what of the “Burning Question” that opens Part One—one of the many, sometimes painful, issues that pressed against the newly evolving cultures of midnineteenth-century America? Could this nation take firm hold of an aesthetic it could call its own? Was it possible for a raw country to supply the future with the settled institutions and growing traditions capable of fostering such an aesthetic? Would its best thinkers ever gain the respect of the intellectuals committed to new scientific enterprises that threatened to make the Art Idea beside the point to American life? And—wonder beyond wonder—might the arts that make up a large part of humanistic activities ever merge with the applied and theoretical sciences to create one splendid, all-inclusive theory about Everything? Those ready to take on these and other “burning questions” throughout the nineteenth century held varying views as to the “Americaness” of their efforts. “Original and National Poets,” an unsigned piece in the Crayon of March 1836, dismissed the notion that Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” might pass as a “national poem.” Even though Longfellow was “American,” his homage to the Indian was not. For “as long as there is a difference between the Anglo-Saxon and an Aboriginal American, we shall never find warrant for pronouncing Hiawatha a national poem.” The essay concludes, “Our great national poem is yet to be produced.” By 1902 one might think that a bright, brash, young writer such as Frank Norris would have moved further down the path toward an understanding of what makes a literature “American”—if indeed a nationalistic aesthetic is what one wishes to achieve. But Norris placed a question mark near the end of his essay’s title—“An American School of Fiction?”—and brought it full stop with the statement “A Denial.” He conceded that “an American point of view”

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was to be found during “the days of Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier,” yet these authors are of “the New England school. . . . And New England is not America.” Norris wrote that “had Mr. Henry James remained in America he would have been our very best writer,” but James left home. So is an authentic American Novel a future possibility? No, since such a thing is “mythic like a hippogriff, and the thing to be looked for is not the Great American Novel but the Great Novelist who shall also be an American.”25 One question that threatens to incinerate the final pages of One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic comes down to this: Do the Art Ideas raised two hundred years ago by a relatively select group of dead white males have any interest for the humanities in today’s scattered world? Many of the recent cries of “crisis” from the humanities in the face of indifference from the practical sciences stem from a cringing sense of irrelevance. But to shy away from the past is feeble at best and reactionary at worst. We ought to add another fallacy to Geoffrey Scott’s list—the Stupidity Fallacy, that impulse to dismiss accounts of how our society has arrived at its current pretty pass, how cultures feed upon their predecessors, and how earlier aesthetic strategies still have the force to command attention, like them or not. Most likely it is of small importance whether nineteenth-century America ever succeeded in its particular quest for a particular homegrown aesthetic. The goal to find aesthetic groundings for a particular day and age was sought by many countries, whether aided or not by a long history (and burden) of artistic achievements, yet ruptures in the social and cultural fabric impeded the creation of fresh traditions. The rebels of the Parisian arts community tried to cut loose from an officially sanctioned aesthetic by the Salons mounted by the Rejected. At the time of Italy’s unification, its arts had to overcome obstacles as great as those in America after its own Civil War, while in the view of William and Henry James, the years between 1860 and 1865 split the American consciousness in twain. For Henry Adams the silent hum of the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition introduced him to a new world of science, and Americans back home were jolted out of faith that the rules of good taste were intact by the 1915 Armory Show. The First World War introduced a technological future totally unfamiliar to many, and for Sir Arthur Eddington, the Kuhnian revolutions of 1915 and 1927 changed scientific thought forever.26 Great changes in the arts and the sciences have a way of encouraging retrievals from the past as well as taking leaps into the unknown. Angus Fletcher expresses his hope for a distinctively American aesthetic that merges poetry with science through a fascinating mix of the Complexity Theory, Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and arguments founded on forms brought forward from the pre-



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Socratic age. The result, claims Fletcher, is “The Remarriage of Argument and Imagination.” His hope is that the intimate observation of the natural world and the inquiring flow of the poetic imagination may achieve fruitful consummation. Fletcher’s position is both like and unlike the vision that William Stillman brought to the Crayon, and may be just as easy to dismantle. Yet it is nice to hear that “at last an ancient poetic wisdom moved into communication with a profound and comprehensive scientific vision.” Whether through well-earned confidence or murky hubris, humanists are reinvigorated by an aesthetic eager to claim, “When it is working right, poetry is a kind of knowledge and always anticipating science,” a knowledge “set free from assuming the burden of proof.”27 Thinkers of a certain kind will (and rightly) continue to demand proof that passes the test of factual evidence. Yet there are still those who take cheer in realizing that, when Raphael was asked the means by which he achieved works of great beauty, he answered, “[I]t’s a certain idea I have in my mind.”28 Many (often conflicting) ideas regarding the arts and the sciences engrossed the participants in this study, at the cost of some confusion as they yearned for a unifying theory thwarted by the drift toward multiplicity. Thus, a note on the relation of my method to the matters at hand. Something is amiss if the manner in which this material is presented does not help to highlight the same sense of the disunities (cultural, technological, and political) that blocked smooth access to their goals. Part One answers William James’s unsettling demand that we reach beyond orderly academic terraces of thought in order to encounter the uncouth forms of experience that lurk in the underbrush, while the contemplation of Darwin’s entangled bank yields both pleasure and risk. Part Two is a cat’s cradle of references that move back and forth between the civic structures (material as well as ideological) of Washington, D.C. and of Italy (Rome, Florence, Siena, and Venice). This is tricky business. Steady nerves are needed in the face of the possibility that these “comparative perspectives” may tangle and collapse.29 Part Three opens upon the troubled lives of fictive artists and concludes with a disorienting journey up staircases depicted by Giovanni Piranesi, Henry James, and M. C. Escher. The ambiguities of perspective (visual and verbal) may seem at times to be incoherent, but they must be trusted as they mount toward a logic of coherence that offers its own kind of satisfaction. According to the current “aesthetics” of truth saying, tidy “closures” once required by traditional methods of argument are inadequate. E. M. Forster’s heartfelt plea “Only connect!” is as untenable as Rodney King’s plaintive “Can’t we just get along?” Perhaps it is only through encounters with the clash of facts and ideas that we may “connect” and “get along.” A narrative that traces the consequences of the challenge taken up in the 1800s to find a one true theory

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is in itself no wild-goose chase, although ever finding that theory probably is. The presence and pressure exacted by appropriate scholarly processes drop the crumbs that guide us out of the Jamesian underbrush and over the entangled banks of Darwin’s vision. What is hoped for is that the intricacies of the quest for an American aesthetic compatible with the elegance of scientific discourse are just that: intricate and elegant.

Part One

An American Aesthetic and Its Travails

[There are] two kinds of perception: one external or scientific; the other vital or artistic, not inconsistent, but, by no means, involving one another. —William Stillman, “Perception,” Crayon (August 1855) [W]hile the two [modern scholarship and modern science] make up the modern scheme of learning, yet there is no need for confounding the one with the other, nor can the one do the work of the other. —Thorstein Veblen, “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization” (1906) [T]he question of art begins where the question of fact ends. —Roger Fry, “The Art of Florence” (1919)

The Burning Question

Could a feasible American aesthetic be accomplished during the nineteenth century by means of the systematization of theories and practices and the creation of institutions as venues wherein these theories and practices could advance purposeful work? In terms of the titles James Jackson Jarves gave his publications in 1864 and 1869, did the Art Idea have a chance to survive in the face of the nation’s history of cultural deficits, and would aspiring art critics, instructors, practitioners, and collectors bring Art Thoughts into play at a time when industry and technology defined the meaning of value? Queries such as these led toward “the question”: What relation had the formulation of a legitimate Ameri-





An American Aesthetic and Its Travails

can aesthetic to the principles of scientific methodology set down by Thorstein Veblen at the close of the century, or, rather, might it at least meet the demands imposed by what I here call “Veblenism”?1 Veblen and like-minded advocates of the principles of scientific inquiry growing in power by the century’s end were skeptical of granting concessions to those labeled as aesthetes, even as that breed tried to downplay the divine in order to embrace the merits of a more realistic rendering of physical existence and the joys of modern science. Devotees of the arts and of literature simply could not be trusted. Just being what they were, belletristic individuals on the margins of the working world of technology, meant they had little to contribute under the stringent conditions of an ever-changing society. I rank Thorstein Veblen as one of our most brilliant analysts of systems making. Still, I approach Veblen’s legacy from a slightly different angle than that held by the economists and sociologists who have followed in his wake. I ask how useful are the rules he laid down in his examination of evolving social/economic institutions in tracking worthwhile developments in the discipline of art criticism: in particular, in the efforts taking place on the nineteenth-century American art scene to assign value to acts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, to the arts of the critical review, and to the institutions and institutionalized practices committed to the elevation of public interest in the arts. These, therefore, are my immediate questions: Do Veblen’s principles work when applied to the general case (however varied its particulars) of nineteenthcentury American aesthetics? How well does “Veblenism” fare within the situation in which Americans found themselves in the years between the 1850s and the early 1900s? I use the term Veblenism in recognition of the specifics of Veblen’s position, which are separate from the more generalized manner by which his views might be applicable to areas to which he did not directly turn his attention. This dual usage is hardly unfamiliar. The writings of Charles Darwin focus on particular sets of evidence for particular purposes, while “Darwinism” spreads its influence over extended regions that may have slight relation to Darwin’s concerns.2 I do not want to risk introducing distortions to Veblen’s position such as those Herbert Spencer imposed upon Darwin’s writings in creating that placebo “social Darwinism,” picked up all too readily by American business and industry. I think rather of Darwin’s statement about the effect that Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population had upon his own endeavors: “I had at last got a theory by which to work”—the theory Darwin needed to pull together the observations he made on the species populating the outermost territories of the Pacific.3 In order to bring some systematic order to these explora-



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails 

tions into the theories propounded for the Art Idea, I pursue my own “theory.” As I place Veblen’s writings next to the texts culled from the nether regions of America’s nineteenth-century art world and from the arts and crafts of the early and late Italian Renaissance, I find Veblen’s imprint glossing that material, just as these texts gloss the influence Veblenism has had over relations (soothing or abrasive) between the sciences and humanistic studies of our own times. Economics and mathematical sciences have importance to our understanding of certain aspects of the plastic arts. Statistical studies by John Michael Montias that articulate the economic base of fifteenth-century Delft, together with Philip Steadman’s analysis of experiments in optics and geometric measurements under way at that time, clearly add to our grasp of the aesthetic milieu inhabited by Johannes Vermeer, his fellow painters, and their patrons.4 It would be nice if it went without saying that Western art is indebted to contributions made by professionals from related scientific disciplines, whether they pertain to the mastering of vanishing-point perspectives in paintings by Gentile Bellini and Piero della Francesca, the architectural projects of Bernini, or the optical experiments associated with French impressionism.5 But it seems that such points remain to be made, certainly when placing them within the Veblenian context. As a sociologist and economist Veblen limited his observations on art’s artifacts to the conspicuously consumed decorative fripperies that adorned the rooms and the bodies of members of the leisure class of his generation. He touched only briefly on the ironies of the relation of art to labor lodged at the heart of the Ruskinian arts and crafts movement.6 But how I wish he had turned his piercing gaze upon the numinous figures by Thomas Dewing lavished on piano tops and library screens, the opulent furniture designed by Christian and Albert Herter, the intricately woven tapestries by Candace Wheeler, the stunning stained-glass windows of John La Farge, the unique confections of Louis Comfort Tiffany, the sculpted fireplace mantels designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the murals commissioned of Edwin Howland Blashfield that flowed across the walls of New York’s drawing rooms—decorative fripperies all, but worthy of consideration as concerted moves in the making of an accomplished, albeit self-contained, aesthetic. What Veblen chose not to analyze left unnoticed the Old Master paintings that came into the hands of J. P. Morgan and Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the arts of Asia and of James McNeill Whistler that Charles Freer brought together to adorn his home—highly polished pieces of workmanship that cannot be, should not be, too facilely swept under the generalizing terms “conspicuous consumption” and “futile effort,” which diminish their aesthetic or social value.7



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails

Was Veblen’s failure to consider the aesthetics of his America a casual oversight or was it the result of a deep hole in his thinking? He was a superlative critic of the 1890s but unable or unwilling to meet the all-inclusive tasks demanded of “the critic”—he who in the mind of William Stillman in 1855 “must be naturalist, philosopher, painter, sculptor, and poet.”8 Thorstein Veblen is primarily associated with the disciplines of sociology and economics, yet perceptive readers recognize the wide range of related interests that stimulated his pronouncements within those disciplines.9 I myself liken the experience of reading Veblen to that of the scene from Darwin’s 1859 conclusion to The Origin of the Species. “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”10 Veblen richly contributes to the legacy of aspirants to the discovery of methods that would make it possible to systematize everything—the impossible desire to achieve Unity to be found in Einstein, yes, and Henry Adams, of course, who suffered mightily because Multiplicity defies Unity, but most famously stated in the introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature of 1836: “All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. . . . Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.”11 For a single intellect to attempt to touch down upon the diverse elements embedded in society’s “entangled bank” is to invite failure, but when, in his struggle to devise valid systems of evaluation, Veblen made mistakes, he still pointed the way toward seeing the useful mistakes society makes for itself.12 This is certainly the case in the material upon which I shall draw (from the Crayon and other American periodicals) when tracing what America’s would-be art critics had to say about their role, the social and economic status of the nation’s would-be artists, and the relation of critics and artists to attitudes held toward art’s efficiency or wastefulness by that citizen Veblen designated as the hapless “normal man.” Do not commit critical suicide by taking an Emersonian leap into the delusion you can “explain all phenomena,” yet try not to limit your efforts so severely that crucial matters are overlooked. To systematize is a way “for reducing things to intelligent orders” by means of the “reflective judgment” that turns our knowledge over to a process that operates “under more general laws than any given by



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails 

experience.” “All that is required is that the things be thought as falling under a system of law according to which they adapt themselves to the laws of our understanding—that they are such in the manner of their being as they would be if they were made with a view to the exigencies of our capacity of knowing.”13 It was precisely the concern over “knowing” and “system” that so angered John Ruskin in the section on “The Fall” in The Stones of Venice, published in 1853 and picked up in the issues of November 1855 by the Crayon. In his diatribe, Ruskin singled out the decay (moral and aesthetic) introduced by “the Roman Renaissance” into Venice by “the Pride of Science” and “the Pride of System.” The very elements Veblenism later encouraged led to “the most exquisite absurdity of the whole Renaissance system,” which burdened “the artist with every species of knowledge that is of no use to him,” imposed “fruitless experiments; fruitless, because undirected by experience and uncommunicated in their results,” “corrupted the sources of knowledge,” and encouraged “the tendency to formulization and system which, under the name of philosophy, encumbered the minds of the Renaissance schoolmen.”14 The Crayonites saw much to agree with in Ruskin’s angers, which he expressed with sarcastic brilliance, more heightened than Veblen’s would be but hardly unlike the modes of argument in which Veblen was so accomplished. But when Veblen followed his talents as psychologist, anthropologist, and cultural analyst, swerving aside from the fetters, cages, and manacles of “Renaissance” systems making, he came near (as Emerson, although perhaps not Ruskin, would wish him to) to including data about “language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.” It is at those times that he opposes “the classic-academic” mind so stunningly expressed in 1901 by William James. This is the mind, whether “animistic or associationistic,” that is devoted to comforting abstractions, with its “fondness for clean pure lines and noble simplicity in its constructions.” It is the mind that “explains things by as few principles as possible and is intolerant of either nondescript facts or clumsy formulas” and that insists “facts must lie in a neat assemblage” in full view on a “sort of sunlit terrace.” For James and for Veblen at his most daring, eccentric, and powerful, the mind must revert “from classic to gothic,” stepping beyond that terrace to “where uncouth forms lurk in the shadows.” Veblen was not a William James, much less an Emerson. He chose not to delve into the shadows where, in James’s words, the “menagerie and the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their material.” But he went far, so as not to be the cheat.15 This was the happy case when either Veblen or art critics were at the top of their game while engaged with the wily, ever-deceptive data with which the scientific aesthetic must deal.



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails

f i c t i v e i n t e r j e c t i o n s: The Critics Emile Zola, His Masterpiece (1886) Setting: Paris (1860s) The players: Jory, art critic for “two widely circulated papers,” expresses his views. “Although, in his inmost heart he remained a sceptical voluptuary, a worshipper of success at any price, he was acquiring importance, and readers began to look upon his opinions as fiats.” Jory and like critics are rebuked by Bongrand, eminent artist of the preceding generation: “[N]owadays the first hobbledehoy who can stick a figure on its legs makes all the trumpets of publicity blare. . . . A hullabaloo from one end of France to the other, sudden reputations that shoot up of a night, and burst upon one like thunderbolts, amid the gaping of the throng.”16

Jack London, The Sea-Wolf (1904) Setting: “The Ghost,” a sealing schooner, captained by Wolf Larsen (the present day) The players: Humphrey Van Weyden, literary critic and man of leisure, has an “analysis of Poe’s place in American literature” in the current Atlantic Monthly, with plans to write on “The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.” Maud Brewster calls him “the Dean of American Letters the Second,” in an obvious reference to William Dean Howells. Wolf Larsen voices his contempt for both Humphrey and Maud since they do no work of a kind he can recognize.17



Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (1915) Setting: Chicago (1890s) The players: In response to an exhibition of Eugene Witla’s paintings, critics shape public opinion since the “more eclectically cultured turned to the newspapers to see what the art critics would say of this—how they would label it.” “One art publication, connected with and representative of the conservative tendencies of a great publishing house, denied the merit of the collection as a whole, ridiculed the artist’s insistence on shabby details as having artistic merit, denied that he could draw accurately, denied that he was a lover of pure beauty, and accused him of having no higher ideal than that of desire to shock the current mass by painting brutal things brutally. . . . ‘If we are to have ash cans and engines and broken-down bus-horses thrust down our throats as art, Heaven preserve us. We had better turn to commonplace photography at once and be done with it.’ . . . Yet there were others like Luke Severas who



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails  went to the other extreme. ‘A true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the ability to endow color—not with its photographical value . . . but with its higher spiritual significance; the ability to indict life with its own grossness, to charge it prophetically with its own meanness and cruelty in order that mayhap it may heal itself; the ability to see wherein is beauty— even in shame and pathos and degradation; of such is this man’s work.’”18

Many tasks are laid upon the critic: he must offer a keen critique of the tired language that encrusts obsolete concepts while resorting to highly polished rhetorical skills that lay out new positions with stunning force to potential skeptics. Veblen’s own critics, harsh or otherwise, acknowledge his remarkable ability to demolish outmoded arguments and to introduce seductively phrased new concepts. Fortunately for him, although not for those who felt the sting of his wit, Veblen stepped away from “the sunlit terrace” of the pre-Darwinian “classicacademic” imagination. Veblen had arrogant self-confidence in abundance, as did other social “marginals” such as the proto-Veblens, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Adams, and Gertrude Stein.19 It was thus that Veblen could impose his demands on all who attempted to analyze social systems by means of the particular scientific methodology he authorized. It was thus that he could face down the fact that then, as now, the hard and applied sciences have as little respect for the disciplines of the social sciences (sociology, economics, political science, psychology) as Veblen showed toward the humanities.20 Measuring Up to Veblenism

Try with your mind’s ear to hear the tone of Veblen’s voice as he lays down the requirements for effective scientific analysis, which, in turn, defines the best way to live according to “modern,” post-Darwinian principles. In the largest sense, this usually means learning what to reject, the point that later followers of Veblen took to heart. “Modern man rejects the priest, the moralist, or the lawyer as his final arbiter.” Indeed, “Whatever is not of [science] or consonant with its ‘opaque creations’ stands outside modernity.”21 In the 1820s, long before latter-day Veblenians articulated this daunting denunciation, Friedrich Hegel delivered a series of lectures on the happy relation between the arts and the sciences. He maintained that art, scientifically considered, could shake free from the useless belief that it exists solely “to serve the ends of pleasure and entertainment, to decorate our surroundings, to impart pleasantness to the external conditions of our life, and to emphasize other ob-



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails

jects by means of ornament.” Through “the science of art,” art ascends to the realm of independent thought, capable of becoming “the first middle term of reconciliation between pure thought and what is external, sensuous, and transitory.” Indeed, our efforts “to ascertain scientifically what art is” will lead us toward “the higher reality, born of mind.”22 The views held by Hegel—reverently cited by the Crayon throughout its short term as America’s inaugural art journal—reflect an overriding concern that art not be seen as useless, susceptible to rejection, a mere plaything for the rich and indolent. Art must be “scientifically” studied, be free from subservience to lesser needs, and be aligned with pure thought. Nonetheless, science so defined could embrace Art Thoughts that attested to “the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind.”23 The powerful influence of German idealism paired aesthetics with what the nineteenth century’s scientific methodology demanded of all advanced thought. “The priest, the moralist, and the lawyer” still played their assigned roles. “Modernity,” as Veblen read the term, had yet to appear. Veblen experienced up close what it means to be tutored in the mores of the “savage” culture that antedated Hegel’s goal of bringing the Art Idea into conjunction with science (with science a word mouthed all too loosely, its advocates unable to point to which science, if science it was). Carleton College, where Veblen spent the first years of his academic training, was—as “[t]his Christian college”—dedicated to combating “the superficial scepticism, or coarse but taking infidelity, or vulgar vice. . . . In it therefore, Moses comes before Socrates, David before Homer, Paul before Plato and Jesus Christ is acknowledged Lord of all.”24 This mandate, so common in America’s colleges throughout the nineteenth century, meant that the scientific study of economics Veblen took as his own suffered its own cultural lag, as did the acceptable study of the plastic arts. It was as Roger Fry, British art critic, put it when facing the fact that “of all sciences, aesthetic has been the greatest laggard.”25 Words spoken by art critics in the pre-Darwinian era had to be eaten throughout the years of cultural lag that separated entrenched views of a scientific method inscribed by a priori determinations from the later disinterested, experimental probings supported by Veblen. It was worth it after all. Pressed to take advantage of the new doctrines, art critics straddling the midcentury had little to guide them and much to deter them from becoming latent Veblenians, however much they tried. Just being what they were—individuals on the margins of the working world of technology—signaled the failures they faced even before they entered upon the serious game of formulating institutions and systems that accommodated past and current phases of aesthetic thought. At the beginning,



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails 

most spoke out as amateurs. Yet they who loved believed they were well suited to their task. They claimed that a true understanding of art must involve both “knowledge” and “love.”26 Throughout the nineteenth century, art critics began to surface in the mainstream quarterlies and monthly magazines—publications readily scorned as genteel and belletrist by hardheaded members of utilitarian professions. Slowly, and not always successfully, as Stillman notes, critics began to modify or jettison neoclassic notions of the supernatural or conventional and symbolical. But if “idle curiosity” was as important to them as it would become to Veblen, instincts and intuition were also privileged as the means to go beyond surface sightings. They debated the proper balance between particulars and essentials, between individual genius and the group-collective. What mattered most was that “the critic must be naturalist, philosopher, painter, sculptor, and poet.”27 Still, according to Veblen’s later mandates, they would not, could not, ever achieve these goals. Still, it is striking to see how many managed to become Veblenian in one respect or another. Veblen was relatively gentle (although condescending) in his assessment of his contemporaries who were gravitating, as toward a new fad, closer to the magic world of science. His extended remarks, included toward the conclusion of that ur-document of 1906, “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization,” set the standards by which the earnest efforts by Americans to strengthen their Art Thoughts were graded. As was his wont, Veblen first dips into the past when “savage culture” served as a “genial spinning of apocryphal yarns,” “an amiably inefficient formulation of experiences and observations in terms of something like a life-history of the phenomena observed.” It has, on the one hand, little value, and little purpose, in the way of pragmatic expediency, and so it is not closely akin to the pragmatic-barbarian scheme of life; while, on the other hand, it is also ineffectual as a systematic knowledge of matter-of-fact. It is a quest of knowledge, perhaps of systematic knowledge and it is carried on under the incentive of the idle curiosity. In this respect it falls in the same class with the civilised man’s science; but it seeks knowledge not in terms of opaque matter-of-fact, but in terms of some sort of spiritual life imputed to the facts. It is romantic and Hegelian rather than realistic and Darwinian. The logical necessities of its scheme of thought are necessities of spiritual consistency rather than of quantitative equivalence. It is like science in that it has no ulterior motive beyond the idle craving for a systematic correlation of data; but it is unlike science in that its standardisation and correlation of data runs in terms of the free play of imputed personal initiative rather than in terms of the constraint of objective cause and effect.28

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The “savage” phase had already been replaced by the “civilised.” In light of the “life-history” traced in Veblen’s essay, the post−Civil War, post-Darwinian articles in Scribner’s and the Century had replaced the antebellum, pre-Darwinian views presented in the Crayon. Unfortunately, Veblen observes, such a stab at “scientific inquiry proceeds on the same general motive of idle curiosity as guided the savage myth-makers, though it makes use of concepts and standards in great measure alien to the myth-maker’s habit of mind.” The name of science is after all a word to conjure with. So much so that the name and the mannerisms, at least, if nothing more of science, have invaded all fields of learning and have even overrun territory that belongs to the enemy. So there are “sciences” of theology, law, and medicine. . . . And there are such things as Christian Science, and “scientific” astrology, palmistry, and the like. But within the field of learning proper there is a similar predilection for an air of scientific acumen and precision where science does not belong.29

Veblen cuts deeply into the differences he finds between “scholarship” (viewed as “general information” gathered by taste makers within the academy) and “theoretical statement” (of little use if merely stiffened by an excess of the pragmatic). In noting the questionable trend that tempts insulated scholars and sterile theoreticians to refigure themselves as true scientists, he takes the field of literary studies as his main example. The students of literature, for instance, are more and more prone to substitute critical analysis and linguistic speculation, as the end of their endeavors, in the place of that discipline of taste and the cultivated sense of literary form and literary feeling that must always remain the chief end of literary training, as distinct from philology and the social sciences. . . . The effect of this straining after scientific formulations in a field alien to the scientific spirit is as curious as it is wasteful. Scientifically speaking these quasi-scientific inquiries necessarily begin nowhere and end in the same place; while in the point of cultural gain they commonly come to nothing better than spiritual abnegation.30

Veblen does not dismiss traditional scholarship. It has its place in the lives of savages at play. It “still holds its place in the scheme of learning, in spite of the unadvised efforts of the short-sighted to blend it with the world of science, for it affords play for the ancient genial propensities that ruled men’s quest of knowledge before the coming of science or of the outspoken pragmatic barbarism.” Further, he discerns less “antagonism between science and scholarship” than the distaste held by scholars for those who lower scientific inquiry to the level of self-serving pragmatics. “Modern scholarship shares with modern science the



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quality of not being pragmatic in its aim. Like science it has no ulterior end. . . . yet while the two ranges of discipline belong together in many ways and while there are many points of contact and sympathy between the two; while the two together make up the modern scheme of learning, yet there is no need for confounding the one with the other, nor can the one do the work of the other.”31 This is Thorstein Veblen at his best when it comes to defanging upstarts who seek parity as useful actors on the modern scene. He does this with ease by demonstrating how little they deserve to be viewed as worthy opponents and how far they are from being active cohorts. But take note of the choice of the scholarly disciplines he uses as contrasting models for inevitable failure and assured success. Literature should attend solely to “taste” rather than to try to ape theoretical areas of inquiry long since appropriated by German-trained philologists.32 Part Three gives its attention to the consequences of this stigma and the efforts made by members of the literary world (both critics and authors) to combat belittlement during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Among other disciplines struggling to be born—left unnamed in Veblen’s résumé of his generation’s “short-sighted” seizure of the honorary principles of scientific inquiry—were sociology, economics, political science, and psychology. (Veblen felt no need to damn the discipline of art history: no need because the teaching of art history and the training of museum curators still lay ahead on the academic scene.) As for the place of the teaching of history, Henry Adams experienced shame in being involved with an academic pursuit considered a loser in the modern world of intellectual activity.33 The final blow for any who might aspire to be Thorstein Veblen was the notion that art critics had no place in societies shaped by achievements in advanced technology. This harsh truth encircled that major technological event, the American Civil War, wherein students of America’s art culture were forced to view it as a manifestation of the earlier “savage” phases of the kind Veblen outlined in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899. Lagging Arts/Advancing Sciences

In his preface to Art in America: A Critical and Historical Study, published in 1880, S. G. W. Benjamin takes care to review “the various phases of American art” so that he might “trace its progress from one step to another.” Benjamin continually refers to his belief that any nation’s art is “the result of centuries of growth” and that only “maturity and repose offer the occasion for [its] development.” As the United States entered its “third phase,” “repose” was in short supply and “maturity” not yet gained. By 1880 the “maturity” necessary for “repose” was

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hardly the temper of the times. The chapter titled “Present Tendencies” traces “in geometrical ratio the progress from primitive silhouettes and rude carvings up to the present comparatively advanced condition of the arts in this country.” Contemporary art culture is characterized by “the same rapid spasmodic action” that drives all areas of the nation’s development. In Benjamin’s hope that art would indeed “dawn upon the country before long,” he points to the orderliness of the mathematical sciences as the best model for America’s present, rather than the randomness of future biological change. No wonder he liked what Herbert Spencer thought he saw in America: a special genius for technological innovation and the ability to solve scientific problems made applicable to art in order that it could “reach a higher plane of excellence.”34 In 1905 Samuel Isham’s The History of American Painting made no use of Benjamin’s geometries; nor did Isham find evidence of biology happily at work since he uncovers no evidence of “organic growth, of logical development.” As would Veblen’s 1906 review of historical processes, Isham states that the thread of art is continually “broken.” Aesthetic theory “has continually deserted one set of models to follow another, retaining at each change hardly any tradition of its former ideals.” Broken or smooth, whatever the means by which American art had reached its “present” phase, it was and would continue to be at a disadvantage in terms of time-ruled processes. “America is the youngest of the great nations.”35 Because of its primal youth, the nation’s artistic efforts might never make up the lost centuries during which Western art inched forward from primitive crudeness to civilization’s sophistication. The Old Masters indeed! America had yet to provide sufficient Young Masters to impress the world. Under such disadvantages, how could the art scene ever devise its own systems and institutions of merit? In the years just prior to World War I, Gertrude Stein (pontificating from Paris by means of a verbal hubris as splendid as Thorstein Veblen’s) had this to say about America’s place along the world’s time line. “Gertrude Stein always speaks of America as being now the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a twentieth-century of life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world.”36 Stein was convinced that modernity in art and literature had been shaped by America’s forward leap into advanced technologies. While an undergraduate at Radcliffe College (the women’s annex to Harvard University), she had taken classes with William James, who had this advice to offer regarding her future



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schooling. “Well, he said, it should be either philosophy or psychology. Now for philosophy you have to have higher mathematics and I don’t gather that that has ever interested you. Now for psychology you must have a medical education.” Stein “had been interested in both biology and chemistry and so medical school presented no difficulties,” so off she went to Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she began “a study of all the brain tracts” until, to the shock of her professors, she told them, “[Y]ou don’t know how little I like pathological psychology, and how all medicine bores me . . . and that was the end of the medical education of Gertrude Stein.” For Stein the “methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed”—America’s Faustian contribution to mankind’s “life-history”—were not those of the abstractions of the laboratory. Stein thought African art boring since it was “very ancient, very narrow, very sophisticated”; “as an american she likes primitive things to be more savage,” so “what had laboratory science to do with truly modern living?”37 Quite a bit, in Veblen’s view. Although, like Stein, Veblen distrusted overdependence upon abstractions (tainted as they might be with pre-Darwinian neoclassicism), he believed that the impact of applied technology on the latest phases of pecuniary culture defined “modern” existence. The impersonal scientific method reigned, and personal matters of taste held small value.38 But even if Veblen and Stein might disagree over the matter of America’s “age,” one longs to have had these two testy individuals in direct debate over the relations of the “old” arts to the “new” technologies. America was hardly the first society to enter upon the Industrial Revolution. That the British first introduced a rash of innovations in the 1700s was— to use the phrase Henry Adams delighted in repeating throughout his writings as social historian—“what every schoolboy knows.” British painters had been quickly drawn to pictorializations of the drama of steam and rail transportation, the proliferation of iron mills (“satanic” or otherwise), the engineering marvels of bridges, ships, and the Crystal Palace. Although John Ruskin and William Morris deplored the corruption of aesthetic taste by industrial materialism, British artists expressed both awe and terror in the face of the new technological sublime.39 Postbellum technology in America began to speed up. Aided by its commanding advances in weaponry, transportation, and manufacturing techniques, the North’s successful waging of war (brought on, in Brooks Adams’s mind, by Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which consolidated the slave system in the South) led to Gertrude Stein’s naming America as “the oldest country” by 1900.40 The consequences of becoming older in industrial progress, rather than younger, were already in evidence at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, which

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celebrated the nation’s success after a mere one hundred years as a political entity. Throughout Philadelphia’s exhibition halls, Americans sought to demonstrate that what London’s Crystal Place had placed on display in 1851 to honor a nation in existence since 1066 was nothing in comparison to what this young/old country had achieved. The prize exhibit was the Corliss Engine on display in the Machinery Building, where the “superior elegance, aptness, and ingenuity of our machinery is observable at a glance. Yes, it is still in these things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks.”41 The delighted public could also move from the Machinery Building to view “The Dreaming Iolanthe,” “an ideal subject” carved from butter. Viewers were amazed that this material had been handled with “a high degree of talent, a fine ideal feeling, as well as exceeding delicacy and brilliancy of manipulation.”42 Was an “American aesthetics” shaped of iron and steel only going to give the advantage (in Veblen’s words) to “passionless matter-of-fact,” thereby replacing those “higher generalisations” and “larger principles of life” that had previously defined the nature of “knowledge” throughout the “life-history on the human plane”? Whatever aesthetic program was being devised for Americans would have to make certain to include ideal forms carved of butter. As a result, “[t]he normal man, such as his inheritance has made him, has therefore good cause to be restive under its dominion.”43 The Economics of Cultural Deficit

The writing of an American art history was a new form of knowledge gathering in the 1880s. Yet unaware of the theory Stein had still to advance, authors had to be frank about the country’s status as “the youngest of the great nations,” in that it had acquired independence from British political rule only a century earlier. It was not yet independent in the cultural sense, as its art was “little more than a reflection” of the old nations across the Atlantic. Commentators were fated to be on the defensive. Many tried to mask their painful sense of inferiority by a vocabulary of hope, of promise, of future times, ever uttering words like “revivals” and “rebirths,” but candor required that they speak of the lack of a “sustaining atmosphere” that impeded the advancement of a successful art scene for practicing artists, critics, and collectors.44 In November 1873, under the heading “Culture and Progress,” Scribner’s Monthly bemoaned New York’s dearth of artbased institutions. (What New York lacked, the nation lacked.) It asked, as Henry James would ask about Hawthorne’s America, “But how can New York ever hope to be a city of the soul until she has something with which to keep the soul alive? We have no libraries, no museums, no collections of natural-history, no galleries



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of pictures and statues, worthy even of a large town, much less worthy of a city that writes herself ‘Metropolitan.’”45 Within a few years, however, there was the proud heralding of “the beginning of a new order, the Renaissance, so to speak, of 1877.” The strongest would succeed in the struggle over which “species” could survive in a chilly cultural climate, once the Old Group was ousted by “the Younger Painters in America.”46 The Veblenian method reaches back to origins to get a clearer sense of what it was like to attempt to be an artist in “savage America.” In 1798 one of the new nation’s many itinerant painters offered his services in the following newspaper advertisement: “a self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of Art.”47 Just as S. G. W. Benjamin’s Art in America: A Critical and Historical Sketch of 1880 was structured according to “phases,” Samuel Isham’s The History of American Painting of 1905 chronicles the three “phases” through which Art Thoughts had progressed to the present moment. The “Primitives” covers whatever passed as art among America’s colonials up to the American Revolution. Next comes the time of the “Provincials,” when artists lived under the heavy thumb of European influence. Isham finally inches into the “Contemporary” to describe the brave efforts by the new generation to break free from old ways. But to get to the “phase” where critics like Benjamin and Isham would attempt to create a life history of America’s drive to overcome its cultural deficits, it took the earlier efforts of writers, featured in journals that devoted sections to “Culture and Progress” in the years prior to the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath. The Crayon was the first independent periodical devoted entirely to issues of art and the aesthetic. Published in New York from 1855 to 1861, it disappeared with the advent of war.48 Filling in the gap created by the war’s shift to a new kind of “facts,” random pieces on the art scene continued to appear sporadically during the remainder of the 1860s in the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation. In 1870 Scribner’s Monthly offered articles on art, together with notes on literature, politics, and world affairs. In 1881 Scribner’s (renamed Century Illustrated Monthly), entered upon a run of years when it held sway as one of the nation’s preeminent mainstream publications. It was genteel, yes, but also articulate, intellectual, and intent on reaching out to “the normal man” in the hope of lessening the unease he might feel in the face of the enormous changes taking place during the same barbaric phase Veblen was so brilliantly at work analyzing. In an issue of August 1879, Scribner’s praised John Addington Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy for reaching “the wide public” of readers, not “the narrow circle of the posted.” Thirty years later, the journal (now titled Century) displayed “Topics of the Time: Free Art and the Farmer’s Daughter” regarding the

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commission formed by President Theodore Roosevelt to aid farmers during the current financial depression. Century argued that more than “prosperity” was needed. “[H]appiness” would be enhanced if the “fatuous tariff on art” was abolished to let “the farmer—or, let us say, the farmer’s daughter—have a chance at the fine things as well as the fat things of the world.” Century’s suggestion: Americans must do all they can to encourage the growth of art museums. In emulation of the passage in 1891 of the international copyright law, which freed American authors from unfair financial penalties, an end was put to crippling taxes on imported art. Rational economic and legal measures would gladden “American artists, educators, and connoisseurs who, together with members of the general public, beg for ‘free art.’”49 Thus began a series of crusades on the part of the “informed” to disseminate art to the farmer and his daughter. Disseminate it as well to “the normal man” later named by Veblen as the metaphoric personage made uneasy by the era’s quest for purposeful technological systems. In Veblen’s words, a “searching knowledge of facts” swirled around this representative of the Great American Public; he was besieged by this hallmark of “modern civilisation” whose pressure on his everyday life gave him “good cause to be restive under its domination.”50 It was the duty of the arts men to satisfy needs the “normal man” probably did not even know he had. They sought to create a series of institutions and systems for art education that they “knew” was required for the public’s greater good.

f i c t i v e i n t e r j e c t i o n s: The Public Emile Zola, His Masterpiece (1886) Setting: Paris (1860s) The players: In the Salon of the Rejected, “[t]he crowd, already compact, increased every minute, for the official Salon was being deserted. People came stung by curiosity, impelled by a desire to judge the judges, and, above all, full of the conviction that they were going to see some very diverting things.” In the Gallery of Honour of the Salon at the Palais de l’Industrie, “[a]ll those who in any way create a stir in Paris were assembled together—the celebrities, the wealthy, the adored, talent, money and grace, the masters of romance, of the drama and of journalism, clubmen, racing men and speculators, women of every category, hussies, actresses and society belles. . . . And what especially struck Claude was the jostling flock-like behaviour of the people, their banded curiosity in which there was nothing youthful or passionate, the bitterness of their voices, the weariness to be read on their faces, their general appearance



An American Aesthetic and Its Travails of suffering. Envy was already at work. . . . It was the usual scamper of the first moment; everybody looking for everybody else, rushing to see one another and bursting into recriminations—noisy, interminable fury” (110, 267–68). Henry James, Roderick Hudson ([1875] 1907) Setting: Rome (1870s) The players: Hudson’s studio is visited by Mr. Leavenworth, “a tall, expansive, bland gentleman, with a carefully brushed whisker and a spacious, fair, well-favoured face, which seemed somehow to have more room in it than was occupied by a smile of superior benevolence, so that (with his smooth white forehead) it bore a certain resemblance to a large parlour with a very florid carpet, but without mural decoration.” Having disposed of his holdings of borax mines, he is “eager to patronise our indigenous talent” for the “large residential structure” being built “on the banks of the Ohio.” He wishes to complement the library “filled with well-selected and beautifully-bound authors” with “a representation, in pure white marble, of the idea of Intellectual Refinement.”51 Henry James, The Tragic Muse ([1890] 1907) Setting: Paris (1880s) The players: Members of “the British traveller abroad” attend the Salon of the Palais de l’Industrie —Nick, Biddy, and Grace Dormer, and Lady Agnes, their mother. Together they illustrate “the happier aspects of the energetic race to which they had the honor to belong.” In the “fresh, diffused light of the Salon,” they show as “finished creatures”—“almost as much on exhibition as if they had been hung on the line.” Although Nick and Biddy take interest in “a marble group which stood near them on the right—a man, with the skin of a beast round his loins, tussling with a naked woman in some primitive effort of courtship or capture,” Lady Agnes, in her role as “the British matron,” declares, “Everything seems very dreadful.” She rejects “the murders, the tortures, all kinds of disease and indecency!” When Grace observes, “I like them better in London—they’re much less unpleasant,” her mother agrees: “They’re things you can look at.” Biddy chimes in, “in a voice like the tinkle of a silver bell,” “The subject doesn’t matter; it’s the treatment, the treatment.” As Nick and Biddy study “a head of a young man in terra cotta . . . to whom, with his thick neck, his little cap and his wide ring of dense curls, the artist had given the air of some sturdy Florentine of the time of Lorenzo,” Nick says his mother would not like it. “She has inherited the queer old superstition that art’s pardonable only so long as it’s bad—so long as it’s done at odd hours, for a little distraction, like a game of tennis or of whist.” Any “effort to

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An American Aesthetic and Its Travails carry it as far as one can . . . she regards as just the dangerous, the criminal element.”52 Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (1890) Setting: London (1880s) The players: Dick Heldar, artist for a newspaper syndicate, has painted a battle vignette, with “a flushed, dishevelled, bedevilled scallawag, with his helmet at the back of his head, and the living fear of death in his eyes, and the blood oozing out of a cut over his ankle-bone. He wasn’t pretty, but he was all soldier and very much man.” When Dick turns it over to the newspaper’s art manager, the man says “that his subscribers wouldn’t like it. It was brutal and coarse and violent—man being naturally gentle when he’s fighting for his life. They wanted something more restful, with a little more color. . . . I put him into a lovely red coat without a speck on it. That is Art. I polished his boots,— observed the high light on the toe. That is Art. I cleaned his rifle—rifles are always clean on service,—because that is Art. . . . I shaved his chin, I washed his hands, and gave him an air of fatted-peace. Result, military tailor’s patternplate. Price, thank Heaven! twice as much as for the first sketch.” Despite Dick’s contempt for the public—“Let them pay—they’ve no knowledge”; “Give ’em what they know, and when you’ve done it once do it again”—he is pleased with the crowd outside the print shop where one of his “good” works is on display. “Look at their faces. It hits ’em. They don’t know what makes their eyes and mouths open; but I know.”53 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) Setting: Paris (1903–7) The players: “The first autumn salon was a step in official recognition of the outlaws of the independent salon,” held “in the Petit Palais opposite the Grand Palais.” “The scene had a great deal of freshness and was not alarming. There were a number of attractive pictures but there was one that was not attractive. It infuriated the public, they tried to scratch off the paint.” Stein and her brother return to examine a Matisse. “People were roaring with laughter at the picture and scratching at it. Gertrude Stein could not understand why, the picture seemed to her perfectly natural . . . and she could not understand why it infuriated everybody. . . . it upset her to see them all mocking at it. . . . just as later she did not understand why since [her] writing was all so clear and natural they mocked at and were enraged by her work.”54

The list was long of all the means that were lacking to bring art to the attention of the public in order that the task of education might begin—especially, it



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seemed, in the United States. Ways were devised to make up this woeful deficit, slowly at first, then accelerating in the years after the Civil War. Unlike Europe, America had no official institutions like the church or state with the authority to promote art, thus a jerry-built series of social modules was created. They provided venues, occasions, and civic structures that might encourage the penetration of the Art Idea into a world that had, as Veblen so brilliantly understood, other matters on its mind. The success of these mini-institutions often rested, however, on just how Veblenian they were: as will be shown in the pages ahead, they included (1) public exhibitions sponsored by newly formed art galleries and museums; (2) burgeoning media sources (newspapers and periodicals) that reported on art exhibitions; (3) the advent of reasonably priced reproductions of famous paintings for home consumption; (4) guidebooks for the growing market of novice art lovers; (5) publication of books by leading art critics; (6) art schools set up to prevent the drain of students to European ateliers; (7) technologically enhanced teaching methods; (8) new goals for art analysis that freed aesthetics from the stranglehold of faulty philosophical idealism or flawed scientific naturalism. It was believed that an informed art education and the establishment of art museums with free days and sound management practices would prevent the untutored from being gulled by “modern art-charlatanry.” It was considered a good sign when art collections were taken to the hinterlands (that is, any place west of the Mississippi), as was the proliferation of “culture clubs” for both the elites and the masses. However snide, another essay in Scribner’s by the respected critic Clarence Cook emphasized that Leonardo da Vinci had a “hold on people who know nothing about art, and care nothing for it except as it is mixed up with their beliefs.” Leonardo’s reputation as a man of “scientific tendencies” and as “a useful inventor” was enhanced because The Last Supper was accepted by people with a reasonable religion, hung up in their parlors, and given out as a prize to newspaper subscribers.55 All possible avenues for the institutionalizing of Art Thoughts that would raise Americans above parlor art must be pursued. Consider the vast geographical distances that separated Americans from the museums and collections of Europe as well as the miles that stretched between the cities of the United States. In the absence of original works, dispersing the best art was an imperative. Later Walter Benjamin considered the mixed results regarding the nature of “aura” with the coming of advanced reproductive technologies, but there was merit to supplying Americans with reasonably priced engravings of past masters and contemporary artists.56 Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century, realized that the newest technics for reproducing artworks was an excellent marketing device as well as

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answering his heartfelt wish to elevate awareness of what fine art looks like. In November 1888 Century announced an ambitious program in “the service of Art to the public” through an extensive series of engravings by Timothy Cole, which ran into the early 1900s. In 1872 Charles Dudley Warner’s “What Is Your Culture to Me?” lamented the discrepancies that separated the educated gentleman and the laboring man. How to advance “the diffusion of works of art” in order “to resist the segregation of classes according to affinities of taste”? Sharing was the only remedy: sharing by books, by newspapers, by whatever means modern technology had to offer. “The artist, in the retirement of his studio, finishes a charming, suggestive, historical picture. The rich man buys it and hangs it in his library, where the privileged few can see it. . . . But the engraver comes, and, by his mediating art, transfers it to a thousand sheets, and scatters its sweet influence far abroad.”57 It was nicer to have the “real thing” set before public view—if, indeed, the pictures on display were not copies or copies of copies foisted off on the gullible. Exhibitors arranged displays of collections brought in from abroad, but did the public know how to react, other than as people might at a pleasurable social event? Newspapers and journals had their say on the matter. “The critics—to say nothing of the artistic and social quidnuncs who judge little and gossip much— are enjoying a first-class sensation in the exhibition, at Mr. Johnson’s gallery on Fifth Avenue, of Turner’s famous painting, ‘The Slave Ship.’ . . . it is rarely that we in Gotham get a chance to squabble over a noted work of a great master.”58 Insult was added to injury when paintings sent to Boston from Europe turned out “to take advantage of our natural national ignorance.” The Duke of Montepensier’s collection of Spanish and Italian works is “not worth what they cost in time, in money, and in printer’s ink.” And “is it not painfully evident that in republican Boston the charm of the Duke’s title, the prospect of having a Duke lend us his pictures, the new sensation of being taken an interest in by a royal personage have made us all too happy for our own good?”59 Ownership of items to add to public museums or private collections was not easy to arrange. Self-perceived as members of “the youngest nation,” art lovers knew that the greatest items for sale had long since been snapped up by “European galleries, governments, great potentates.” What was left were lesser works, if not the dregs, as exampled by the “somewhat ignoble realism” of genre and still life from the Netherlands. The newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art had scant chance “to get even a much smaller set of old Italian masters with their loftier ideal and religious tone.” Private collections risked purchasing fake paintings through auctions. After adding in the costs of duties, boxing, and freight charges, no wonder that shrewd would-be collectors needed assurance that paintings were above average and worth the price.60



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To the followers of Culture 2, knowledge was all important, whether the goals were cultural or financial. If one had not received systematic training, guided by the principles of inquiry Veblenism brought to the fore by the 1890s, one had little chance to know how to know. So what were the untutored in an untutored society to do? They might turn to the guidebooks and art histories imported from abroad, yet be harmed by intellectual dependency at best and misleading information at worst. The Crayon believed the general public required education that provided both “knowledge and right criticism.”61 But what constituted “right criticism” in the years surrounding the Civil War, which had, in Gertrude Stein’s view, transformed America into the world’s most advanced nation in terms of technology and art? Even Anna Jameson decided she had to notify American readers (Protestant to the core) that she could not “treat of the representations of the Blessed Virgin without touching on doctrines such as constitute the principle differences between the creeds of Christendom. . . . Not for worlds would I be guilty of a scoffing allusion to any belief or any object held sacred by sincere and earnest hearts; but neither has it been possible for me to write in a tone of acquiescence, where I altogether differ in feeling and opinion.”62 The American tourists who parade through the international theme novels of Henry James are never without their copies of Tauchnitz, Murray, or Baedeker. Raphael lovers referred to the English translation of Eugene Muntz’s Raphael: His Life, Theories, and Times, while Ruskinians clutched The Stones of Venice. Americans unable to take advantage of the precipitous rise in tours on the Continent after the end of the Civil War were certain to be scolded about the dense ignorance on “this side of the Atlantic.” They were thrown back on Violletle-Duc, Lubke, Burckhardt, or imported issues of L’art. Those who sought Arnoldian touchstones of taste dared not rely on the judgment of amateur critics. The “idle puffery” and love of superlatives printed in local newspapers had made the American art scene “a thing to be laughed at” by Europeans, to whom “American vain glory becomes a thing proverbial.”63 Caught between selfpreening boasts and earnest self-belittlements, there seemed no middle way for a postbellum society trying to deal with its cultural deficits. To which authorities might the general public turn? Angers of Influence

America’s art students and art lovers had to bear an even weightier burden. Was the legacy left by Europe’s art ancestors to be emulated, rejected, or adapted (and why should they care)? European artists also had to battle against the pressure of centuries of past glories, but the situation was far edgier for the

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Americans who went abroad after the Civil War to absorb ideas for the creation of a new art for the new country, only to find themselves overwhelmed by old traditions. In 1867 the Nation tried to get at the core of the problem. “What Is Art Criticism?” detailed the Veblenian stages through which Americans staggered in the attempt to gain effective standards of judgment. First there was “the primeval newspaper notice,” which responded to paintings in the same way it gushed over giant strawberries at a county fair. Next came “something that looked like criticism and partook of its nature, namely, discussion of art and works of art according to the principles of this or that school”—a method useful only when discussing theology or politics since the public understands what opposes one position to another. But in the Nation’s evaluation, it was useless and must be replaced by the principle of disinterested objectivity that assures the critic “does not take sides.”64 As long as America lacked an accredited system (safe from a priori conclusions), both the public and the practitioners of art were at the mercy of unquestioned judgments pulled out of the air. Foremost among them was the damaging belief that the Old Masters set the standards for all art, for all time.

f i c t i v e i n t e r j e c t i o n s : Roman Fervors Henry James, Roderick Hudson ([1875] 1907) Setting: Rome (1870s) The players: Hudson responds with enthusiasm to “the artificial element in life and the infinite superpositions of history” in “the immemorial city of convention,” where the pope sits “erect in a gilded coach drawn by four black horses.” He takes a studio by the “unclean historic river” adjacent to St. Angelo, the dome of St. Peter’s and the pines of the Villa Pamfili. “The place was crumbling and shabby and sinister, but the river was delightful, the rent was a trifle and everything was romantic.” While others argue whether “Venus, and Juno, and Apollo, and Mercury used to come down in a cloud into this very city of Rome” or whether they “arrived to-day in a very dirty cab; and were cheated by the driver too,” Hudson says, “It won’t matter a rap what you call them. . . . They shall be Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they shall be Power; they shall be Genius; they shall be Daring.” On her arrival from New England, Mary Garland is affected more violently: “Here in a single hour everything is changed. It’s as if a wall somewhere about me had been knocked down at a stroke. Before me lies an immense new world, and it makes the old one, the little narrow familiar conceited one I have always known, seem pitiful! . . . To enjoy so much beauty and wonder is to break with the past—I



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mean with one’s poor old own. And breaking’s a pain” (1: 92, 97–98, 117–118, 333).

The turn of Americans toward Continental Europe was expected, although they often viewed the habit of kowtowing to the English art tradition as a slur against patriotic pride. It transformed American art into a mere “echo”—a repetition in weaker terms of “something already told.” By emulating what their former political masters had already accomplished, American artists were deprived of the “originality” that was “essential to give one’s self a genuine existence in the world of Art.” The sad fate the new nation had to face down was to be an increasingly visible force on the industrial front but nonexistent in the cultural sense.65 Apprentice practitioners of the plastic arts had to learn the skills of their material craft. In the early years “the provincials” (as Isham called them) sought out “universities” abroad in a succession of art centers, ranging from Italy (Rome and Florence), to Germany (Munich and Düsseldorf ) to France and England— each of which were waging their own wars against the overpowering presence of the masters of the past. Back home, mainstream journals had to come to terms with, or act against, the Italian influence, which kept drawing an endless procession of art lovers to sacred sites.66 Anxious Americans wished to end the export of art students abroad—a market flow holding out scant hope that an authentic American vision could be imported back into the States. If only America could establish first-rate art schools, but this was not an easy matter in a culture in flux, with few models on how to bring system to the process. New York seemed the only place that might produce the right materials. Anywhere else was doomed to “aesthetic provincialism.”67 The bad blood that led to incessant rivalries among New York’s art academies gave Scribner’s ample occasion in the 1870s to report on their rise and fall. William C. Brownell’s “The Art-Schools of New York” sums up the hope in 1878 that a homebred cadre of young artists might “Take care of the art-schools.” From them should come “not only artists but aesthetic evangelists.”68 Yet obstacles were many and complex: the creative drain of American students to Europe; the divergent perspectives offered by Cooper Union, the Art Students’ League, the National Academy of Design, and the Society of Decorative Art; conflicting views on the nature of art’s “science” presented by Taine and Ruskin; responses from the general public, whose members, although never creators of art, were the potential purchasers. Brownell believed that the situation was mixed. Ten years earlier Americans had paid “very little attention” to aesthetics. They were absorbed by Reconstruc-

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tion politics, the newly freed black population, the “settlement of the Genesis and geology question,” and a spread of agitations ranging from “teetotalism to the emancipation of women.” Art was now a matter that “popular feeling is deeply stirred about,” but this caused its own concerns, since ignorant love is harmful. “Very likely, in mentioning [art], one would need to use some sonority of utterance, and to pronounce the word with a kind of ecstatic unctuousness and circumflex accent, in order to indicate the reverent ardor with which it has popularly to be worshipped.”69 Brownell notes that those in the know should be grateful in light of the fact that “we have so long had no art at all in a national sense.” It is the general public that needs to be instructed how to understand what the art process involves. Meantime, art students must be trained in “better taste and better skill.”70 This division of labors was not yet resolved. Taste is what art critics offer. Skill can be provided only by the technics taught in the studio. Technics, Technics!

Proto-Veblens like Thomas Eakins believed that the artist’s eye must not be deadened by contact with sterile artifacts; it must be educated by examples drawn directly from living nature, albeit through the application of methods of scientific precision, which had replaced moony raptures. Plaster casts imported from Europe had been both an aid and a curse to students in earlier times. Serving as substitutes for originals either unavailable or too costly to purchase, glossy white copies of copies had been the only way most Americans could see (or think they saw) the inspiring brilliance of ancient Greek and Renaissance sculpture.71 In the late 1870s Eakins’s advanced life-drawing classes at the Philadelphia Academy placed undraped models (male and female) before his students (male and female). Eakins also introduced dissection techniques; he wanted students to familiarize themselves with anatomical structures, to know the touch of flesh (however flawed) rather than sterile plaster (however idealized). Nonetheless, William Brownell, who generally liked what he found in New York’s art schools, was displeased with the aesthetic effects of Eakins’s introduction into the art studio of the morbidity of such scientific procedures: “Constant association with what is ugly and unpoetic, however useful, instead of even occasional association with what is poetic and beautiful, however useless.” Brownell’s conclusion: “a thirst for knowledge by no means leads to a delight in beauty.” All in all, Brownell agreed with Walter Shirlaw (leading teacher at New York’s Art Students’ League) that “art begins only where accuracy leaves off. An artist must have the science of his art at his fingers’ ends in order to play with it unconsciously.”72



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Brownell’s praise for Shirlaw’s concern over scientific accuracy was hardly unusual. This note recurs from first to last throughout the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the fact that “scientific accuracy” meant different things to different people. In the 1890s, as in the 1850s, William Stillman pointed to the merits of Perugino’s studio practice (he, the teacher of the young Raphael): “The history of art teaches us that it is better for a pupil to have a master who has a firm and sound style and method of working without great personal qualities, which are less influential in forming the art of the pupil than a correct technic.” America was waiting for its first true genius, its own Raphael. Until then, America’s art students must be given the opportunity to gain “correct technic” even in the face of the perceived danger that, by becoming a “technist,” one might destroy the “indefinable, unscientific, incommunicable quality” of art.73

fic t i v e i n t e r j e c t i o n s : Students in Training Emile Zola, His Masterpiece (1886) Setting: Paris (1860s) The players: Among the lists of candidates eligible for inclusion in the Salon exhibition at the Palais de l’Industrie “[t]here was the list of the studios of the School of Arts, the liberal list, the list of the uncompromising radical painters, the conciliatory list, the young painters’ list, even the ladies’ list, and so forth. The scene suggested all the turmoil at the door of the electoral polling booth on the morrow of the riot” (253). Henry James, Roderick Hudson ([1875] 1907) Setting: New England (1870s) The players: Many are quick to comment on what the untutored Hudson needs in order to become an accomplished sculptor: “The flame smoulders, but it’s never fanned by the breath of self-criticism. [Hudson] sees nothing, hears nothing, to help him to self-knowledge. He is hopelessly discontented, but he doesn’t know where to look for help.” It is unlikely that Roderick will be able to share in “the flexible temperament of those Italian artists of the sixteenth century who were indifferently painters and sculptors, sonneteers and engravers.” Like others of his generation, his studies of sculpture are limited to “looking at models and imitating them.” The “jocose” view held by native philistines further belittles this process. “Roderick is going off to Europe to learn to imitate the antique. . . . An antique, as I understand it . . . is an image of a pagan deity with considerable dirt sticking to it, and no arms, no nose, and no clothing.” (1: 29, 58–59, 99).

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An American Aesthetic and Its Travails Henry James, The Tragic Muse ([1890] 1907) Setting: Paris Salon (1880s) The players: Nick Dormer notes the pervasive atmosphere he must absorb in order to attain the “artistic life”: “The precinct of the marbles and bronzes spoke to him especially today; the glazed garden, not florally rich, with its new productions alternating with perfunctory plants and its queer damp smell, partly the odour of plastic clay, of the studios of sculptors, put forth the voice of old associations, of other visits, of companionships now ended—an insinuating eloquence which was at the same time somehow identical with the general sharp contagion of Paris. There was youth in the air, and a multitudinous newness, for ever reviving, and the diffusion of a hundred talents, ingenuities, experiments” (7: 21–22). Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute (1914) Setting: San Francisco (1890s) The players: Vandover goes through many stages in his art training. As a boy he invented his own “system of drawing. . . . Over the picture to be copied he would paste a great sheet of paper, ruling off the same into spaces of about an inch square. He would cut out one of these squares and Vandover would copy the portion of the picture thus disclosed. . . . At other times Vandover copied into his sketch-book, with hard crayons, those lithographed studies on buff paper which are published by the firm in Berlin. . . . From these he went on to bunches of grapes, vases of fruit and at length to more ‘Ideal heads.’ The climax was reached with a life-sized Head, crowned with honeysuckles and entitled ‘Flora.’ He was three weeks upon it. It was an achievement, a veritable chef-d’ouvre.” As a young man Vandover attends the School of Design. “All about were a multitude of casts, the fighting gladiator, the discobulus, the Venus of Milo, and hundreds of smaller pieces, masks, torsos, and the heads of the Parthenon horses. Flattened paint-tubes and broken bits of charcoal littered the floor and cluttered the chairs and shelves. A strong odour of turpentine and fixative was in the air, mingled with the stronger odours of linseed oil and sour, stale French bread. . . . Vandover was probably the most promising member of the school. His style was sketchy, conscientious, and full of strength and decision. He worked in large lines, broad surfaces and masses of light or shade. . . . Though he had no idea of composition, he was clever enough to acknowledge it. His finished pictures were broad reaches of landscape, deserts, shores, and moors in which he placed solitary figures of men or animals in a way that was very effective. . . . However, it bored him to work very hard, and when he did not enjoy his work he stopped at once.”74



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Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (1915) Setting: Chicago (1890s) The players: As a student at the Art Institute, it was “[t]he mechanics of drawing [that] interested Eugene from the first,” but he is rebuked by the instructor. “‘A plan! A plan! . . . Get your general lines first. Then you can put in the details afterward.’” Eugene is distracted when the model (“this little flower of the streets”) presses near him while on her break, but once “she resumed her pose, his passion subsided, for then the cold, aesthetic value of her beauty became uppermost. . . . In spite of these disturbances, Eugene was gradually showing improvement as a draughtsman and an artist.” His instructor suggests, “A little colder, my boy, a little colder. There’s sex in that. It isn’t in the figure. You ought to make a good mural decorator some day, if you have the inclination” (69, 71).

Dare not think there is a fine consistency to be found in nineteenth-century responses to the relation between technique (precise training in the pursuit of objective knowledge of nature’s laws) and the artworks that result.75 That disconnections and contradictions were always present is the unsettling, fascinating fact that coincided with the American desire to crawl out from under a humiliatingly inadequate cultural life by means of elevating public taste and raising the level of art training. The former required the refinement of the people’s collective soul; the latter meant perfecting manual skills. But Veblenism is not about soul; it is about the economics of labor. Thus there was something quite poignant in the purity of efforts to reconcile the demands of the stringent new scientific methods with the traditions they were intended (all at once) to obey: the vaunted Laws of Nature, of God, of Art, and of Science.76 Yet Veblen’s essay of 1898, “The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor,” is overlaid by references to that better “phase” (now lost) when pleasure in the hand’s products still overruled the quest for pecuniary advantages. To achieve this happy balance (suggested somewhat wistfully by Veblen) was the immediate concern of certain late-nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans alike. They tried to pry German idealism and the Germanic scientific methods loose from the pre-Darwinian era in order, somehow, to import those values into the post-Darwinian world. Nonetheless, the stalwarts who refused to dilute the laws of the Ideal dug in their heels at Yale University (to be cited later) and Carleton College (cited above)—educational institutions where religious truth continued to trump other forms of knowledge.77

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An American Aesthetic and Its Travails Nature, God, Art, Science

The motto assigned to Titian was “Natura Potentior Ars” (Art is more powerful than Nature), but Kant, Goethe, and Hegel (the Germans most favored by the antebellum Crayon) tried to mediate (the key term) between art and nature by playing strict attention both to nature’s laws and the laws dictated by God and revealed in art.78 The Crayon printed its pre-Darwinian, pre-Veblenian creed on the back cover, testifying to its dedication to the study of Art’s Beauty, man’s Divine origin, and Nature’s laws. But this commitment led to the danger to which Americans of Crayonite disposition were particularly susceptible: devotion to the “primitive” purity of the child’s eye. Thorstein Veblen liked the gentle savages of the pre-predatory age, but he never argued for a return to a world driven by the animistic urges of the innocent heart. But since America was Nature’s land, when the public took a positive view of life in a still-howling wilderness, it celebrated the continent’s rawness and vastness in landscape paintings, oratory, poetry, and prose. In William Stillman’s view, it was a matter of who was in control: Man as materialistic reaper of Nature’s profitable commodities, or God who endowed the fields and forests with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty where children run free, since “we all know that evil passions and base motives have no origin or sustenance in the realm of birdsongs and flower-bloom.”79 Contradictions were abundant during the neo-Kantian phase of American art criticism. On the one hand, amateurs of the aesthetic expressed a childlike response to the benign evidence that proved that the laws of the natural world were guided by God’s love. On the other hand, aspiring professionals in the pursuit of a true “Democratic Art” believed they must go beyond uninstructed love by merging knowledge with love. The “critic” directs the general public and the dilettante in what it is to love; this, because he comprehends the how as well as the what. To educate the unknowing, he must educate himself “in the mechanical and merely intellectual elements of his profession.” He must study sunlight in order to realize that shadows are blue. Still and all, critics (“the adults” in charge of “the children”) must retain the spontaneity of the “pure vision,” else they be harmed by devotion to a science required to give more weight to physical laws than to spiritual mandates.80 The European sensibilities of the Enlightenment, the romantic, or the Victorian eras liked to think they placed the educated intelligence in touch with the noble, the elevated, and the pure. But how might Americans reconcile “knowledge” defined as the defeat of adult ignorance, when “love” was honored as the treasure of infant innocence? American commitment to unknowingness bound



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its citizens dangerously close to ignorance—dangerous to themselves and to others—as the rest of the world knows all too well, when ignorant innocence, paired with political and economic power, works itself out in history. A long line of literary critiques of this ingrained national trait flowed from American authors of achieved maturity, Melville through James, who took to task their country’s liking for being morally and imaginatively stupid.81

f i c t i v e i n t e r j e c t i o n s : Art in the Raw Emile Zola, His Masterpiece (1886) Setting: Paris (1860s) The players: Chaine, the true primitive as hopeless failure, was once hailed as “rustic genius,” although he “painted like a whitewasher, mixing his colours as a hodman mixes his mortar. . . . His triumph consisted, however, in combining exactness with awkwardness; he displayed all the naive minuteness of the primitive painters; in fact, his mind, barely raised from the clods, delighted in petty details.” At the Salon of the Rejected, the jejune jumble of paintings revealed no sign of evolutionary progress. “The whole show was a mixture of the best and the worst, all styles were mingled together, the drivellers of the historical school elbowed the young lunatics of realism. . . . A dead Jezebel that seemed to have rotted in the cellars of the School of Arts, was exhibited near a lady in white, the very curious conception of a future great artist [Manet]; then a huge shepherd looking at the sea, a weak production, faced a little painting of some Spaniards playing at rackets, a dash of light of splendid intensity. Nothing execrable was wanting; neither military scenes full of little leaden soldiers, nor wan antiquity, nor the middle ages, smeared, as it were, with bitumen.” The only constants at the Official Salon: “uniform mediocrity” and “the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood” (58–59, 114, 122).

Despite ingrown obstacles during its “primitive” periods, American art had to press forward, committed to “advances” in order to overcome the ways in which it was “still beset with the limitations of infancy.”82 The American landscape attracted many of the most talented of the young nation’s painters. If the union of Nature, God, and Love is the most dependable means by which to link Truth with Goodness and Beauty, how could one not employ the North American continent—very large and very impressive— to express this sacred equation? The Hudson River valley had memorably wild

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vistas, and Frederic Church’s tumultuous Niagara Falls caught the public eye in ways that only the dynamism of Joseph M. W. Turner’s Alpine avalanches could match. Albert Bierstadt’s and Thomas Moran’s paintings are immense panoramas of “the primitive sublime” into which human figures barely penetrate.83 Individual portrait heads came off with more success, especially at the hands of the colonialists who went to London for their training, as evidenced by Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley, and by the wonderful fluke by which wholly self-instructed itinerant portraitists provided memorable facial images marked by stalwart individuality. The relatively slim record of success in bringing off fulllength figure studies suggests an early lack of training in the rendering of bodily structures, thus held back from rendering the uniqueness of individual form. George Inness was one of the nation’s finest landscape painters, noted for the stunningly precise manner by which he rendered the twist of a barren tree limb battered by wind and storm. Yet Inness drew back from any art that displayed signs of the fleshly impurities he associated with heinous “realism.” Realism stressed “particulars” and “facts” of the human form that encouraged the physical eye, not the mind’s eye, to “see.” Speaking of the paintings he disliked, Inness stated, “They are literal transcripts from the model who stands beside him. They are too sensuous. They are not art. The artist must never forget that in nude figure-painting, when the ideal is ignored, the tendency is inevitably to the lustful.” In his efforts to preserve ignorant innocence, Inness accused both the contemporary Frenchman and the Renaissance Italian of paying attention to the brute facts of form in ways that overwhelmed the sweet ideality of idea. “As for such representations as [Titian’s] ‘Leda and the Swan,’ ‘Danae,’ ‘Venus and Adonis,’ etc., they are certainly beyond the pale of toleration. No modern artist would publicly exhibit such subjects.”84 Before reconciliation was possible between the sciences of Form (vessels of the particular or the abstract) and the ideas of the Ideal (concepts that support both the abstract and the particular), yet other conflicts had to be addressed: the sparring realities of Time, Space, and the seeing Eye. God’s Time/Government Time

The old Delaware County Courthouse in Muncie, Indiana, had a clocktower with four faces, marking the points of the compass. When Congress established daylight savings time, the nation’s citizenry complied by setting timepieces ahead one hour each spring and back each fall. Not so in the Muncie area. One set of the courthouse clocks matched the newly imposed federal mandate; the other stayed with the old time. Farmers of the surrounding rural area who came into



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town on weekends to do business clearly distinguished between the clock faces that told “government time” and those that proclaimed “God’s time.” (Cows know when it’s time to be milked, not congressmen in Washington, D.C.) Delaware County’s courthouse, the third since the settling of Muncie in the early 1800s, was later torn down and replaced by a modernized building, but although the current edifice has no public timepieces on view, Delaware County and other regions in the state of Indiana still refuse to abide by the standardization of time legislated by Congress. What time it is remains to be determined by local views. Insistence on the rule of God’s seasonal rhythms once firmly held by the fetishistic agricultural norms has been replaced by the dictates of the inbred orneriness of “Hoosiers,” which rejects certain systems the rest of the United States is willing to take as law.85 Space per se might fall readily under the control of the systems makers and the lords of corporate or congressional institutions, but time/space forms as “lived” by Veblen’s “normal man” placed him in social situations imposed upon organic “God’s time” and mechanistic “government time.” This resistance radically informed the language used to analyze the what and how of America’s movements into the art scene as it inched its way through phases of the primitive, animistic, savage notions toward the scientific methods that dominated late capitalistic society. Nature continued to be viewed simultaneously, erratically, illogically in terms of both old-time God’s laws and the laws of modern science. In 1792 the first Farmer’s Almanack was published by one Robert B. Thomas, an entrepreneur of the Benjamin Franklin type and a true proto-Veblen. Thomas, who had attended Boston’s mathematics school and rejected the pseudo-science of astrology, based his yearly “Farmer’s Calendar” on “Astronomical Calculations.” Each page featured two columns: to the left, notes on the weather for each month; to the right, a list of the tasks the farmer must do in his fields under these climatic conditions.86 If the systematic tracking of weather to aid in the daily chores of an agricultural economy made sense, still other systems were viewed as crucial as the United States went through successive phases of land expansionism throughout the nineteenth century. The Cartesian grid was applied by Congress’s Land Ordinance of 1785, which took the urban grid of Philadelphia and extended it into agricultural areas. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 created new states out of the now-squared western parts of the new nation. In 1853 Congress backed the Pacific Railroad Surveys, which led to the granting of federal land to private railroad companies. The Homestead Act of 1862 granted up to 160 acres of unclaimed land to new settlers going westward.87

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When space is “discovered” by Americans (although the native Indians already knew it was there, and theirs), systems are created that take control over newly claimed lands. Since the reach of that space stretches almost four thousand miles between two oceans, time systems must also be devised and imposed—systems that require sharpened technologies for their formulation and that encourage still newer technological innovations to convert land into economic assets. Railroad companies, not government agencies, were the first to regulate the disparate time zones crossed by their trains. By 1870 eighty time zones existed before a uniform system was put in place on November 18, 1883.88 Railroad technology made possible further advances in determining standardized time systems, which lessened the confusion of diverse spatial conditions. Technology devised refrigerator cars that transported foodstuffs from their source across several time zones to centralized markets supplying ever-increasing consumer demands. The quality of public passenger cars was greatly improved. (George Pullman’s cars for one, although at the cost of his company’s “barbaric” labor conditions, which led to the bloody strike of 1894.) The quickened speed of getting across the continent by railroad delighted Mark Twain. In Roughing It, he recorded that the route he had taken in 1862 by stagecoach (St. Joseph, Missouri, to the North Platte) spread over fifty-six jolting days. In 1872, traveling in sumptuous luxury, the trip took only fifteen hours and forty minutes. As for advances in American Art Thought, speeded-up transportation through time and space, complete with creature comforts, was all to the good. S. G. W. Benjamin’s Art in America of 1880 was pleased to report that rail transportation aided the development of landscape art. That the general public could move around more and get to distant places encouraged the painting and purchase of newer, grander vistas.89 Yet questions remained for those deeply committed to defining, and devising, a coherent aesthetic system that tried to balance “seeing” according to God’s lambent laws of seasonal growth with hard facts that advanced the goals set by government laws formulated as systems of social control. Even if more people ventured forth to “see” America’s Landscape Sublime directly, without the need to rely on mechanical reproductions (engravings or the newly refined skills of photography), what did it mean to “see” well? “Seeing nature” through God-given landscape art protects the American soul from “the lust of the eye” to which George Inness objected. Henry David Thoreau (naturalist by vocation, surveyor by avocation) holds title as America’s shrewdest analyst of the natural landscape and the man-made economic systems imposed upon it. The entry of the machine into the garden (made famous by Leo Marx’s 1964 book of that name) had taken place while Thoreau walked the fields and forests around Concord, Massachusetts. He knew



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that the bodies of Irish workmen formed the rails of the cars running out of Boston. He saw the Lowell Mills as he floated past upon the Merrimack River. He urged his countrymen to go “huckleberrying” in order to experience God’s laws at first hand while obtaining food without dependence on the artificial economics of urbanized markets. And why, he asked, should anyone waste time waiting to receive news by telegraph from London that Princess Adelaide had the whooping cough? At the same moment that Walden: or, Life in the Woods detailed Thoreau’s advanced theories of natural “Economy,” contributors to the Crayon (possessed of less wit and intellectual sophistication than Thoreau) had their say about the proper ways to see Nature in line with God’s time, advising one to follow “the precepts of Christ” as “a body of laws for Art fulfilling all the demands of its widest range.” As long as art criticism linked itself with patently theological systems, anti-Veblenism was in control, not merely a faltering Veblenism. For many the “World” meant two things, as it did years later to the citizens of Delaware County, Indiana: the Sacred World, “to whose influences [Christ] led his followers as to a sphere of blessedness and repose,” and the Mundane World, the locale of “busy whirling humanity, whirling it would seem like a maelstrom, dragging down into depths of pride and sin.” When obedient to these terms, art seeks out the terrestrial sublime, aware that “[g]eometry does not compass it, no rules can systematize it.”90 There were better minds at work at this time on questions raised by the relationship between science and soul. To many, John Ruskin was the man who caused this problem in the first place. Wrong, actually, although his influence had to be tempered by the end of the century before striking changes could take place in the realm of art aesthetics.91 Nonetheless, he applied his own high intelligence (and occasional wit) to the concern felt by his generation’s “normal man” over how to mediate between seemingly clashing demands. Ruskin’s answer: be at ease with the fact that there is a science of the mind matched by a science of the spirit. In a lecture of 1874 he speaks first of the botany, a science, of the growth of the mind which lets you see either intellect or conscience unfolding, first, the blade, then the ear, after that, the full corn in the ear. Parallel with these mental changes there are changes in our body and in the nervous substance of the brain. . . . And modern science is striving at a perfection of analysis in which it is prepared to assign to every particle of matter its separate power in the formulation of spirit or thought. Precisely in the same manner the salts, earths, and manures of the field are absolutely necessary to the production of plants; so that for every olive leaf on

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this branch there is a root down in the field dependent for its existence on certain particles of a given earth of manure, so that a wise earthworm, cognizant of all qualities and processes of earth, would be able to pronounce with precision, by the motion, say, of a certain atom of ammonia the quantity of olive leaf which would be caused or derived therefore, and would fearless announce in any social science meeting of earthworms that ammonia was the final cause and origin of olive leaves.92

Leaving the “wise earthworm” to the mercy of his fellows at the “social science meeting of earthworms,” Ruskin wraps up his lecture on the paintings of Fra Angelico by concluding that the “two sciences of the spirit and of the body of man are connected in the same manner.”93 This position would never gain approval by Thorstein Veblen, but it may pass as an important early version of Veblenism. Thus it was with the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose members strove to see Nature truly in their belief that mid-nineteenth-century art and science are not foes. The plaintive cry continued in the Crayon for an “intermediary” between spirit and matter, the need for “intuitive logic” that balances excessive rationalization and untutored mysticism. The method that could “see Nature” had to decide whether to stay with material surface facts yet attempt to reveal Nature’s hidden secrets (in later generations to be described in terms of ions, quarks, particles, threads of DNA) or to continue to argue, as did Cennino Cennini and Leon Battista Alberti, whether the artist’s duty is to scrutinize the irrational and the ineffable or to limit one’s art to subjects that are to be seen in terms of a visible “system of proportion.” Cennini’s Book of Painting (c. 1400) stated that painting’s goal is to “discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects”; in centuries to come it served the purposes of the symbolists, the surrealists, and the abstract expressionists. In contrast, Alberti flatly said that “the painter has nothing to do with the things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.” We hear both men’s argument voiced again in the Crayon: “The regards of the scientific man only rest on the outside, and let him analyze, and dissect, and pass under the microscope even, until he can discover the ultimate atomic construction, he has not gone beyond the surface of the knowledge to be acquired of the thing.” The artist must recognize that there are “two distinct kinds of perception: one external or scientific; the other vital or artistic, not inconsistent, but, by no means, involving each other.” Whereas the former act deals with the eye, the latter needs only “the rudest hint which conveys an essential ideal to the mind.”94



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Over the centuries, as well as during the 1800s in America, it was not so much a matter of who was right and who wrong in these “whirling” theories about science-cum-art, argued in terms of either pre-or-post-Darwinian thought. It was rather that both the art thinker and the scientific mind had to traverse the same dangerous territory. No wonder that William Stillman apologetically acknowledged to his readers that they may be “weary of our, perhaps, over-minute and tedious—it may seem even hypercritical, analysis” of theories that try to define the relations between Nature, God, Art, and Science, that lead to Beauty.95 The art lover’s task was as wearying, yet necessary, as the hours spent in the chemist’s laboratory, the archaeologist’s digs, or the theoretical physicist’s study, to find purposeful answers to scientific problems. This is not idle chatter but the best kind of “idle curiosity.” Art critics were and are dependent on words while troubled by the subjectivity of feelings expressive of what that concrete object “looks like,” whether in the eyes of man or God. However, the times of taking panic over the unreliability of language had not yet afflicted America’s most able cultural analysts. They embraced the word’s power to systematize a piece of writing, just as they had confidence that a painting might succeed as a tangible work of composition. It is true that when the Crayon reviewed the lectures John S. Blackie delivered in Edinburgh in 1858, it took note that Plato’s theories on Beauty were too static since founded on words, whereas things are dynamic and progressive.96 But a Veblenian understands that certain aspects of the scientific project, like art, approach the ineffable. The need remains to make use of different modes of communication to “say” what things signify, else there is no chance to advance competent systems. To follow the career of Richard Offner, professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts of the New York University, is to trace the line from Giovanni Morelli (whose scientific methods adopted classification systems from anatomy, botany, and zoology) through Bernard Berenson, the Morellian who turned art attribution into a profitable enterprise. Offner did not discard his predecessors’ practices. He modified them with a neo-Kantian version that borrowed from other, less positivistic approaches beginning to find favor as early as the 1890s at America’s more advanced academic institutions. Offner’s 1927 essay “An Outline of a Theory of Method” brings together elements familiar to Thorstein Veblen. It melds Kant’s views on aesthetic judgment with his own approach toward words and things. Offner’s goal was to pursue traces of both the describable and the indescribable in areas in which art and science coexist at their most complex— areas in which attempts to exact total systematization fall short, even when modes for institutionalizing their study are put into place. I cite the following

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useful distillation by a student of Offner’s method for dealing with the ineffability of concrete art forms that are “pre-cognitive and therefore non-verbal,” whereby “aesthetic judgments have been converted into judgments of experience.” But in that conversion the particular is, necessarily, subsumed under the general, the material of aesthetic judgment becomes the material of debate and discussion. Offner himself says “But that instant [of aesthetic impact] once passed, shape becomes material for the cognitive faculty . . . There precisely actual shape forfeits its ultimate but fugitive reality, and becomes generic, typical shape or represented shape.” . . . Thus we find ourselves, in discussion, at a significant distance from the “thing-in-itself.” . . . We may talk about these generalities; we cannot actually talk about the specific individual form or about the aesthetic judgment per se. The very foundation of Offner’s criticism is, strictly speaking, ineffable.97

A member of the generation that came after Veblen, Offner extended crucial aspects of Veblenism into the art academy. This move is particularly apparent in exploring the ways—suggested by Veblen but never fully fleshed out—that art’s honesty is based on efforts to “see” the world’s forms, while implying the haunting presence of all that lies beyond. Raw, Ripe, Rot

Diverse language systems aid the intellectual endeavors in which we participate. The language of numbers gives us mathematical formula, charts, and graphs that transmit information to particular areas of science. The language of images, such as the icons that sort out data on computer screens, is as useful for relaying information as the religious icons once used to guide illiterate worshipers or the advertising logos that coax voracious consumer appetites. But scholars in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences continue to make use of word systems. Thorstein Veblen was no stranger to the belief that words are essential not only in formulating new concepts for economics and sociology but in persuading members of the intellectual elite to accept their truths. The most he could do for “the normal man” was to express his awareness of that individual’s bafflement in the face of modern modes of science and technology. Americans attempting to devise systems for articulating an art aesthetic primarily addressed themselves to those they viewed as fellow connoisseurs, but they also directed their words to the uninformed public. A study of periodical articles between the 1850s and the 1890s discloses the absorbing fact of an inces-



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sant use of language patterns borrowed from the sciences of horticulture and biology—language familiar to elites and farmers’ daughters alike. As writers for the Crayon, Scribner’s Monthly, and Century Magazine traced the phases through which humankind had passed from early to late (the stadial phases that structure the opening pages of The Theory of the Leisure Class), they (almost comically) relied on an organic time line that expressed a social, cultural, and political evolution from raw to ripe, and (if Americans did not rewrite history as Europe knew it) to rot.98 Americans who put aside the nagging sense of inferiority associated with art matters liked to define “raw” as the benign primitivism that overlay God’s natural world. This particular story line did not take account of the good savages who once occupied the North American continent, banished by the arrival of barbaric warriors and ruthless exploiters from across the Atlantic. Lacking the contemporary revisionist impulses that overturn nineteenth-century accounts of “America’s History,” this version of the story begins with seeds planted in fertile soil by white settlers—seeds destined to sprout, then to ripen into a full harvest of art lovers and art makers. Thoreau, as one of America’s best proto-Veblens, was not so naive. His use of the vocabulary of raw, ripe, and rot includes the back history of a fruitful Indian culture in his account of the wasteful economics practiced by the citizens of his native Concord. The final, fatal phase of barbaric decay was not yet a fact in this nineteenthcentury telling of the highly charged tale of the American march toward perfection. America was where the future would evolve into “ripeness” while avoiding the “rot” that fells decadent societies that descend into luxurious excess and moral decay. Rot could be averted if the public was cautioned by admonitory tales drawn from the Italian example. In warning of the questionable progress of Italian life, American periodicals evoked lessons learned from the history of its art. “The lust of the eye” signified more than the sexual license “known” to be central to Italian models. Excessive devotion to the sensuality of living forms signaled the moral decay of Italy’s social systems and religious institutions, placed flagrantly on display in the art of the Old Masters. The precise moment when spiritual and artistic decline fell upon Florence and Rome was clearly stated in the Atlantic Monthly and the Crayon. Michelangelo and Raphael had represented the perfected art that had ascended from the raw primitivism of the pre-Giotto generations, but once the hand’s technical skill replaced the ripening of the soul’s spirit, a “cold, unfeeling, academic accuracy” permeated the arts of sixteenth-century Italy. The so-called rawness of Fra Angelico’s frescoes offered the last true art. The ripeness mastered by the next generation of artists initiated the downward turn. Leonardo, Raphael, Michelan-

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gelo, and Titian—“the immediate forerunners of the decline and fall of art”— led to the artistic outrages of Bernini, “fit representative of its weakness and decline.” Once Italian art became “degraded into the servant of human ambition, the attendant of luxury and pomp, and the slave of falsehood and caprice,” it was left for Venetian art to express “the spirit of an age of formal reverence and real infidelity,” “that period of debasement in religion, in philosophy, and art.”99 After the United States took time out from Art Thoughts to fight the Civil War, warnings reappeared regarding the dangers of peaking at levels of perfection. In the 1880s Century Magazine introduced certain variations and additions. Essays now drew upon the growing interest in Greek and Byzantine art. They emphasized how early the seeds of the high culture had ripened before quickly rotting in history’s soil. Reference to America’s artists and authors were drawn into the discussion to demonstrate that the nation still existed in a good phase, as yet untainted by the frightening fleshiness of barbaric impulses. Thoreau “improves with age: in fact, requires age to take off a little of his asperity and fully ripen him.” Winslow Homer is “a little primitive, a little rustic,” yet “so fresh and unaffected.” George Fuller is “so complete and ripe and masterly.”100 The periodicals still savored plant tropes even when the Greeks, the Romans, the Florentines, and the Venetians were not used directly as cautionary examples of raw, ripe, and rot, part of the love-hate emotions ever present in the American art consciousness. They were happiest when, as in Benjamin’s and Isham’s delineations of the stages of America’s art history, they set the language of organic growth over against terms overcharged with mechanistic references. It would take a statistician to compile the number of times that “seed,” “flower,” and “bloom” were set alongside “fresh” and “free,” or to tabulate the frequency of words that signified the decay of overripe fruit.101 The language of national agronomy had still more to accomplish. American art pedagogy was clearly on a mission. The blossoms of the fruit must come from good seed, in order that they might result in a “robust” and “healthy” harvest of “manly” art.102 Art commentary placed constant scrutiny on the moral qualities of individual artists. Language of botany, mixed with that of biology and touches of the nomenclature of animal husbandry, made clear the importance of proper breeding techniques. Once again, Italy’s Old Masters were commandeered to instruct the American public in right and wrong ways to advance the nation’s aesthetic reputation. Young in culture, although old in technology, America must not make the mistakes found everywhere in Italian art history. America’s artists should not merely edge toward acceptance as an equal by Europe’s advanced societies. They must arrive at the point where they were different: different because better, because American, because their art was manly and moral.



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Biography played an inordinately prominent role in the commentaries printed in the mainstream periodicals. Stories of artists with noble souls or tarnished natures overwhelmed careful analysis of the actual products these artists created. (Gertrude Stein complained that Americans were more interested in the person of the artist than in the work produced, although that work was what drew attention to the artist in the first place.) It was not just Italians on trial. The Dutch were constantly evaluated in terms of their similarities as a society to Americans, though they displayed a taste for raunchiness that proper Americans wished to reject. Inevitably, interpretative contradictions clouded paintings that came from the hands of an artist credited at one moment with having high moral qualities and at another with deplorable habits. Rembrandt’s art conveyed feelings to the spectator that are “subtle and refined” through “forms” that are yet “of the most gross and vulgar extraction.” Rembrandt was also taken to be “a rare, mellow, juicy, queer old fellow” whose paintings replicated his character. Rembrandt again: “His nature seems to have been rank, sensuous and vicious. . . . Great genius is seen in him, struggling through a corrupt and sordid taste. The original splendor of his imagination is befouled by his taint of a debased and wicked spirit.” Rembrandt yet again: named “a big-hearted, big-brained, bigsouled man” because he painted people with “soul.”103 One does not need to wait for the case of Robert Mapplethorpe to recognize the problems that arise from the quest to find corollaries between makers and the made. Yet in the same year that Veblen published his sardonic portrayal of the fake manliness of leisure-class “warriors” who indulged in debased sports, Century was glad to praise any American art, as far back as colonial times, that gave evidence (as did Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of manly men) of the “robust and virile.” It liked to speak of examples, such as that of James Fenimore Cooper in the literary field, of “a sturdy, hearty, robust, out-door and open-air wholesomeness.”104 Europe was ready to hand to confirm the crucial links between an artist’s innate moral value and the influence his productions had upon the public. Almost forty years after his departure from the Crayon, William Stillman applied himself to this task in articles for Century Magazine throughout the 1880s and 1890s. He singled out the two figures representing the peak of the Italian Renaissance: Raphael and Michelangelo. Michelangelo’s “contempt for Raphael” was based on “the extreme incongruity of [Michelangelo’s] own and Raphael’s art . . . the latter form feminine, flexible, full of the graces which demoralize art, and made attractive by a seductive sweetness which to the robust imagination of Michelangelo must have been the very Capua of its decline.”105 American worshippers at Raphael’s shrine preferred to linger over the painter’s own heralded saintly qualities that flooded his holy images, while

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turning aside from shrewd analyses of the shrewd talents he brought to his canvases.106 Time tends to overturn reputations, as became apparent after a major exhibition in 2004 of Raphael’s early works at London’s National Gallery. Brash American reviewers in the New York Times (November 12, 2004) and the New Yorker (November 22, 2004) announced, respectively, “I have never entirely got Raphael” and “I don’t like him.” The review of December 10, 2004 in London’s Times Literary Supplement (titled “The Raphael of Sweet Piety and Decorum”) commenced by typing him as “perfect head-boy material.” By the end of these pieces it was admitted (somewhat grudgingly) that Raphael’s later work had merits that the twenty-first-century viewer could appreciate—if, however, one could get beyond the virtues (moral and aesthetic) by which he had once been named “saintly” and “pure” through the convenient overlooking of what others called his “womanizing” habits. It was Raphael’s misfortune to have attained perfection. Perfect fruit marks the ominous moment of the takeover by the pseudowarriors of the leisure class when rot sets in once the society that sustains that art is stripped of robust manliness.107 Stillman’s dedication, early and late, to aesthetic concerns makes him a clear representative of the often tortuous transition between German idealism and Germany’s contributions to modern scientific theory. His stand on certain issues could seem silly and yet be highly perceptive. They were always marked by the earnestness of his wish to be as intelligently informed as the deficits plaguing his generation allowed him to be. This is obvious once one sets Stillman’s assessments against Timothy Cole’s cloying remarks about the Old Master artists that accompanied his wood engravings for Century.108 Cole’s highly skilled reproductions appeared regularly from the late 1880s to the early 1900s, but it was an unfortunate move to let him express the meaning of the art he copied. His comments are often ludicrous because of his reliance on the rule of thumb that moral biographies take precedence over objective scrutiny of the creative process. However, they are useful in reinforcing the fact that late-nineteenth-century Americans (including “the farmer’s daughter”) liked art that represented manly males and tender females.109 Cole’s discourses on Vermeer, Van Dyck, Rubens, Velásquez, and Murillo (their character and their paintings) rely on a handful of words, strictly divided along gender lines: “robust,” “stamina,” “good-natured” for the males (both artists and subjects); “tender,” “sweet motherly sympathy,” “sentiment,” “charming,” “purity, love, and hope” for feminine subjects. He also offered brilliant misjudgments about the artists’ work: Goya: the artist’s once “cheerful scenes of frolicsome mirth” and the “pretty instance” of the “lassies of Seville” are thrown into “the black and gruesome horrors of his later canvases,” where one “feels instinctively that the



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man must have gone mad.” El Greco: “through a craving for originality,” he “sank lower and lower, painting like a visionary, and taking for revelations the distorted fancies of a morbid brain.” Cole’s remarks in the pages of Century in November 1904, October 1906, and February 1907 are witness to what it means not to “see”—neither art, nature, nor human nature. They fit the responses of visitors to the Steins’ Paris apartment in the same years (walls layered with paintings by Matisse and Cézanne) who set about “roaring” and “scratching.” Although the work seemed “perfectly natural” to the Steins, the pictures “infuriated everybody.”110 Time (government time as well as God’s time) had passed between the auspicious day that Samuel F. B. Morse (painter manqué) announced the powers of telegraphic technology in 1844 by tapping out the words “What hath God wrought?” and the magic moment in 1877 when Thomas Edison tested his newest invention, the “talking machine,” with the line, “Mary had a little lamb.”111 The shift in reference and tone from scripture to nursery rhyme signals changes taking place that replaced reverence with flippancy. When the American painter William Merritt Chase told James McNeill Whistler in 1910 that an admirer compared him with Velásquez, Whistler retorted, “Why drag in Velasquez?” When Chase invited his friend to accompany him to Holland to see the “old masters,” Whistler answered, “They’ll keep.”112 There was willingness to do away with the analysis of “soul” and a liking to see things as “just paint.” In a modernized America the very nature of language was being reappraised. On the terrible retreat from Caporetto during World War I, young Americans like Ernest Hemingway’s Frederick Henry learned that “[a]bstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages . . . the numbering of regiments and the dates.”113 Times had definitely altered, but with what lasting consequences to the mental methods by which Americans evaluated the strange new worlds of the arts and the sciences? Transitions without Resolutions

Not only the words descriptive of cultural needs and social systems were changing. The nature of things seemed altered as well. The late-nineteenth-century world scheme had already undergone a striking series of successive responses to what science and technology (not God) “hath wrought” once German philosophy was replaced by German methodology (mathematics, philology, archaeology).114 Veblen often stated that change does not necessarily signal progress. He had

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doubts there could ever be productive resolutions to the problems introduced by change, particularly when changes were random, partial, patched together. There were too many backtrackings, overlaps, and vestigial tails to allow a smooth passage to progressive innovations. Neither individuals nor collective groups could count on the enjoyment of an evolved state. Process was certainly in evidence, but the mixed results were difficult to contain within any set system or to enclose within an official institution. The “healthy-minded” among Americans put their faith in their ability to make “good endings” to their endeavors.115 They were aided by scientific methods carried out by professionals in the act of creating, almost from scratch, the new social sciences, the new economics, and the new psychology that promised hope for better things in their world. Lewis Mumford, for one, was susceptible to the “sick-mindedness” described by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience of 1902 that weakened him in the face of the confrontations he found between “art and technics.”116 In taking James to task for being too much the “tough-minded” optimist, Mumford failed to sense that the persona James uses to represent the relation between “sick” and “healthy” arose from his own lifelong battle against despair through the assertion of individual will. James, like Veblen, might wish for a tempering of the social forces predicated on the mores of aggressive acquisition, but neither found this possible. Whereas James probed “the hidden self,” Veblen analyzed the external nature of the collective will. As for the Italian “texts” Americans continued to consult, they displayed the effects of Leonardo’s “scientific modernism” as well as Michelangelo’s rigorous devotion to anatomical studies. But by the 1890s attention had shifted to French art.117 Soul-seeking Americans preferred to associate France’s culture with lurid subjects and sensual techniques, yet the importance of French commitment to the science of color and optic geometries had to be acknowledged, even if deplored. Art lovers traveled to Paris to revel in the display of Napoleonic loot from Italy. Students were turning to the Parisian ateliers, leaving Rome behind to deal with conditions that Americans viewed as increasingly sordid. The unification of the Italian states caused a multitude of political and economic problems, including the dissipation of the past glories of papal temporal powers. The question remained whether the increased emphasis given to the systematization of technological knowledge via science-as fact lessened or intensified the barbaric materialism that was once the concern of advocates of art as the science-of-soul. Rome’s Julius II—warrior, pope, patron, materialist—had been the perfect representative for the predatory class Veblen brilliantly described in The Theory of the Leisure Class.118 Raphael and Michelangelo flourished under Julius’s ruthless but canny code of aesthetic power. New York’s J. P. Morgan filled the same



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(more secular) role as the Julius for his age once he began to collect the Renaissance masterpieces he was able to strip away from Europe. But Morgan was no patron of contemporary American art, although, in contrast, Isabella Stewart Gardner had both her Italian Raphaels and Titians and her American Sargents. Art assigned value by the quasi-scientific method of “attribution” practiced by Bernard Berenson, as well as by reliance on the acuity of one’s own eye, gave American collectors social prestige, sound investment value, and great personal pleasure. Meanwhile, over in Paris, Gertrude and Leo Stein went on a judicious collecting spree, backed by intuition, personal taste, Pateresque intensity of desire, enormous self-confidence, and a decent amount of family money. At the time, the paintings they bought had no value and no public merit. Their collection was considered ugly and worthless. Beauty and money were attached to the artists’ names only when they were “seen” and thus accepted.119 Particularly when accepted by the art dealers who set the standards for greatness.

f i c t i v e i n t e r j e c t i o n s : The Dealers Emile Zola, His Masterpiece (1886) Setting: Paris (1860s) The players: Naudet is the dealer as “a speculator, a Stock Exchange gambler, not caring one single rap about art. But he unfailingly scented success; he guessed what artist ought to be properly started, not the one who seemed likely to develop the genius of a great painter, furnishing food for discussion, but the one whose deceptive talent, set off by a pretended display of audacity, would command a premium in the market. And that was the way in which he revolutionised that market, giving the amateur of taste the cold shoulder, and only treating with the moneyed amateur who knew nothing about art, but who bought a picture as he might buy a share at the Stock Exchange, either from vanity, or with the hope that it would rise in value.” “Ambition was turning [Naudet’s] head; he talked about sinking all the other picture dealers; he had built himself a palace, in which he posed as the king of the market, centralising masterpieces, and there opening large art shops of the modern style. One heard a jingle of millions on the very threshold of his hall; he held exhibitions there, even ran up other galleries elsewhere; and each time that May came round, he awaited the visits of the American amateurs whom he charged fifty thousand francs for a picture which he himself had purchased for ten thousand. . . . There was talk of a syndicate, of an understanding with certain bankers to keep up the present high prices; the expedient of simulated sales was resorted to at the Hotel Drouot—pic-

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tures being bought in at a big figure by the dealer himself—and bankruptcy seemed to be at the end of all that Stock Exchange jobbery, a perfect tumble head-over-heels after all the excessive, mendacious agiotage.” Meanwhile, Claude has “reached the lowest degree of distress—he worked according to size for the petty dealers who sell daubs on the bridges, and export them to semi-civilised countries” (171, 233, 273). Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (1915) Setting: New York City (1890s−1900s) The players: Anatole Charles, dealer as patron and art critic, “knew by experience what sold—here, in France, in England, in Germany. He was convinced that there was practically nothing of value in American art as yet—certainly not from the commercial point of view, and very little from the artistic. Beyond a few canvases by Inness, Homer, Sargent, Abbey, Whistler, men who were more foreign, or rather universal, than American in their attitude, he considered that the American art spirit was as yet young and raw and crude. ‘They do not seem to be grown up as yet over here. . . . They paint little things in a forceful way, but they do not seem as yet to see things as a whole.’” Yet he backs Eugene Witla throughout the years, even during bad times. “Some American artists must be encouraged—some must rise. Why not Eugene? Here was one who really deserved it” (226, 729).

By the 1890s American artists were doing well enough. New-money members of the leisure class adorned their houses lavishly despite the fact that most could not meet the prices needed to bring the art of the Old Masters over to the States. Satisfying stories of success replaced sad tales of earlier aspirants unable to make a living at art. The three sons of Charles Willson Peale achieved no great success on the art scene of the Federalist period despite their father having named them Raphaelle, Titian, and Rembrandt. Samuel F. B. Morse had had to drop his lifelong wish to take an active role in the almost nonexistent art scene, thereafter becoming rich from his invention of the telegraph.120 Robert Fulton’s career as a portrait painter is overshadowed by his attainment of great wealth and social prestige through his development of steam transportation. The situation changed once William Merritt Chase, Thomas Dewing, and Frank Benton, among others, profited from the new market for figure painting opened by interest in the softened style then flourishing in France.121 Since economic values now offset moral values, American art no longer labored under the need to elevate the souls of a populace. Ties between the production of art and its pecuniary value were a matter of interest to Veblen’s “normal man.” Newspapers



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made big stories (and profits) by recounting the purchase prices of European art that had become American loot.122 The media gave coverage to gallery exhibitions and art museums. Fewer would-be artists had to go abroad for training, and there were more clients willing to buy their work. It still seemed, however, that the years of the “American Renaissance” centered on the creation of luxurious decorative objects, not the promotion of serious aesthetic worth.123 As America moved through the stages of an advanced predatory culture, the proliferation of perfected technologies led to a surplus that exceeded actual needs for survival. More desires came into play, met by more leisure time (yet another kind of “surplus”) in which to acquire more things. Many Americans still worried about the priority given to material acquisitions. (The old joke still rang true of the query put to the Pilgrims upon landing at Plymouth Rock—whether they had crossed the Atlantic for the sake of God or cod.) Century lamented that pig iron and whiskey were more highly valued than works of art, although by the 1900s, Carnegie steel and Anheuser-Busch beer probably had greater appeal. Few put the charge against materialism better than Charles Dudley Warner in 1872. (His remarks were well timed. He and Mark Twain published their proto-Veblen novel, The Gilded Age, the very next year.) “If ever man took large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own use, it is the American. We are gross-eaters, we are great drinkers. . . . I am filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the prairies, marching straight down the throats of Eastern people. . . . It is always dinnertime in America.” Warner concludes, “If a civilization is judged by its wants, we are certainly highly civilized. We cannot get land enough, nor clothes enough, nor houses enough, nor food enough.”124

f i c t i v e i n t e r j e c t i o n s : Celebrity Art Emile Zola, The Masterpiece (1886) Setting: Paris (1860s) The players: The rush to become “Mr. Celebrity, Mr. Great Artist” is decried by Bongrand: “wear out your brains, consume yourself in striving to climb higher, still higher, ever higher, and if you happen to kick your heels on the summit, think yourself lucky! . . . and if you feel that you are declining, why, make an end of yourself by rolling down amid the death rattle of your talent, which is no longer suited to the period.” As for Fagerolles’s success, “Well, the whole trick consists in pilfering [the great painter’s] originality and

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dishing it up with the wishy-washy sauce of the School of Arts! Quite so! you select a modern subject, and you paint it in clear bright style, only you adhere to correctly commonplace drawing, to all the habitual pleasing style of composition—in short, to the formula which is taught over yonder for the pleasure of the middle-classes.” For example, take Fagerolles’s Picnic. Plagiarized from Claude’s In the Open Air, centered on nude women grouped with clothed men in a forest glade, it receives public acclaim for its “same light key of colour, the same artistic formula, but softened, trickishly rendered, spoilt by skin-deep elegance, everything being ‘arranged’ with infinite skill to satisfy the low ideal of the public. Fagerolles had not made the mistake of stripping his three women; but clad in the audacious toilets of women of society, they showed no little of their persons” (167, 170, 269). Henry James, Roderick Hudson ([1875] 1907) Setting: Rome (1870s) The players: Three American artists have attained varying degrees of success. One is Gloriani, “conscious and compact, unlimitedly intelligent and consummately clever,” who “now drove an active trade in sculpture of the ingenious or sophisticate school.” His works “were considered by most people to belong to a very extravagant, and by many, to a thoroughly depraved type,” but they were “the last fruit of time.” The second is Miss Blanchard—admired for “her combination of beauty and talent, of isolation and self-support”— whose pictures were “generally a bunch of dew-sprinkled roses, with the dew drops very highly finished, or else a way-side shrine and a peasant woman, with her back turned, kneeling before it. She did backs very well, but she was a little weak in faces. Flowers, however, were the chief of her diet, and, though her touch was a little old-fashioned and finical, she painted them with remarkable skill. Her pictures were chiefly bought by the English.” The third is Sam Singleton—“so perfect an example of the little noiseless devoted worker whom chance, in the person of a moneyed patron, has never taken by the hand.” He “painted small landscapes, chiefly in water-colours.” “Improvement had come, however, hand in hand with patient industry, and his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was now incontestable. It was as yet but scantily recognised, and he had hard work to hold out” (1:106–10). Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (1890) Setting: London (1880s) The players: Dick Heldar’s friend chides him for capitulating to public taste: “Here’s the peroration: ‘For work done without conviction, for power wasted on trivialities, for labour expended with levity for the deliberate pur-



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pose of winning the easy applause of a fashion-driven public. . . . there remains but one end—the oblivion that is preceded by toleration and cenotaphed with contempt’” (67).

By the 1900s the American population was augmented by the millions of immigrants flowing through Ellis Island and other ports of entry. Late arrivals at New York’s “Plymouth Rock” were quickly taught to crave contemporary variations on the Pilgrims’ cod in lieu of God. This fit well with the “instinct of acquisition” outlined in William McDougalls’s 1903 An Introduction to Social Psychology—a view with which Veblen was said to concur. Gertrude Stein distinguished between those who write for “mammon” and those writing for “god,” but how was the aesthetic temperament to function midst the barbaric followers of mammon? This was the question posed by Charles Eliot Norton, who constantly fretted over “the matter of civilization—the particular civilization that a young roaring and money-getting democracy inevitably but almost exclusively occupied with ‘business success,’ most needed to have brought home to it.”125 Anxieties of Modernity

Samuel L. Clemens, the “Mark Twain” whom William Dean Howells later named the Lincoln of American letters, was the subject of an essay by Howells in the September 1882 issue of Century. Howells noted that Hannibal, Missouri, placed Twain where “the two embattled forces of civilization and barbarism were encamped . . . as they are at all times and everywhere.” Embattled forces created the “big blooming buzzing confusion” of the world’s “much-at-onceness” with which William James contended in 1911. Thorstein Veblen had also been set down midst “all the buzzing, booming confusion of American life,” but David Riesman found him wanting, since “somehow, thinking he understood it, [he] did not continue to grapple with it.” Riesman tends to write off Veblen for believing in “a society cleansed by the machine” that erased “all ritual, reliquary and rite.” If true, this would brand Veblen as an anachronism out of sync with modern scientific thought, bound by the “progress-minded thinking of the 19th century rationalist.”126 I give Veblen higher marks than this. I see him, like the best minds of his generation, not only in transition between centuries but caught in the flow of the multilayered transactions between disparate nineteenth-century modes of thought and the “buzzing booming confusion” that plagued the early-twentiethcentury mind.

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Henry Adams characterized himself (a boy born in 1828) as an eighteenthcentury sensibility dragged into the nineteenth century before being hurled into the twentieth through the forces of philosophy, science, economics, and politics. So, too, did Veblen. For a long time Gertrude Stein confidently viewed the twentieth century’s technological progress that elevated America to status as the world’s oldest country. But by World War II (notwithstanding the paintings her genius recognized as great and the writings produced by her own genius), she realized that the nineteenth century she believed had ended with the Civil War was still with her.127 Public anxieties, delicately named in 1881 by Dr. George Miller Beard as “American Nervousness,” were more scientifically, and bluntly, defined as the neurasthenia affecting an entire generation. These same anxieties permeated the art scene as well as the nation’s businessmen and society women. One explanation for the sound market enjoyed by Paris-trained artists who returned to the States to paint for Boston clients was the consummate ability of Frank Benson, Dennis Bunker, William Paxton, and Edmund Tarbell to paint tranquil scenes of pastoral settings and orderly domestic interiors. If Italian Marys and Madonnas were not quite right to grace New England’s Protestant homes, portraits of American Virgins and American Mothers did very well. The emotional force of portraits and genre scenes by Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer was placed at a disadvantage by this taste for the tranquil. The questionable “Frenchness” of young rebels experimenting with the science of optics and color was tamed by newly returned American impressionists like Maurice Prendergast, William Merritt Chase, Theodore Robinson, John Twachtman, Julian Weir, Childe Hassam, William Glackens, and others. In contention with the penchant for “robustness” and “vigor,” terms like “repose,” “peaceful,” and “calm” gained approval.128 Esther Singleton’s Old World Masters in New World Collections tabulates the high prices commanded in the 1920s by eighteenth-century British portrait artists and by Raphael, Titian, and Hals. Singleton makes clear what is at stake in debates over the relation between market values and aesthetic worth. Perhaps personal belief in the truth of God’s laws that once guided the study of Nature’s laws is no longer the ruling factor, but the elevating beauties of the Ideal must still be utilized to control the blunt facts of the Real. “Art, according to my way of thinking, is something to be enjoyed, something to delight the senses, and something to refresh the mind; and I feel that many connoisseurs will agree with me and gladly welcome a book devoted to Old Masters in which not the slightest suggestion of suffering enters. Therefore, in this book there are no Crucifixions, Pietàs, martyrdoms, nor tragedies.”129



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Singleton insists on the effect of the historical moment upon her publication—the decade after the close of World War I. Her generation can never offset the “complete reversal of all hitherto existing political, geographical, social, and economic values.”130 Thus, art must offer tenderness to the “many shell-shocked minds” that resist “the cant phrase—the ‘beauty of ugliness’” that thrills “the Twentieth Century cacophonists” with their “works of jostled planes and lurid colors.”131 Old Masters (Italian or otherwise) should never be replaced by Italian futurists or French cubists, whose art-as-science and science-as-modernity threaten Western civilization. Gertrude Stein said all new ideas are “ugly” until accepted; then they become “pretty” and uninteresting.132 Ugliness proved of great interest to contemporary theorists of the moral and aesthetic decline of social systems. Max Nordau’s Degeneration (placed in the hands of English speakers by 1895) and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–22) sold very well.133 In Art and Technics, Lewis Mumford, major American historian of technology’s impact upon modern American society, drops into moments of Spenglerian pessimism in lectures delivered in 1951 at New York’s Columbia University. Mumford insists he is not an opponent of advanced machinery or research in the physical sciences, yet he fears that too much technology and too many engineers had shaped an existence that “has already gone back to barbarism.” Mumford’s immediate concern is with the dire influence of the machine over the art spirit, one that pits man as “symbol-maker” (the artist) against man as “toolmaker” (the technician). He concludes by voicing the hope there might be reconciliation between these two powerful forces—the kind of “reconciliation” about which Veblen had always had his doubts.134 There is a long history of debates over whether technology does social harm or good, ranging from Mumford’s agitated lectures back to Thoreau’s calm appraisal in his 1843 essay “Paradise [to Be] Regained,” which balanced the practical contributions of scientific inventions with the aims of the spirit. It is good to remember that other excellent proto-Veblen, Horatio Greenough, whose “Remarks on American Art” in 1843 called on the would-be artist to take hope. In his seminal publication Aesthetics in Washington of 1851, Greenough was an early proponent of the beauty found in what man as toolmaker has devised. His manifesto “Form is Function” would inspire later advances in architectural design made by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. He also singled out the Yankee Clipper as one of his age’s finest works of art and technology. He might just as well have cited the example of the pitchfork crafted by those peaceful savages, the Shakers, who raised the instinct of workmanship to new heights. We ourselves can hope that, despite his doubts about the virtues of the warrior ethos,

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Veblen, the Norwegian American, would have admired the perfect lines of the Viking warship, whose beauty exceeds the basic needs of barbaric efficiency. Case Studies: Adaptations to Veblenism

The influence of technology (made “modern” in America throughout the 1820s and 1830s by the railroad, the telegraph, and the steamboat) continued to concern those (whether pre-or-post-Darwinians) whose natural affinities were in areas not commonly associated with the physical or theoretical sciences. These were, nevertheless, Americans who wished to participate in, or at least to understand, what was taking place. The Adams family, exemplified by John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Adams, gives us a narrative that did not have a “good ending” in the sense that William James defined this hoped-for conclusion in his essay “The Hidden Self,” cited above. In the years between the 1770s and the 1900s, successive generations of Adamses afford an excellent test case for clarifying Veblenism; in particular, the uneasy relationship between personal morality, statecraft, science, and aesthetics. John Adams (1735–1826), second president of the newly created United States, furnishes his analysts with a mass of useful paradoxes. Observing the “richness, the magnificence and splendor” of France’s public buildings and private houses in 1778, Adams declares, “But what is all this to me? I receive but little pleasure in beholding all these things, because I cannot but consider them as bagatelles, introduced by time and luxury in exchange for the great qualities, and hardy, manly virtues of the human heart. I cannot help suspecting that the more elegance, the less virtue, in all times and countries.”135 Adams could appreciate “the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, music” in that they, like “the art of government,” follow the neoclassical dictum that “all these arts are founded on certain general principles of nature, which have never been known to change”—principles “it is the duty of philosophers, legislators, and artists to study.” Adams viewed Europe as the source of the corrupting forces of the “Superstition and Despotism” sanctioned by the institutions of church and state, precisely what the new nation must avoid. However, in 1777 he advised his son, John Quincy (1767–1848), that “a Taste for Literature and a Turn for Business . . . never fails to make a great Man. A Taste for Literature, includes the Love of Science and the fine Arts.” Adams gave his version of the stages through which the new man of the new nation, about to enter the new century, will evolve. “The science of government, it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences. . . . I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and



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philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”136 When Brooks Adams, the great-grandson of John Adams, set down “The Heritage of Henry Adams” in 1919, he cited his ancestor’s flawed but valiant efforts to create a workable metric system of weights and measures, impeded by the fact that he was overburdened by presidential duties, wholly self-educated in mathematics, bereft of needed experimental equipment, and held back by the fact there was “no kindred mind from which he could draw a stimulant.” As Brooks noted the anomalies that made up his brother Henry’s “heritage,” he wrote at length about John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, and his obsession over merging scientific and political systems. Besides dabbling in botanical experiments, Adams led the crusade to establish the country’s first working astronomical observatory, to back the newly established Smithsonian Institution, and to bring American administrative and social systems into line with the principles of the natural and mathematical sciences. Alas, this mission was betrayed by the 1826 presidential election. “God had abandoned him, and made [Andrew] Jackson triumph”—the man who, in John Quincy’s words, was that “barbarian” who “could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name,” the man who spread Jacksonian greed and the deification of the competitive spirit over the land.137 With The Education of Henry Adams, it was Henry’s turn to outline the stages through which the gentlemanly savages of an earlier era evolved into rapacious barbarians. Yet even evolution came to a halt, then stumbled backward, when Ulysses S. Grant entered the White House in 1869, as a shocking example of the “type” that “was pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers.” “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” Adams was born in 1838; his own life span sent him hurtling past “troglodytic Boston” (“cut apart” by the advent of railroads, steamers, and telegraph), once the banks of State Street demolished “his eighteenth-century, his ancestral prejudices, his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training.” What lay ahead for the Adamsian manikin was a useless Harvard education (only the classics, no mathematics); a disastrous taste of the Germanic teaching method, which lacked both method and merit; the end of any thought of participating in politics, law, or diplomacy; the stab at economic analysis of the stock market in numerous pieces of journalism; absorption in, and confusion over, Darwin’s theories; a stint as teacher of medieval history at Harvard, the science of which he said he knew nothing; the purchase of a “dirty, little, unfinished red-chalk sketch” (perhaps by Raphael) that intro-

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duced him to the vagaries of the current “method of studying art”; witness to the growing power of the forces of industry and capitalism; a worshipper felled to his knees over the wonder of the Dynamo, the X-ray, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the forces of Inertia and Acceleration.138 Henry Adams studied the coherency of the Age of Unity, whose arts, philosophy, and economics were represented in concrete form at France’s Mont-SaintMichel and Chartres, but he was unable to analyze the “Chaos” of his own Age of Multiplicity. The only professional discipline in which he had any experience was history and its teaching once he was dragged into the lecture hall at Harvard in the 1870s. Veblenians ought to be familiar with (in order to enjoy, not to ridicule) Adams’s witty if heartfelt attempts to place the humanistic study of history into line with the strict principles of the scientific method. Adams was painfully aware of how readily the discipline of history could be discarded, together with other trivia, in a world that seemed to have no place for it. Armed only with flawed math and bad physics, Adams wrote “The Tendency of History” (1894) and “A Letter to American Teachers of History” (1910) as well as “The Rule of Phase Applied to History” (1909). These essays help “prove” almost everything Thorstein Veblen had to say in “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization” about the desperate, if not silly, desire of humanists to adapt to the principles of an accredited scientific method. Adams’s essays are necessary reading because of the excellence of “the mistakes” they make and the brilliancy of their (however weird) insights into the direction Adams thought that Thought was taking during his and Veblen’s lifetime. Neither man subscribed totally to Spengler’s lack of buoyant optimism. Adams’s writings on the relation between the humanities and the sciences are strangely heart lifting. Their intellectual energy is enhanced by the honesty of his refusal to believe that full reconciliation is possible or that troublesome problems can be resolved. He rejects “good endings” based on false reasoning and wishful thinking. In the same way, Veblen does not give his readers answers to the nagging questions: When was the precise moment in time when true workmanship altered its course and began to produce spurious excess? When did man-made objects giving genuine aesthetic pleasure become things whose value rests on status and pecuniary worth? But even more important than the question about when is the one about how. How might the logic behind the making of art ever share the same heartbeat as the pursuit of science? These are issues before us to this day, possibly never to be settled. I choose, however, to cite areas where the sciences and the arts began to pull together in positive ways.139 The Adams family serves as a detailed paradigm for the anxieties stirred up by a century in the process of adjusting to all that science and society were in the



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process of becoming. There is also a similar trajectory discernible in the earnest efforts of two major contributors to key American journals. One was William Stillman, student of Frederic Church, failed artist, art critic and editor of the Crayon, who went off to Europe in 1859 (walking, talking, sketching with John Ruskin as a boon companion of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, planning to join Garibaldi’s Marsala expedition before being called away by family duties, acting as U.S. counsel in Rome and Crete, authoring books on Italy and Greece) before he returned to the States in 1870 to write for Scribner’s Monthly and Century Magazine. The other was Charles Eliot Norton, failed artist, Ruskinian art critic and editor of the Nation and the North American Review, who spent years in Rome before his return to the States to teach at Harvard where he created the famous “Fogg System” of art education and analysis. By 1900—Veblen’s era—the “harvest” from the “seeds” whose tropes for “ripening” both Stillman and Norton assiduously nurtured suggested models by which various art enterprises found legitimization through an institutionalized set of systems. Under Norton’s leadership, Harvard advanced the role of the academically trained aesthete who merged “literary art culture” with “‘scientific’ connoisseurship.” The first generation received instruction that Veblen would have diagnosed as a mix of both pre-and post-Darwinian methods since it clung to elements of the genteel tradition Stillman and Norton championed in their essays on aesthetics. Norton offered no visible images during his lectures. Students learned to “see” the paintings of which he spoke through the power of his rhetoric. If somewhat old-fashioned in its Ruskinian approach, Norton’s assigned reading from original art historical sources (French, German, Italian) was a major advance. From the 1870s on, students received a hands-on introduction to the actual techniques by which actual artists acquire their individual style. As the result, advanced museum work and curatorship began to come into being by the second generation of Norton’s tutelage.140 Bernard Berenson added Harvard’s insights to his own liking for both Walter Pater and Giovanni Morelli. Then he went off to Italy, where he became famous for modes of scientific inquiry believed to verify an artwork’s cultural and pecuniary values. Meanwhile, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University drew German refugees from Europe (that influx into all areas of intellectual endeavor later known as Hitler’s gift to America). Among its prize figures were Erwin Panofsky, Richard Offner, Walter Friedlander, and Richard Krautheimer, art men whose personal and professional teaching styles were entirely different but who helped make the institute the place where the majority of America’s museum directors and curators received their training. By fits and starts, art history, art scholarship, and art criticism adapted themselves to the demands of sci-

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entific methodologies. By the early twentieth century art instructors had moved from reliance on the spellbinding talk about the moral base that grounds aesthetic theory. Ruskin’s essays, plaster casts, and crude stereopticon images were replaced by sharply defined slides, index-card systems for classification, and university-endowed galleries as teaching tools for “the humanistic laboratory.” In due time the use of X-ray and chemical analysis, conservancy programs, and techniques of public education came into play. The essay contributed by Donald Preziosi to The Early Years of Art History in the United States argues there are no true “genealogical trees” that offer a direct line through “the historical development of art-history. . . . Such games of anamorphosis have long served to employ the narratives we fabricate about the history of art as a linked chain of theories, methods, personalities, and schools of interpretation. . . . It has long been a commonplace to frame the history of our discipline as a professional evolution of advances, survivals, hero(ine)s, and avatars, main streams and minor rivulets.” Preziosi thinks it best to escape these “suave entrapments” (as did Darwin and Veblen) by turning to the realization “that critical re-thinking of art-historical practice has constituted the very foundation of the discipline.” It is necessary to take into full account the “conflicting and often strongly opposed vision of art, and of art’s history.”141 In this narratological tradition, a better narrative is the one offered, as it were, by “the wise earthworm” of Ruskin’s metaphor at a meeting of social scientists or a forum at the College Art Association. It traces the diverse processes by which art criticism, art histories, art lovers, and art analysts will betray, define, redefine, denigrate, and honor the strange relationships found (to paraphrase Preziosi) between the conflicting visions that continue to complicate histories of science and aesthetic theory. “The Normal Man”

What of William Stillman? Did he ever move from an initial position where he was, at best, pre-Darwin, pre-Veblen, and a pale Veblenian, to a more advanced position that sets the standard for what it takes to be an acting Veblenian? Stillman’s voice has agitated us throughout this section with its earnest desire to place Nature, God, Art, and Science at the service of Beauty. He was present in the 1850s as coeditor and chief essayist for the Crayon and reappeared a generation later as contributor to Scribner’s and Century, but did he ever give himself over to the processes of modernity that relieved him of the demands exacted by the ideals laid down by the Old Masters of Italy’s High Renaissance? In “Cole and His Work” Stillman announces to Century’s readers in Novem-



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ber 1888 that the magazine will launch an extended series of wood engravings of Old Master paintings from the hand of Timothy Cole. The second part of Stillman’s essay is titled “Mr. Cole’s Methods.” This is where he records the complex and meticulous stages by which wood engravings are executed by that professional, devoted to the instinct of workmanship. The first part of Stillman’s article is titled “The Popularization of Art.” It is here that Stillman registers certain shifts that challenge his earlier views voiced in the Crayon. Stillman still sees himself as one of the intellectual elites whose mission is, paternalistically, to bring art to the people, but he recognizes there are differences in the means by which art is now being dispersed, the kind of art open to public access, and the language it behooves one to use in describing this new art experience. The differences are subtle. They might suggest that Stillman has indeed moved himself out of the pre-Darwinian age where his mind had once existed, adapting himself to a markedly Veblenian world. The history of art is full of records of popular enthusiasm over some work that met the ideal of the day—a result always possible when that ideal was one of art, but which is no longer possible since nature has been recognized as the standard. . . . The human mind—so far, at least, as it has been subjected to the process of civilization—has become awakened to the reality and importance of nature and the emotions which are derived from her, and in the same degree has become insensible to art and its enthusiasms. This seems to be a necessary state in human development. The race cools to the whole range of poetic emotions as it grows older in progress. . . . but to the race in general, in proportion as it develops to the modern ideal of progress, even in the better sense, the entire range of artistic, i.e., emotional, faculties are yielding place to the rational and scientific and the redevelopment of art in the sense in which it was known in its golden ages is no longer to be hoped for.142

Gone are references to God, to soul, to imperatives for the poetic impulse, for the hot passion formerly exacted of art lovers.143 Gone is the need “to discuss the conditions of American art: whether we have or have not a proper school, whether we have developed a proper motive, is a matter of purely academical platitudes.” Also absent is the call for Americans to bow to the art of the Italian High Renaissance. Americans can give themselves over to “a new art,” which means they need not “err in attaching great importance to the manner of thought and work of the great artistic epochs of the past, or study too profoundly the traits of the great painters, whom we distinguish as the ‘old masters.’ Whatever contributes to the better knowledge and keener discrimination of the more subtle traits of the work of the nascent phrases of art as distinguished from the

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mature—the early and struggling Renaissance as compared with the triumphant and complete—is, therefore, a profounder lesson in the philosophy of art, and more important in view of a possible new avatar of the creative spirit in our own day. . . . The art of Giotto is, in this sense, more important to the student than that of Titian.”144 Stillman gives leave to Americans to throw off the sense of inferiority long processed into their hearts since they had not yet attained “the triumphant and complete.” Be raw, and enjoy it, and hasten not to gain “perfected results” and “the top of the scale. . . . We are growing wiser as critics in proportion as we grow less impassioned as poets. . . . And as the study of pure art makes its way and molds the art university which may come one day, Giotto and Botticelli, even more than Titian and Raphael, will come forward as the true masters of any possible new art.”145 Stillman has not forgotten that “[t]o us in America, removed from the facilities of the great galleries and still further removed in spirit from the temper out of which all great former art has sprung”—we must rely on reproductions, thus the importance of Century’s commitment to presenting Cole’s engravings to its subscribers. “Our national temper is anti-artistic”; still, we gain from having Cole’s engravings at our disposal. “The modern spirit of fidelity to the visible and material ideal is here entirely appropriate, and when the old subjective creations of art come to be regarded as objective material, the unquestioning and uncompromising exactitude of the modern spirit has found the noblest field it can ever be employed in. The skill which on a wood-block can facsimile an etching is more worthily employed in reproducing and perpetuating the greatest works of the pencil which time has left us.”146 Certain snide aspersions about the limitations of popular taste remain in Stillman’s “Cole and His Work.” He regrets the loss of that special moment when the saintly Raphael “reached the top of the scale,” while he acknowledges “the rational and the scientific”—the objective “exactitude of the modern spirit of fidelity to the visible and material ideal.”147 Ten years later Thorstein Veblen published “The Instinct of Workmanship,” which seems to put efforts like Cole’s into doubt. Eight years further on Veblen’s “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization” indicates why people like Stillman, Norton, or Henry Adams should not try to cross the line between matters of “taste” and “scholarship” that bars them from the realm of the “real” sciences. So what of Veblen’s “normal man”? Would this primary representative of the American public remain “restive” well into the next century—still bewildered despite Stillman’s attempts to calm his nerves by scientific and sociological forces outside his comprehension? I conclude by referring to the life histories of two most “normal men,” who felt the issues Still-



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man and Veblen put on display without ever understanding what was happening to them. My father was born in 1883 before the advent of the automotive era. He died in 1975 after men had walked on the moon. At eighteen he set out to visit the battlegrounds over which his father (a farmer’s son, born in 1840) had fought in Grant’s Army of the Tennessee during the Civil War, the history-rending event that eradicated much that had existed in the past. My father made his way south to Shiloh and Vicksburg by hitching rides on horse-drawn farm wagons. On the loop back north, he went to work at the steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama, later laboring in the mills run by U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana. His own father never knew what the Civil War was about. All that mattered was that he had survived (just barely, at Vicksburg) to live on until 1924, past more wars, more political, social, and economic upheavals. As for my father, his life span gave him many “restive” moments of pleasure and apprehension, but his world—like that of his father and that of Veblen’s “normal man”—simply happened to him. He had no way to comprehend what it meant to live out ninety-two years under the “domination” of the scientific process. It is what my father and grandfather could not grasp that drives us to keep trying to pull meaning into patterns that are greater than the sum total of academic squabbles or the encroachments of bureaucratic institutions. Part Three will lay out what major figures in the literary world (both in their novels and in critical essays) had to say about the values of “the Common Man” in a specifically American context. But first there is Part Two, which questions the role taken by the often “normal,” often very “common” men who were elected to Congress during the formative years of this nation’s emergence as an independent entity. They not only had to put together a working basis for governing the erstwhile colonies, they were pledged to start up a new capital city, erect its buildings, and—almost by default—to make the physical look of Washington, D.C. an emblem for its republican ideals. These were heavy duties for senators and representatives sent forth from the loosely bound-together states to a plot of land along the Potomac River to create a city that could somehow convey by its architecture and artistic ornamentation the symbolic essence of Rome’s republic purified of Rome’s historical flaws. On these undeveloped grounds (literally as well as figuratively), the United States sought to prove whether it could originate an aesthetics that expressed the nation’s inmost spirit while sustaining the principles of the powers of human reason.

Part Two

Capitol of Best Intentions

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836) Have we not molded a giant statue, not out of marble or brass, but of more stubborn materials—a mighty people, formed from all climates, faiths, and races, into one massive nationality, and kindled into life. —Samuel Osgood, “The Fine Arts in America” (1855)

The Perfect Republic: Comparative Perspectives

The creation from scratch of Washington, D.C. furnishes an excellent test case for assessing the aesthetic choices and cultural principals set in motion once the Continental Congress designated the site along Tiber Creek as the future seat of the nation’s “real” and “ideal” being.1 Concerns covered in Part One of One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic come into even sharper focus when applied to the intentions that guided the planning, building, and decoration of the new nation’s capital and its signature edifice, the U.S. Capitol. Once the need was voiced for efforts as forceful as those that raised the civic structures of Italy, it was time to define the best art worthy of the ideal of the perfect American republic. Whether Art Thoughts or politics would dominate what came next is the matter at issue, wrapped in the further question of whether a developing national art could decently serve nationalistic purposes

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or find its aesthetic values swamped by overtly ideological readings of American history. Congress and the president were pulled into debates over matters for which they were ill prepared. When the men in Washington, D.C. first met to assign funds for the construction and embellishment of the nation’s prime civic site, they had to rely on the abilities of army engineers and self-taught architects to carry out their intentions. Along with their fellow Americans, they had to figure out the relations between moral rawness, ripeness, and rot. The impulse to look to ancient models of governance and the arts reflective of past Italian glories was leavened by debates over whether America was committed to republicanism or to imperialism, to strong federal controls or to states’ autonomy. Congress had to give full attention to the special needs of systems making. It had little time to deal with the distracting challenges voiced by Emerson in the 1830s and the arts men of the Crayon during the 1850s. Instead of getting too deeply involved in an antebellum aesthetic involving God, Nature, and Soul, might it not be better if congressmen attended to rules of logical thought that followed the lines of Veblenism? Washington, D.C. was first an idea, then a series of hard facts leading to an actual city. Its history provides a running commentary on the politics and aesthetics of nation making. Moving (sometimes staggering) through prolonged stages of change, the men in charge had to decide what it means for a nation’s capital to represent its values in stone and paint before a skeptical world. This would have been a problem for any nation in any age, but America’s capital was burdened by a special task: how to deal with Italy’s past greatness. (Gestures were made toward the Greek ideal, but the example of Italy soon surpassed that of Athens.) Would the new city follow the often confusing lead of Rome, which had passed through monarchy to republic, empire, and papal state—devolving through the centuries from glory to decline? Or of Medician Florence, with its powerful mercantile families, political upheavals, and populist agitations? Or the ambiguous model of Venice, alternately viewed as decadent oligarchy or the most “serene” of republics? Any attempt to judge the nature of the influence exerted over the United States of America during its youthful years by glowing accounts of Italy, appended by sad tales of its cities’ declines, resurrections, and final falls, leads to acts of comparison. To deal in comparative history is a dangerous thing, especially when calling upon examples that pit social structures such as America’s Washington, D.C. in the 1800s against the complex of images that trace Rome from its legendary beginnings to its nineteenth-century present. Since “the comparative

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method is an adaptation of experimental logic to investigations in which actual experimentation is impossible,” any thinker who distrusts analysis marked by retreat from the principles of scientific inquiry can hardly be pleased.2 In 1909 Max Weber voiced unease over historians with a sociological bent who were unable to provide “scientifically ascertainable ideals” in face of the fact that we are “expected to create our ideals from within our breast in the very age of subjectivist culture.”3 As did Veblen, Weber held doubts about the value of “evolutionary and mono-causal theories.” He objected to conclusions based on viewing “cultural development in the manner of biological processes as a lawful sequence of universal stages.” Shoddy logic prates of “analogies” and “parallels” dedicated to the static sameness of “identities,” at the cost of losing sight of the particulars that denote dynamic distinctions. But if historians can take great care to avoid generalizations that obtain absolutes on the cheap by making “grand manner” sweeps, they may point out similarities that lead to useful distinctions. They will be aware that comparison is simply a method that sets “a task for the historical imagination” (emphasis added). It is the same task borne by “Part Two—Capitol of Best Intentions,” in which the emphasis is placed on advantages gained through the responsible use of “comparative perspective.” Less limited than the logic of comparative history, comparative perspective imparts “a sense of the richness and variety of human experiences; it provides us not with rules, but with insights.” The endgame is the affirmation that different societies, whatever their distinctions and similarities, are placed on view in order that “some explanatory problem is being addressed ” (emphasis added).4 The potential dangers of comparative history and the exhilarating possibilities of comparative perspective in regard to the creation of nations and city-states are on full display during the following treatment of the civic arts imbedded within the respective cultures of Italy’s past and America’s present. Scholars currently tracing Italy’s achievements throughout the trecento, quattrocento, and cinquecento call upon “the new art history.” In contrast to previous historiographies, they “must speak from the cultural and social perspectives . . . in order to deduce plausible interpretations and collect data, without claiming that they obtain the whole truth.” The Veblenians and Weberians now engaged in art history take up “the work that art did in society in presenting ideals and strictures to viewers through images” and “in ordering society through urban planning, and in structuring ordinary life and ceremony with edifices.”5 We cannot, however, lose sight of the “then”—the pre-Veblenian stance on “evolutionary and mono-causal theories” articulated by William Stillman in the pages of the Crayon. Giorgio Vasari’s preface to The Lives of the Artists of 1550



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echoes through the centuries his belief in the biological attributes of human progress, which set patterns of thought for connoisseurs of Italian art well into the nineteenth century. Vasari’s shadow fell across Stillman in the common wish for each man to encourage “the welfare and common advantage” of his fellow artists. Once the arts men of the 1550s and 1850s “had seen how art reached the summit of perfection after such humble beginnings, and how it had fallen into complete ruin from such a noble height (and consequently how the nature of this art resembles that of the others, which, like human bodies, are born, grow up, become old and die), they will now be able to recognize more easily the progress of art’s rebirth and the state of perfection to which it is again ascending in our own times.”6 Lest we forget that Americans other than William Stillman made their own use of Vasari’s position on the “biological” growth of the arts, take note of The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici and of Our Own Times, published in two volumes in 1845 by C. Edwards Lester, who spent years as the U.S. consul in Genoa. One of Lester’s primary aims is to vindicate the reputation of Hiram Powers, whose statue (as we shall see) of George Washington caused more displeasure than approval when placed in the Capitol rotunda. In arguing that Powers was “born with a germ sure one day to develope [sic] itself,” Lester decries the fact that the Americans, desirous of learning their trade as artists, are forced into exile by the lack of support in their home country. Once they settle in Italy, they risk tainting their native talents by studying the Old Masters—a situation that “exalts the teaching of the master above the guidance of nature,” thus making more “of the close air of the hot-house than the pure breezes of heaven.” Lester concludes, “We may draw a good comparison from the vegetable kingdom. The plants that thrive best in a country, with a few exceptions, are indigenous to it; or if not, they must be grafted upon a natural stock.”7 When Americans went abroad to study they were vulnerable to the decay of their imagination in the midst of the decline of ancient Italian cities. Would graftings from their Italian experience stunt their wish to create a ripe art? Above all, could they sense when rot begins and where it ends? Rot can take place in any city, new or old. In the first year of its existence, observers already judged Washington, D.C. “both melancholy and ludicrous.” It is “a city in ruins [with] the appearance of a considerable town, which has been destroyed by some calamity.” America’s capital already resembled a Rome that had been rotting for centuries. In 1800 “the ruins of the ancient city lie scattered and solitary. Like gravestones above the race that reared them in their prime, they cover dust. . . . Old conflict, old triumphs, and old heroes, sweep through the broken arches and crowd about the sunken columns.”8

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There is a deal of difference between ruins caused by the collapse of edifices built long, long ago (the “old” inevitably suffer physical decay over time) and ruins in a new city in a state of deterioration before time has had a chance to step in. Rome evidences rot because its historical presence became overly ripe by the time of Augustus Caesar, a state exacerbated by mythic memories of what it had once been.9 In a country still raw, the “ruins” of Washington, D.C. stir no memories of past glories, suggest no possibilities of regeneration. However, by means of risky experiments in quasi-evolutionary theory, America’s capital might be reborn through reliance on origin myths that replaced the history it did not yet have. Vasari’s review of the decline, then rebirth, of art in Italy provides a metaphysical reading of why the vaunted “resurrection” came about. Art and human affairs had fallen into sad decline once the Byzantine style was brought into Italy from the East, but God took mercy on the best men of Tuscany. God was, after all, the First Artist from the moment he created Adam. He did not intend that the things of this world should remain eternally in an imperfect state. Guided by the design embedded in his world, Tuscan artists learned how to “bring their imperfect drafts to that state of refinement and perfection they seek.”10 Americans would like to believe that this clutch of Tuscans were not the only ones chosen to benefit from God’s compassion in revealing his aesthetics to mortal minds. Perhaps he would do the same in the 1790s for Americans, enabling them to triumph over the rotting imperial systems of the Old World, despite their “rough and clumsy” ways. Winning through would not be easy. It was not only that there were ongoing struggles between Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers as to which agency was finally responsible for laying out the city’s buildings and adding certain artistic embellishments. Decisions were required to determine what that architecture and those decorations were intended to say. It was no small thing for the members of the succeeding administrations to select the material forms best suited to express the history of the heroic creation of a perfect republic and the mythologies of American exceptionalism while unable to avoid reference to past Italian models of civic art. Whether pagan or Catholic, the stylistic references of those models intruded upon democratic principles bedded in traditions of Protestant governance that were even then undergoing seismic shifts. In this study of the place Charles Dickens named “the City of Magnificent Insentions” [sic],11 the thrust is simply stated: first, to define the roles played by the members of Congress, the engineers/architects who built the actual city, and the artists hired to turn it into the supreme symbol of a splendid idea; second, to apply comparative perspectives drawn from the merger of politics and the arts in



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Washington, D.C., Rome, Florence, Siena, and Venice. Such a study (one that provides its own modest set of “Magnificent Intentions”) presents problems that include, but extend beyond, the warnings set out by Veblen, Weber, and others. These are some of the facts to take into account: the plans (structural and symbolic) for the infant capital, which had to consider geography and topology; an abiding “newness” that required both inventing and borrowing from previous models; the mixed reactions to Italy’s past as a civic entity and patron of civic art, which clouded discussions of “democracy” and “republicanism” in American terms. These are some of the questions that need to be answered: Why the overwhelming focus on Italian models, not those of London or Paris? To what extent were origin myths seized upon to justify past historical events, adding a dragging weight to future aspirations? Which political figures materializing from the mists of the early years would be selected as icons for Good Government and Good Art? What substitutes had a Protestant nation for Italy’s wealth of pagan heroes and Christian saints—monumental figures such as Augustus Caesar and St. Peter for Rome, St. Mark for Venice, Julius Caesar, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and the Medicis for Florence? Was it feasible that a material structure like the U.S. Capitol serve as the stage for the practical processes of representative government while conveying the transcendent nature of the nation’s self-appointed mission? Had the Capitol the force to make dual statements, both profane and sacred, that helped define the edifices dedicated to the greater glory of Italy’s emperors, popes, and mercantile dynasties? And what is “seen” (much less “known”) by the public eye once an aesthetic intended to extol an ideology of “virtuous government” is placed on view under the aegis of adherents of the politics of power? The men living through the raw period of the American Revolution were disturbed by the lingering question: What was the point of their mad adventure after all? They were in the process of creating an “abstract” nation, not an “organic” grouping that has come into being through random gropings with no particular end in sight. At least on paper, the United States of America had the look of a planned venture. Through a series of documents (the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution), it was committed to a Purpose, based on the Best Intentions. The future meaning of Washington, D.C. was not as clear. The event set going by the Residence Act of May 1790 lay with the choice of a ten-mile plot of undeveloped land vaguely located between Maryland and Virginia, the acceptance of plans for the layout of a capital city, and the selection made of men charged to build and to embellish its central civic structures. But to what end? By the 1850s Horatio Greenough was striking the note of hope. For him “truth

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is not a series of approximations but an arrival and a result. Therefore do I feel that this American people is the advanced guard of humanity; because it is one vast interrogation,” but as one scholar has observed of the interrogations pursued by followers of Christianity during its formative years, busily testing their beliefs and creating the pictorial emblems to depict those beliefs: “it had yet to decide where exactly it was going.”12 Creation Ab Ova: How Washington, D.C. Came About (1783–1790)

It seems so easily brought about: this decision where to locate the “deliberately created” capital of the new nation. All it took, according to the pleasant little tale still being told years after the event, was for Thomas Jefferson to meet with Alexander Hamilton over dinner the weekend of June 19–20, 1790. As the result of “the clever bargain of two scheming politicians,” southern debts incurred during the Revolution were settled, the South received the right to choose where the city would be built, and “the wiles of the Philadelphians” who wished to remain the government’s city were defeated. This was how Charles Moore related the story in his memoirs of 1929.13 In league with Glenn Brown, national secretary of the American Institute of Architects, Charles Moore, as secretary to Senator James McMillan of Illinois, advanced “the winning crusade to revive George Washington’s vision of a capital city” during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. The purity of the original vision had been corrupted by politics, ignorance, and greed, as well as by opposing visions deemed equally pure. No wonder that when Moore and Brown conjured up the “facts” of the city’s origins, they lingered over the tale of a longago gentlemen’s dinner. In this telling, politics are touched by a bit of genial cynicism and graced by an amiable agreement that leads to the “truly noble” acquisition of land. Pseudo-history of this sort was good to look back upon. It did no harm in the strenuous work Moore and Brown undertook in 1900 to resurrect the perfect city based on the perfect ideal initially held by George Washington, the perfect citizen-president.14 This rendition of the passage of the Residence Act of 1790 is hardly on a par with Parson Weems’s fictive concoctions of 1800 that instilled in the minds of generations of schoolchildren the image of the boy George Washington stoutly declaring, “I cannot tell a lie!” It has none of the force of the origin myths that lie behind the founding of Rome, Florence, or Venice, cities so old they have no clear beginnings or facts to call upon. (Guenther Roth cites Max Weber’s conviction that “ancient social history had no visible starting point.”) Recent



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scholarship in the papers of Jefferson and Washington has thickened and darkened the accounts of the steps by which Washington, D.C. came into being as the “Federal City.” Although there are still disagreements about what actually happened that legendary weekend in June of 1790, a fairly clear picture is now available of the search for a home for the new nation.15 One of the better summaries of what was not primarily a genteel “gentleman’s agreement” comes from Kenneth R. Bowling’s contribution in 1991 to the First Federal Congress Project, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital.16 It goes as follows. Congress did its business in Philadelphia between 1774 and 1783 before being relocated to New York City. Still without a permanent capital, Congress remained in New York until 1790, when it returned to Philadelphia. There it stayed until November 17, 1800, when it finally moved to the newly created District of Columbia. It had been James Madison who pressed the Federation Convention in May 1787 to settle the capital’s location. On December 8, 1789 article 1, section 8, clause 17 of the Constitution specified that a ten-mile-square area of undeveloped land near the Potomac be allocated for the purpose of “the Seat of Government.” This location “will be most central and convenient to the citizens of the United States at large, having regard as well to population, extent of territory, and a free navigation to the Atlantic Ocean, through the Chesapeake Bay, as to the most and ready communication with our fellow citizens in the western frontier.”17 By July 16, 1790 the States at Large reached an agreement on the matter. On January 24, 1791 President George Washington issued the proclamation that put the Residence Bill into action. These flatly stated facts make the affair sound simple, but not when one realizes that seven years were spent between October 1783 and July 1790 in heated debates over the selection of the actual site of the capital city—debates that ominously presaged the war that would rend the nation decades later. The battle over how and where the capital would come about consumed the attention of the Confederation Congress, held up the drafting of the Constitution, and absorbed the work of the First Federal Congress. On one side were the “centralists,” who sought a strong government system in tight command of the individual states; on the other the “decentralists,” who fought to impose strict limits on the federal government. Clashes between those who intuited an imperial future for the United States and those who argued for a republic pitted capitalist interests (financial and commercial) against an agricultural economy dependent upon the slave system. These agitations were finally patched over, in Bowling’s words, when Hamilton and Madison, Washington and Jefferson, “struck a compromise by which the North secured southern acquiescence to

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both financial capitalism and the constitutional doctrine of implied powers,” and the South “gained passage of an act placing the United States capital on the Potomac River. Along with it came the strong implication that the North would not raise serious objections to the institution of slavery, for the North had consented to a capital located in two slave states.”18 This compromise, which hoped to create “an indissoluble bond: a republican empire, fueled by northern financial and commercial capitalism, the capital of which sat in the agrarian, slave South,” was the first of three compromises intended to hold the Union intact. Through passage of the Compromises of 1820 and of 1850, the North and South put off for a little while longer the terrible war that lay ahead in 1861—the war foretold by many wise heads during the rabid debates throughout the 1780s. But already Virginians were speaking of “northern oppression”; they felt free to disassociate their talk of “separated confederacies” from northern charges of “treason.” It was apparent to one observer that “[p]eople seem almost ripe for a national division of North and South,” and John Adams expressed a sense of “horror” over the “division of this Continent into two or three nations” and the “dread of civil war.” Another admitted that “division” between southern and northern positions within Congress was a “disagreeable” thought, “but the distinction is founded in nature, and will last as long as the Union,” and a man from Connecticut wrote, “I was so vexed at the clashing of northern and southern politics, local interests, and the contentions of rival cities for the seat of government that I heartily wished the avenging angel would sever the continent in twain at the Hudson, Delaware, or Potomac.”19 Despite grave divisions and tenuous agreements, the Residence Act of 1790 was finally accepted and the yet unfinished Federal City received official authorization. Washington, D.C. came into being in 1800, filled with the “Magnificent Intentions” of representing the noble efforts of a (white, male, propertied) citizenry committed to fostering the modern world’s first truly free republic.20 The Southern Factor

The “Southern Factor” is placed at the center of Constance McLaughlin Green’s Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878. A key point is the seriousness of the debate over what the word “central” meant at the time of the original debates over the capital’s location, with implications that reverberated throughout the nineteenth century. When “central” was defined geographically, pressure was put upon a location halfway between southern Georgia and northern New Hampshire. If “central” indicated the center of the nation’s population, support was given to placing the city well north of Virginia (even if slaves were counted



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into the figure). However, in the end the District of Columbia was taken into the Virginia/Maryland area. This promised that the capital would rest at “the center of both population and power,” with the ability to attract business ventures. As a consequence of the final decision, the capital’s administrative offices were dominated by “appointees from Maryland and Virginia [who] alone still composed nearly half the civil and military list in the District of Columbia,” while the city’s general population was “even more preponderantly southern in origin.”21 Aesthetic matters, not only politics, came into play in this and many other aspects of the choice made in 1790. The all-important “Roman” constituent folds into that of “the southern factor.” Place the response of southerners in the early years of the national capital to arts in the cause of historical recollection next to this description of thirteenth-century Rome at the close of the Middle Ages, viewed by one of its historians as “a beautiful short Indian summer.” There was, in this aftermath . . . a problem recurrent in the history of Rome. Basically she was conservative. Her past, Christian and pagan, was her pride, but it weighted her down. . . . for long periods, patrons and artists remained untouched by new concepts of art evolved elsewhere in Europe. In the course of Rome’s long history, whenever political constellations finally forced her to confront such alien concepts, there grew from the interplay of innovative and traditional forces time and again a surprisingly strong new, and eminently Roman art . . . [as] when art from abroad penetrated and was absorbed and transformed. . . . Each time the upsurge of a new art was linked to a political revival . . . The alien ideas only took root when wedded to the living tradition. But a plainly conservative undercurrent lazily moved along beneath the recurrent upsweeps.22

What distinguishes the Roman conservatism of this passage from that of the southerners of Washington, D.C., is that while “the upsurge of a new art [of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries] was linked to a political revival” that affected Rome’s entire being, the southern members of Congress often stood apart from the political changes introduced by its northern members. The reluctance of the American South to participate fully in the northern aspects of governance would have a considerable effect upon the official Art Ideas introduced into the Capitol, as well as upon the political decisions made in the congressional chambers. The many chroniclers and analysts of the capital’s everyday life make note of the cultural splits that gave the city its own Mason-Dixon Line, replicating the growing political divisions between the South and the North. In Lillian Miller’s seminal study of the status of the arts and public patronage during the early

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years of the new republic, she traces these splits from colonial times forward. That the arts flourished in Charleston came from “the desire to imitate English ways.” There was “little interest” in “the theoretical or social or aesthetic value of art as an aspect of culture.” Miller believes that “the southern aristocratic tradition . . . precluded professionalism in the arts,” thereby turning it over to “the middle classes.” In Miller’s eyes, even the example set by Jefferson’s interests in architecture and technological innovations “lost its influence in the South” by the 1830s.23 In art, “as in other aspects of intellectual life, southerners turned away from cosmopolitanism to a conservative sectional patriotism.” One result was “the classical portrait in the aristocratic manner.” Miller concludes her appraisal with the Civil War. “Where nationalism was rejected for sectionalism, there American art received little encouragement—until sectionalism became southern nationalism and the South began to think of itself as a culturally distinct area.”24 Andrew Cosetino and Henry Glassie, authors of The Capital Image: Painters in Washington, D.C., 1800–1915, are primarily concerned with the city’s local art scene. Since its patrons and artists stood apart from the official commissions given out by Congress, this self-isolation offers an intriguing look at the city’s society defined by its “predominantly Southern orientation.” The earliest visitors to Washington, D.C. remarked on the southern rusticity of the Maryland and Virginia environs, its taste for the “rhetorical idealism” of Italian art and for bucolic landscapes, in contrast to renderings of northern urban scenes and the paintings by local residents such as George Washington Parke Custis (father-inlaw of Robert E. Lee).25 Capital Elites, Kathryn Allamong Jacob’s social history of Washington, D.C., also emphasizes the tensions enforced by the dual nature of the nation’s capital from the time that the District was first settled, with a population that included 3,224 slaves.26 By the 1850s the city “was a house divided, neighbor against neighbor, resident against official.” Southern in its population and traditions, “it sheltered a national government that was increasingly dominated by Northerners,” such as Congressman Abraham Lincoln (Illinois), who proposed the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia in 1849. In 1860 the census recorded that 24 percent of the city’s population was from either Maryland or Virginia and 50 percent had ties to southern families. It was not unexpected that, when Lincoln was elected president, plans were formed for Virginia and Maryland to take over the District prior to his inauguration. Once the war began and the city (under constant threat of capture by the Confederacy) became a military camp, a mass exodus of southerners took place. By 1873 a journalist would declare, “The old provincial Southern city is no more. From its foundations had risen another city,



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neither Southern nor Northern, but national, cosmopolitan.”27 Yes, and no, as we shall see, once the spirit of George Washington was resurrected in 1906. The Education of Henry Adams was written by a longtime resident of Washington, D.C., a historian devoted to debunking American myths while creating his own origin myth. One perfect passage demonstrates what the nation’s capital stood for in 1850 in the imagination of a Boston-born child. Through its description in the painterly form of a rural landscape, it provides an allegory for the material, emotional, and moral significance of the city of slavery. At age twelve, Adams was taken by his father to Washington, where he received his “education politically” upon first “entering a slave State.” Upon venturing outside into the air reeking with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found himself on an earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks meandering from the colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble columns and front of the Post Office and Patent Office which faced each other in the distance, like white Greek temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city. Here and there low wooden houses were scattered along the streets, as in other Southern villages, but he was chiefly attracted by an unfinished square marble shaft, half-a-mile below. . . . He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more the sense of atmosphere almost new, had perhaps as much again, and the brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in the atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not simple but the boy liked it. . . . The want of barriers, of pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent Southern drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed his . . . blood.28

A visit to Mount Vernon was a requisite part of the boy’s “Virginia education.” “To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road’s badness, which amounted to a social crime—and yet, at the end of the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.”29 Adams’s father also took the boy to the Capitol, where the “old Senate Chamber resembled a pleasant political club.” Introduced to “Clay and Webster and Calhoun,” Adams is “struck” by “their type. Senators were a species; they all wore an air, as they wore a blue dress coat or brass buttons; they were Roman.”30

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In the nation’s Capitol where the spirit—and crime—of George Washington lived on, the men in command still looked like Romans, possessed by elements of their own spirit and crimes. It was impossible for an American child to escape being “educated” by Washington, D.C. It was almost as difficult for its builders, its decorators, or its visitors to escape what memories of Rome in particular, and Italy in general, imposed upon the political, cultural, and aesthetic life of the nineteenth-century American mind. Celebratory Histories: Old and New Style

Approval in 1790 for the creation of the American capital came at the time when the great city-states of Rome, Florence, and Venice were in decline. Even before the first stones were laid in the undeveloped tract along the Potomac, Philip Freneau voiced the view that set the newly created myth-history of the capital’s origin next to the myth-history of Rome. “They have erected a city, which like Rome in her glory, may be called the strength of nations, the delight of the universe, the birthplace of sages, and, if not the abode of gods, yet truly the nurse of heroes, statesmen, and philosophers.”31 Freneau was not alone in such thoughts. He addressed the “idea” for Washington, D.C. that ruled the decisions made by members of Congress to charge engineers, architects, and artists to create a new Rome on the banks of the Potomac, near Capitol Hill and the streamlet called the Tiber. Single-minded devotion to an aesthetics intended to celebrate the principles of the American form of governance would peak, then wane, in the years ahead, but the call to emulate past models was voiced in 1872 on the floor of the House of Representatives by Mr. Brooks of New York. “Democracy is not a coarse and vulgar thing, but the ideal creation of the best and the most beautiful. . . . And thus from the Roman Forum the Roman orators pointed to the Capitolum, where was the Roman golden temple full of the Roman sacred gods. Even so the republicans of the Middle Ages in Florence, Pisa, or Venice, decorated and adorned their capitols with glorious statues or frescoes or noble parks; the people in all of them, the democratic people, feeling that as they exalted their own chosen governments, they exalted the democratic principles, and also exalted themselves.”32 If the methods of “comparative perspective” are to be put into play, attention has to be paid to questions prompted by the constant references made to Rome—the city whose structures (material, ideological, and symbolic) would, in profound ways, serve both as model and antimodel for America’s attempts to justify its own future greatness. Which Rome was Freneau thinking of? Was “Rome in her glory” the storied city that represented an ideal republic, or was



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it the Rome that became the imperial master of the ancient world? Any answer, however meager, requires looking back at how its own peoples defined the Idea of Rome. First off, the idea came into being through a cluster of myths well before Rome entered history, as would conceptions of their own splendid lineage by the citizens of Florence and Venice. Once the meaning of Rome fell into the eager hands of its historians, all manner of formulations evolved as to the origins of what would become a city of great power. The chapter titled “Auspicious Beginnings” from Edwin Muir’s study of civic ritual opens with an epigraph by Eric Auerbach: “To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the techniques of legend.” Muir then cites the impact upon history making of Italian folklorist Francesco Lanzoni’s Genesi delle leggende storiche. With this as one’s guide, there are no obstructions to making up stories about the origins of ancestors and cities. Thus freed from historical facts (often unavailable at the time), celebratory authors could “claim primacy in the eyes of God or to be considered the Chosen People.”33 In the case of the United States, there was a certain check on such historical nonchalance. The new nation was too embedded in modern times to draw upon the advantages available to the folklorists and chroniclers of Italian greatness who looked back into the misty centuries before history as such existed.34 The charming apocrypha of the dinner shared by Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison was dimmed by the intrusion of facts by which even ardent memorialists have to abide. Origin myths expressed in the Italian style seemed impossible, given the prosaic nature of contemporary documents like the Residence Act of 1790. Nor would thought tutored by Enlightenment principles allow tales of the lacteous love lavished by a maternal wolf upon abandoned twin boys. It was, after all, Tiber Creek, not the River Tiber, where the Founding Fathers conducted their business. Bits and pieces of pseudo-myth and uncertain historical facts were used to glamorize the reasons that led to the foundation of the nation’s capital.35 Once the Capitol Building was reared on Jenkins Hill near the Tiber’s streamlet (also known as Goose Creek), a physical place was established for the inscription of iconographic emblems of the sparse myths out of which the new republic was writing its own history. Between 1830 and 1860, Congress would slowly (often reluctantly) appropriate funds to introduce representations of the Columbus voyages, the landing of the Pilgrims, the settlement of Jamestown, the defeat of Indian tribes, and the military exploits of the Revolution as visual evidence to justify America’s claim to “primacy” as a “Chosen People.” It became necessary to call upon at least a modicum of myth in order to craft

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an aestheticized history that met the new nation’s ideological needs. The hard facts of a rock or a tree mean nothing, since America offers only “a barren study.” But the tree under which William Penn signed the treaty with the Indians that initiated his “holy experiment” became more than a tree. The rock on which the Pilgrims set foot at Plymouth was merely a rock until it was realized that it “treasures within itself so much history.” The “transfusion of the human imagination into the meaningless forms of outward objects” reveals “their relations to history, tradition, or story.” These “un-beautiful” events became “beautiful” through the agency of “memories of the past.”36 i ta l i a n pa l i mps e s t s : Origin Myths Washington, D.C. and the nation it symbolized would always feel shortchanged by lack of the “long-time” that enabled Italy’s early historians to embellish their myths.37 Had not Venice’s historians cleverly taken advantage of the fact that their watery city had been founded relatively late, in the eighth century after Christ?38 Its very youth encouraged the comforting notion that the “Most Serene of Republics” had no past history of occupation by Rome; it was free of the rot of Rome’s decline away from its own brief moment as a republic into a long history of tyranny. Yet it was Rome, rather than Venice, that nurtured the political aesthetic of most Americans, whether they liked or condemned what they found there. It was the material legacy of Rome’s imperial glory to which Washington, D.C. was committed, despite the contradictions involved when creating a showplace for New World republicanism. “Roman history began the Renaissance in a state of exhilarating confusion.” In this way A. T. Grafton opens “The Renaissance,” his contribution to The Legacy of Rome. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century humanists preferred the annals of Livy and Sallust, which “portrayed a Golden Age in Rome’s distant past and an imperial age of expansion in the late republic and empire.”39 By the sixteenth century, attention turned to the newly discovered writings of Tacitus, Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and others who questioned the fixed nature of Rome’s greatness. As Jean Seznec observes, the ancients had not comprehended how their legends had developed. It was the scholars of the Renaissance who “discovered” this past and imposed their own meanings upon it.40 Rome’s rise to imperial status fed upon recently uncovered evidence of the earlier, “finer” Etruscan civilization, embellished by Trojan genealogies. In order to nourish belief in their own republicanism, Florentines gave honor to the first Roman settlements near the Arno. In contrast, Rome’s emperors were cited by papal apologists as models for the im-



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perial autonomy of the Vatican. But once the writings of Cato and Varro were probed, scholars began to sense that nothing was certain about Rome’s founding. Some went so far as to deny the veracity of Roman tradition by which myth and history had merged. “Let the Romans produce their forefather’s [sic] fathers. Some will say it was the god Mars, others that it was a foul spectre. Let them produce his mother. One will say it was the vestal Rhea, another Silva, another Ilia. If you ask for his nurses, they trot out animals, the she-wolf and the woodpecker. . . . One thing is clear: vain poets invented Romulus from the name Rome because they did not know the city’s origins.”41

The rank and file of America’s congressmen never fully understood the gains (political and artistic) enjoyed by the Italian mind, which drew upon stories (apocryphal or not) about the origins of Italy’s great cities. The time would come, however, when they had to decide who was the father of America’s forefathers and who was America’s mother. Many held to literal beliefs in pseudohistories that justified the nation’s self-image as a noble political experiment, but the choice of images meant to enhance the walls of the U.S. Capitol was complicated by nineteenth-century responses to the iconographic mix of pagan and Christian images and historical figures in which Italians found such comfort. So equipped, it had been easy for Old Master artists to lavish the sites associated with greatness with gods, demigods, and heroic mortals.

ital i a n pa l i mp s e s t s : Sites for Future Greatness Archeologists now speak of Roman settlements dating from 1500 b.c. whose findings nicely blend with mythic wisdom. A fair amount of historical facts adds force to the claims that Rome’s origins go back to Romulus and Remus, the descendents of Aeneas, whose flight from Troy brought them to the banks of the Tiber. Romulus leapt over the walls Remus built on the Palatine Hill and killed his brother in a fit of rage. His men made off with the women of the Sabines, a tribe from the north. The avenging Sabines penetrated the fortress, but when the Sabine women achieved a truce, the two tribes were united under a single government. Rome became the seat of power, with April 21, 754 b.c. proclaimed as its official date of origin. Six kings were followed by an Etruscan who became the city’s leader until his murder, circa 579 b.c. Sevius Tullius organized Rome into a class system of voters, military men, and the poor. Under the rule of Tarquin the tyrant many public works were completed,

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Capitol of Best Intentions including the Temple of Jupiter. After more rapes and murders, the kingdom of Rome ended around 507 b.c. and the Roman republic came into being. Christopher Hibbert sums up the importance of this mélange of myths and facts. “Such, then, were the legends of the early history of Rome, legends that clearly indicate the kinds of people and behaviour which later Romans found admirable.” Whatever shifts took place over the centuries from kingdom to republic to empire, the Romans knew that their interests would not be served if they did away with “the simple overwhelming aura cast by the greatness of Rome’s ancient past.”42 Florence did not wait to be tutored by the cleverly practical cynicism of Niccolò Machiavelli to commit itself to a set of comparable origin myths. When Machiavelli studied the earlier accounts, he recognized the “political import behind these myths and texts.” Always aware that old views must be altered to fit present circumstances, he pressed the force of tales that guide “the novice ruler in the art of governing—through emulation of the ancient founders of the Western world.”43 But well before Machiavelli, the tradition of Florence as a powerful advocate of Tuscan republicanism dominated accounts from the thirteenth century, supported by adroitly employed rhetorical panegyrics and material images. Florentines argued that the settlement by the Arno had been founded in 59 b.c. by Julius Caesar. After Caesar’s destruction of Fiesole (itself founded in the fifth century b.c.), he replaced it with a new city modeled on republican Rome. Still later versions claimed that Florence had been founded by the veterans of Sulla’s Roman republicans as early as the end of the Social War in 80 b.c. The origin of the Florentine way was pushed farther back in time once it was claimed that Florence had been an important Etruscan town prior to the first Roman settlements. The Etruscans, not the Romans, were credited for the tradition of republicanism proudly upheld by Florence. Later still, the impact of Rome’s influence was lessened further when set against the role of Florence’s popoli in countering the power of families like the Pazzi or Medicis.44 Not missing a beat, it had also held that Florence was founded by Octavian and the second triumvirate in the days before he was heralded as Rome’s first emperor. By selecting which stories they wished to tell, Florentines might call their city the birthplace of republicanism as well as the “New Rome”—the “Rome” of imperial dynastic powers. One takes the myth one prefers. One gets the history one deserves.

The myths and histories elaborated upon by Renaissance scholars and artists gave weight to the euhemeristic tradition that allowed the old gods to be transformed into illustrious ancestors and civic heroes. This tradition would not sit



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well with the congressmen from Illinois or South Carolina; nor did the decorative allegories flowing from its practice give pleasure to the commissioners of Public Buildings and the members of the congressional committees who supervised the selection of artwork for the Capitol’s rotunda. “American” versions of the methods by which Italy’s Renaissance packed the past with rich meanings eventually found their way into the national imagination, especially after the rising commitment to manifest destiny began to overlay republican modesty with grandiose images of heroic glory. But in the beginning the Capitol dealt with America’s first president in its own way. By a reversal of the euhemeristic tradition, as we will see in the making of the myth of George Washington, the mortal man became a demigod.45 Republican Virtue on Display

When the government of the United States moved in 1800 from Philadelphia to the raw area named Washington, D.C., the basic construction plan had been fixed, albeit not without contentions and disruptions. Pierre Charles L’Enfant had envisioned a city open to extensive expansion in the future, expressing his belief in the nation’s ultimate elevated status before the world.46 Thoughts of spreading republican glories across the designated ten-mile district were put on hold as visions of grandeur fell before the practical need to erect buildings for immediate occupancy. The rudimentary structures—the White House, the Treasury, and the Capitol—were widely separated by stretches of undeveloped land. There was as yet no sense of continuity and cohesiveness. The decision by Washington to replace L’Enfant (viewed as a difficult man) with William Thorton provides one of the several ironies that mark the evolving plan for the nation’s capital. A century later it was the mission of the McMillan Plan to re-create L’Enfant’s “vision” in order to revive Washington’s own “vision.” The urgency expressed by Glenn Brown and Charles Moore, its leading advocates, is but one indication of how strongly the capital had become associated with the Washington myth. There was the Rome of Augustus Caesar and the Florence of Lorenzo and Cosimo I di Medici. George Washington as America’s savior general and first president would endow the nation’s capital with what Renaissance Italy named civile—“the affective identification of the [citizen] with a particular, geographically defined place,” as well as “a belief in the sacred nature of institutions and leaders, an attitude that invests things and persons political with a mystical aura, distinguishing them from mundane structures and from ordinary mortals.”47 As early as 1793 Washington had called upon the Office of Public Buildings

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to achieve “Grandeur, Simplicity, and Beauty of the exterior” (later amended to “Grandeur, Simplicity and Convenience”), but none of his wishes were met over the next two decades.48 After the destruction brought upon the capital by the British in 1814, Senator Fromentin doubted whether Washington’s request could find expression on “this sacred spot—sacred still in my eyes, although temporarily polluted by the foot of the enemy, as long as it bears the name of Washington.” On February 3, 1815, the senator asked his colleagues, What do we see here? Twelve or fifteen clusters of houses at a considerable distance from each other, bringing to our recollection the appearance of a camp of nomad Arabs. . . . If, sir, such is the situation of this city, after fifteen years since the Government removed here, during the six first years of which period there prevailed not only in this country, but all over Europe, a degree of enthusiasm bordering upon madness respecting the future destinies of this metropolis, and during which period of six years, too, this country enjoyed still the benefits of the Administration of Washington, whose good deeds for several years after his death were still in force—Washington, in his tomb, still securing the prosperity of this his beloved country—if, sir, such be now the situation of this city, what, in the present state of things, are our prospects for the future? Awful, indeed. . . . Is it not time, then, that we should adopt less lofty ideas, that we should assume sentiments, that we should express opinions more conformable to our present situation. Troja fuit, fuit Ilium. It becomes us to be modest. Our laws to be wholesome, need not be enacted in a palace.49

Some, like Representative Cushman of Maine, felt their spirits lifted after the decision was made not to flee like the Trojans. Others were reluctant to appropriate funds to offset the ravages caused by the material destruction of 1814. It was Cushman who argued for “the golden mean” in evaluating what was required to restore the capitol to the standards set by Washington’s memory. As would recur with ever greater frequency, Cushman’s points of reference linked the great capitals of Europe, America’s own capital, and George Washington. During House proceedings of March 13, 1821, he declared, “The proud oppressors of the earth, at different periods of time, have erected cities to their own fame, and adorned them with spoils of conquered nations. Not so is it with the city of Washington. The people of the United States, prompted by motives which do honor to the Republican character, decreed it, and are rearing it up to perpetuate the name of the Father of the Country. As long as our Republic shall remain, it will be a standing monument to his glory.”50 The glory must be represented by “the stately structures corresponding to the greatest of his achievements, reflecting the splendor of his talents and the mu-



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nificence of his virtues.” By rejecting “extravagant expense, empty parade, and useless ornamentation,” the capital could commit itself to the “simple grandeur” of the republican ideal based on “sober pomp and modest splendor. Not the dazzling radiance of a throne is here reflected, but the mild lustre, the serene majesty, of the sovereign people.”51 These early fumblings toward the codification of a nationalistic aesthetic failed to explain how “grandeur” may be “simple,” how “splendor” manages to be “modest,” and how “pomp” can be “sober.” Lacking a working “grammar of art,” the men of Congress relied on familiar forms of rhetoric that could inadvertently give the lie to their desire. During the first uneasy years of its existence, the District as a whole struck interested visitors either as having the elements of “a terrestrial paradise”—a site that “entertained the hope that it would at some future period equal ancient Rome in splendor and magnificence,” or as a paltry place of swamps, grazing areas for half-starved cattle, and muddy paths dotted with shoddy shops and dwellings.52 Those who fancied the landscape paintings of the period had kinder things to say, since a painter’s distancing techniques created amiable images. So did the falsification of its city plan through maps that gave meticulous details of buildings and avenues not yet in place. Viewers were struck by the awareness (one in play for generations to come) that up close Washington, D.C. might be ugly but that when viewed from the distance favored by a Claude or a Poussin, it was a delight. Was not this the same effect experienced by visitors to nineteenthcentury Rome? As long as one gazed at the city from out on the Campagna, the malaria-ridden swamps, muddy thoroughfares, and squalid rusticity of Rome retained a semblance of glory. The actualities that lay behind these phantom views offer a metaphor for the overall arts scene in America: random elements were randomly joined together; gaping holes waited to be filled; ill-used sites lay undeveloped. For the time being, Washington, D.C. was locked into the conditions of real history. It had to provide a workplace for members of Congress (the Capitol), the president (the White House), and the clerks at the Treasury Building. The nation’s business was defined for the next hundred years by the values implied by the shifts in 1793 between George Washington’s call on January 31 for “Beauty” to his request on March 3 for “Convenience.” Aesthetic concerns affecting the city’s civic structures had to come later. What could not be put off were provisions for public ceremonies that testified to the success of this embryo government before the rest of the waiting world. Public ceremonies required the right person to represent the nature of the republican virtues Americans were making up as they went along. The nation felt

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blessed in having George Washington on hand from the start. During the awkward first years of the new nation, the first president had to be, not merely enact, the living symbol of what the republic might hope to become. In order to confirm him as the leader of a people that “had yet to decide where exactly it was going,” it was imperative to position him carefully within a series of makeshift public ceremonies and settings.53 On April 30, 1789, simply dressed in a suit of “American cloth,” George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States—taking the oath as he stood on the balcony of New York’s City Hall before departing midst a military procession to St. Paul’s Chapel for services. But the greatest impression on the public mind came from the “royal progress” he took from Mount Vernon to New York. Washington’s arrival in Philadelphia en route to New York was celebrated, as one journalist put it, in ways that “did more honor to a man than all the triumphs that Rome ever beheld.”54

i ta l i a n pa l i mp s e s t s : Rituals of Arrival As Washington rode a white horse under arches decked with laurel and evergreen, his entry had many of the elements common to the ceremony of adventus augusti lavished upon Roman emperors of old. The general crowd was delighted, although naysayers thought the public’s infatuation “a menace to the republic, a threat of monarchy.” The best solution to this edgy transition would be a leader who played the “noble Roman” while possessing “the understanding and charity of the Christian.”55 Scholars who study the tradition of the “triumph” in the Rome of classical and Renaissance times cast wide their definitional net. Adventus rituals involve “any procession, with or without the festival cars and floats that came to be known as trionfi.” The ritual is “a formula, a category or construct that is as such artificial, arbitrary, and abstract.”56 Even after emperors were distinguished from the gods, adjustments were made and new protocols added for the reception of semidivine presences. Nonetheless, essential procedures for creating “splendid theater” continued as ancient institutions were carried into later times. As did classical Rome and medieval Constantinople, Washington, D.C. learned that “old forms could be regrouped to express new themes” through the retention of “an impressive reserve of images and turns of phrase which were hallowed by usage.”57 The high-flown panegyrics offered to emperors were latent in the oratorical flights in which midcentury American politicians and statesmen took pride. Speeches at welcoming ceremonies in Old World empires and New World republics could choose either



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to emphasize the ruler’s personal virtues or to point out qualities attached to the office and the deeds done in its name. In both the Old World and the new, ceremonies of adventus sealed the relation of leaders to the people (private individuals, the military, the administrative staffs). They confirmed the needed sense of stability and order, backed by a coherent bureaucratic system. Over time, however, it became unnecessary to highlight the “action” (imperial conquests or political campaigns) by which the ruler “arrives.” He is “just there” through a process that has been “completed and consummated.”58 For American citizens of the new republic, the attribution of divinity for an elected leader would reinforce bad memories of Old World notions of a monarch’s claim to divine rights. As members of a modern society birthed by the Enlightenment, they had to avoid according a godlike aura to their adventus ceremonies that aped pagan Rome or Christianized Constantinople.59 Americans freely borrowed laurel wreaths, coinage embossed with eagles and the profiles of leaders, triumphal arches, and laudatory speeches for use when it came time to inaugurate their presidents, but not images that joined the divine and the mortal. Or so it might seem.

Although George Washington was regarded as the mortal he undoubtedly was, during his lifetime members of an adoring public raised his image into realms of more than mortal perfection. The “real” Washington, like the “real” capital city in his name, rapidly took on attributes of the “ideal.” On his death in 1799, even before the nation’s capital was ready for business, Congress proposed to canonize their dead leader by placing his body in a tomb under the rotunda of the yet unfinished Capitol Building. This stab at an American version of the classical rituals of consecratio did not take place, however. Continuing the Anti-Federalist debates they led in the 1780s, southerners insisted that his body remain at Mount Vernon. Virginia, once it was designated as the nation’s most sacred site, would seal its status as an independent authority.60 Further attempts to transfer Washington’s body to the capital ended in failure by 1832. The Virginia contingent prevailed. John Quincy Adams was deeply depressed by the implications of the inability to reach a compromise over the final resting place of the nation’s foremost symbol of unity. In his diary of February 22, 1832, Adams wrote that the wish for the Capitol to be the site of Washington’s tomb had been “connected with an imagination that this federal Union was to last for ages. I now disbelieve its duration for twenty years, and doubt its continuance for five. It is falling into the sear and yellow leaf.”61 Adams tended to take gloomy views, but dissentions between the

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South and the North had been on record from the first. The original tensions over the location of the capital and the current refusal of the Virginians to relinquish their prize were now supplemented by divisiveness cutting into all congressional actions. “The Cherokee Strip,” attesting to the ideological divide between North and South, was the name given to the space separating the two sides of the Senate chambers. Many besides Adams sensed the need for symbolic ties to bind more tightly the fragile union of the states. It was no small matter that the Capitol tried to claim the body of George Washington, as it had been no little matter for Italy to establish the primacy of sacred relics that became the literal as well as the symbolic base for the great institutions of power that rose above their resting places.62 Once the U.S. Capitol failed to obtain the mortal remains of George Washington, the core upon which the building was to be erected, it was up to Congress to find a way to commemorate Washington by imprisoning his memory in marble—a way of commemoration that, with due delicacy, kept divinity in check. Generations lapsed before this task was completed, but the “ideal” George Washington eventually received his monumental due in the proper Roman fashion, according to which “an imagery of art, of culture” began to replace “an imagery or cult, of religious worship.”63 Whether they were fully aware of these connections, residents of Washington, D.C. became practitioners of the Italian ideals of civilità. This entailed commitment to notions that shaped “the effective identification of the self with a particular, geographically defined place.” Washington, D.C. supported “a belief in the sacred nature of institutions and leaders,” the “complete immersion in the affairs of one’s community,” the breakdown of ordinary time into the “civic time” of the administrative calendar, a “legalistic, yet severely aristocratic hierarchy of offices” likened unto the Federalist ideal, capped by a “love of the republic” that elevated a “civic ethos” of “virtuous service” handed down over the generations in filial devotion to the memory of its founders.64 Such notions were intended to honor an “ideal” city that was never part of the “real” Washington, D.C. Treated as mythic, they dictated the physical structures of the nation’s capital—above all, the crafting, and recrafting, of the U.S. Capitol. Washington, D.C. never experienced the series of “sacks” that battered Rome over the centuries, but the “barbaric” actions in 1814 by the British left behind a charred White House and Capitol Building, anger against those who dared to invade the capital of America’s model republic, and bitterness over the fact that the enemy had ridiculed “the paltry stream, called in true Yankee grandiloquence, the Tiber, as the hill itself is called the Capitol.”65 Unlike Congressman Fromentin, who called up the image of the Trojans who fled the destruction of their city,



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other voices relied on the sturdier Roman tradition. “This is not the first capital of a great empire, that has been invaded and conflagrated; Rome was reduced still lower by the Goths of old, than we are, and when its senate proposed removing the seat of government, they were answered, Romans would never be driven from their home. . . . May a Roman spirit animate our people.”66 The burning of Washington, D.C. acted like the “busking” process praised by Henry David Thoreau, that annual ritual practiced by the Indians that purifies what has come before and prepares for what lies ahead. Now was the proper time for the United States to erect proper buildings that offered proper settings for the civic art and pageantry deserved and desired by the growing nation.67 Waiting for Greatness to Happen (1820–1860)

Early fumbles in the years between 1800 and 1820 made it impossible for Congress to convert L’Enfant’s initial abstractions into actual buildings reflective of the capital’s position as the seat of the republican faith. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the Committee on Public Buildings was hampered by uncertainties regarding lines of authority over the army engineers in charge of construction, and by tensions over the granting of congressional funds to augment the building’s structure. The governing bodies were slow to bring about the ideal vision credited to George Washington. Congress was likened to “a cold-hearted protector” that acted like “a step-father” for failing to foster “the infant metropolis.”68 Well-wishers, like Frances Trollope in 1830, kept sounding the note of conditionality—“should be”/ “intended to be”—that became so familiar in future accounts of the stalled status of the American arts, while naysayers like Harriet Martineau (1835) and Charles Dickens (1842) saw no chance for Washington, D.C. ever to attain greatness. Indeed, Martineau forecast that the site of the capital would be relocated to the West. Once “all will be over with Washington,” its “grand mistake” would be erased.69 Negative sniping continued up to the opening days of the Civil War. It was easy to cast doubts over the future of a capital city unsteadied by the fact that its existence rested on the impermanence of partisan political powers that waxed and waned with each new election. “The whole place looks run up at night . . . and it is impossible to remove the impression that, when Congress is over, the whole place is taken down, and packed up again till wanted.” It was easy to point out that greatness had no home. “It has a Monument [for George Washington] that will never be finished, a Capitol that is to have a dome, a Scientific Institute which does nothing but report the rise and fall of the thermometer, and two pieces of Equestrian Statuary which it would be a waste of time to criticize,”

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and—in a final slap—“It boasts a streamlet dignified with the name of the river Tiber.”70 Whatever imaginative stake Congress held in the republic’s brief history was deeply retrospective. Defenders of the arts had only the future to support their hope that Congress would one day foster the nationalistic ideal. As for practical concerns, the present tense alone had value. As Charles Fairman put it his introduction to Art and Artists of the Capitol of the United States of America, “It may not be safe to estimate the culture of a people by their progress in art attainments or art possession. The necessities of those early years, the strict economy of those days, left but little for expenditure in art directions, and to have a roof for shelter was considered wiser than to possess paintings or sculpture. Works of art could be acquired at a later time when the necessities had been provided.”71 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine was pleased to report in 1859 that, despite “the all-absorbing Kansas discussion” over slavery, Congress had voted new funds to further the city’s development. “It is due to the national dignity that Washington should be if not a great city, a great centre of whatever is noble and beautiful in architecture and the fine arts.” Presidents might dwell in cabins and congressmen meet under a tent, but “the public intelligence and taste demand that the halls of legislation and the departments of Government shall be noble in construction and of the best materials. . . . Anything short of this would be derogatory to the national character, and for that reason we might almost say unconstitutional. Hence, the Capitol, the president’s House, and the Departments must be marble palaces, adorned with statuary and painting, and surrounded by parks, and trees, and flowers, and fountains. There should be libraries, and picture-galleries and museums, and whatever illustrates civilization in its highest walks. This is what people expect to find when they visit Washington.”72 These are comments from the 1850s. It would take another fifty years, with the passing of the McMillan Plan and its aftermath, to bring about a semblance of the vision attributed to L’Enfant in the name of George Washington. In the years leading up to the 1850s, L’Enfant’s plan was overturned by a series of beleaguered architects/engineers, by the sluggishness of congressional decisions to fund the decoration of the Capitol, by difficulties in hiring workers up to the task, by everyday business matters in a country rapidly moving away from its dream of republican simplicity, by pressures of ever-increasing sectional tensions, by the unanswered “problem” of how to represent George Washington in iron, stone, or marble, and by the continuing desire to “be like, yet unlike” Rome. A break in the stalemate came with the approach, then the start, of the American Civil War. The war turned Washington, D.C. into a military camp, a society divided against itself, the scene of political chaos, and the shaken symbol



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of Union where unity was no longer guaranteed if ever General Lee’s rebel army crossed over the Potomac, the Rubicon of America’s future. Breaks in the Italian historiae function differently than those that cut into the American res gestar. Julius Caesar did cross the Rubicon, and shortly after the Roman republic became an empire. Another break occurred, after yet another set of military conflicts, once Emperor Constantine gave official recognition to the Christian faith, starting a slow but irreversible shift of power from Byzantium back to Rome. But though the authority of Christian emperors replaced that of the pagan emperors, they, too, became irrelevant with the tightening of Rome’s papal powers. If Rome had its own kind of memories to keep, it also had its own aesthetics— employed in statues of the Caesars, the emperors, and the popes—that record what it was like to have such men take over its history. Perhaps the most compelling is the massive head of Constantine on display in the Capitoline Museum. Through the centuries it codifies the “uncompromising” look of that particular historical break, with a head whose “wide-open eyes gazing severely into space; a firm mouth and a hard chin” betrays “no tensions; only strength and selfcontrol.”73 In 1860 it seemed as though the United States might never have the chance to display any likeness of George Washington, the single personage capable of representing America’s past res gestar, as well as shaping the nation’s future historiae. A major rift now separated the generations on either side of the divide between a seemingly settled past and an uncertain future. It is not surprising how much thought was given in later years to the time before this break appeared. As will be seen, in 1879 Henry James famously described the before- and aftereffects of this break in the American consciousness in his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1903, in the biography he wrote of William Wetmore Story, his countryman-sculptor who had resided for years in Rome, James looked back on another signature break: the manner in which Americans abroad responded to “their” Italy prior to the war back home and the Italy they found after the 1860s. It was an Italy with its own rebellions to undergo before the country experimented with “union” in 1871 once the centuries-old patchwork of city-states, provinces, duchies, dukedoms, and occupied lands was shakily drawn together as the Kingdom of Italy. As James meditated over “the dawn of the American consciousness of the complicated world it was so persistently to annex,” he characterized “the American who started on his Wanderjahre after the Civil War quite as one of the moderns divided by a chasm from his progenitors and elder brothers.” In contrast were the Americans in Rome and Florence (would-be artists or art lovers) who

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came during the “pure and precious time—the time of the early flowering— [which] was the matter of a moment.” James makes the same point he had made in 1879 vis-à-vis changes taking place in his country’s home civilization. Recalling the times before the war, he mused that the “dawn” of that consciousness “is the more touching the more primitive we make that consciousness; but we must recognise that the latter can scarcely be interesting to us in proportion as we make it purely primitive.” Americans “came from a world that was changing, but they came to one likewise not immutable, not quite fixed, for their amusement, as under a glass case; and it would have quickened their thrill to be a little more aware than they seem generally to have been that some possible sensations were slipping away for ever, that they were no more than just in time for the best parts of the feast, and that a later and less lucky generation might have as many regrets as surprises.”74 James on Americans in Italy and James on Americans at home finds greater interest in watching his compatriots’ consciousness “becoming perceptive and responsive” to “what they still found and what they paid for it.” According to one’s tastes, “America’s Rome” (as William Vance argues in his study of responses to the nineteenth-century city) offered a greater “thrill” than early nineteenthcentury Washington, D.C., but issues governing the aesthetic and psychological payments due were the same.75 It was easy to ridicule America’s infant capital set in contrast with the ripe maturity of ancient Rome. In 1804 Thomas Moore had set the tone with his verses. In fancy now beneath the twilight gloom, Come, let me lead thee o’er this second Rome, Where tribunes rule, where dusky Davi bow, And what was Goose Creek, once is Tiber now. This embryo capital, where Fancy sees Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees; Which second sighted scenes e’en now adorn With shrines unbuilt and heroes yet unborn, Though now but woods and Jefferson they see Where streets should run and sages ought to be.76

“Shoulds” and “oughts” flow quickly over the muddy landscape where too few finished buildings stood, separated by inconvenient distances. As William Dunlap put it in 1806, Washington, D.C. did look like Rome, but not the Eternal City, Empire of the World: only Rome after centuries of decay. “I see the Capitol at two miles distance, towering like some antique Ruin, & wanted nothing but



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some Colossal columns with their heads at their feet, to remind one of Rome or Persepolis.”77 Within the next thirty-five years, the elements of a commendably utilitarian working city was in place, containing American versions of the bureaucratic structures ancient Rome had formalized to advance its imperial goals. The Guide to the National Executive Offices printed 1841 under the hand of Robert Mills, architect of Public Buildings, listed what was there to be seen, erected in large part by slave labor.78 The first three (the White House, Treasury, and Capitol) had been appended by the later additions of the War Department (housing for the quartermaster general, the secretary of war, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, and the Gallery of Indian Portraits), the Engineering Bureau, the National Institution of the Promotion of Science, the Topographical Bureau, and the Navy Building (where trophies of two wars and models of naval vessels were on display). This Washington, D.C. fit the times in ways John Adams could appreciate when in 1790 he compiled his generation’s greatest needs (study in the “science of government” and of “politics and war”), looked ahead to his sons’ generation (“study of mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture”), and prophesied that his children’s children might win the “right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”79 Pierre Charles L’Enfant was before his “American” time in 1790. He was a fine example of the French Enlightenment, which trained him to think in terms of grand and ordered “plans”; L’Enfant’s conceptions held no real “contradiction between an urban design suited to a tyrannical Renaissance prince and his absolute state, and the needs and beliefs of a young democracy.” The formalism of an ideal city based on “cubes, cones, cylinders, pyramids, and other mathematical models” found little comfort midst the woods along the Potomac. Years afterwards, Charles Moore wrote about the crusade that he, with Glenn Brown and Senator James McMillan, led to revive L’Enfant’s vision of the new capital. He admitted that L’Enfant’s plans for a city of wide avenues and extensive vistas filled with “Statues, Columns, Obelisks” had been too rigid for public acceptance. The “good American” could appreciate a certain amount of orderliness but was reluctant to be “chained to a plan.” This went against the national character: one that valued “freedom to do as he pleases—freedom even to do wrong.”80 From the perspective of those (relatively few in number as they were) concerned with neoclassical urban planning and the expert cultivation of the fine arts associated with the great cities of Europe, “doing wrong” was exactly what took place over the years after L’Enfant was dismissed because of his inability to compromise his bent for “doing right.” Among the earliest architects-builders-

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engineers who were passed the baton were Benjamin Latrobe, William Thornton, and Charles Bulfinch.81 They were immediately faced with the need to furnish a hydraulic system to contain the water flow of the Tidewater location to satisfy nearby Georgetown and Alexandria, which yearned to become eminent port cities, and to placate land speculators calling for quick improvements to the city’s layout. Pragmatics overwhelmed the “dreamlike” quality others had seen in L’Enfant’s original cityscape. In fact, Washington, D.C. prided itself on the rapid moves it made in fashioning itself as a practical center of scientific inquiry. Although such “fripperies” as an artists’ colony and a craving for aesthetic distinction were set aside, Congress aided in the founding of the Columbia Institute in 1816 for “the promotion of arts and sciences,” but since Congress preferred that individual states sponsor their own projects, almost a decade passed between James Smithson’s legacies of 1838 and the opening of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846.82 Yet in its pre-Veblenian mood, Congress established the Department of Charts and Instruments, specializing in hydrography, meteorology, and astronomy for naval use, and the Patent Office, whose innovations in technology proved of immediate benefit to America’s business of business. Government business was always in the forefront. Through these crucial early years, members of Congress were absorbed in the growing agitation over the slave-state issue, the need to place control over any Indian tribe that might not subscribe to its subordinate place in the western-moving American empire, and the heightened pressures of the dual demands of nationalism and regionalism.83 Judging the intricacies of arts patronage on a national scale was not a talent in which they were well versed or well disposed toward. Early on, certain members of the more “aristocratic” Federalist camp were open to spending public funds on the public arts, but only when they sidestepped the prevailing belief that “gentlemen” did not go into the “art business,” where a “damn sign painter” makes his dissolute, unrefined way.84 The absence of an energetic system of public patronage confirmed the situation William Stillman deplored within the pages of the Crayon. Stillman’s sense was that Yankees, westerners, and Tidewater grandees alike had little knowledge or concern with the arts and that few people raised their voices in support of an American aesthetic. Stillman was not quite correct. There were Americans concerned over the imbalance between American advances in commerce and manufacturing and its laggardness in fostering the arts. James Jackson Jarves’s flow of books proved this, as did the two volumes of C. Edwards Lester’s book of 1845, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici and of Our Own Times. Lester, the U.S. consul in Genoa, opened his second volume with a series of “Letters from Florence” appealing to Congress for an enlight-



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ened program of patronage. He urged the American government to develop the nation’s resources by means not limited to the imposition of tariffs to protect trade or funding for new roads and canals. “There are higher and nobler interests for the Government to watch over, than to take care of the Currency,” yet “[h]ow vigilant have politicians been to repress every movement on the part of Congress or the President to encourage Art, Science, and a National spirit!”85 Facing down the charge that a nation of free citizens ought not to emulate the cultures of the despised Old World, Lester boldly states, “I believe, there is not among all the Despotic Governments of Europe, a Capital that is not adorned with some such noble National Institution, generously aided by the Sovereign. These matters are better understood abroad, where other matters are done so badly.” Lester shifts into “should” mode as he envisions the environs of the Capitol as they should be at Washington, and the feelings of the young American who walked up an avenue, on either side of which stood, in colossal bronze, the great heroes of the Revolution, with Washington at their head. The Senator, as he goes to take his seat in the public councils, should walk through lines of marble statues of all the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,—a company of men who are already regarded with more veneration, than any other perhaps who have ever lived—and they would form a gallery as does not exist. And in the Rotunda, let the statues of all the Presidents be placed, and merging, in the oblivion of a noble sentiment, all distinctions of party, let those men who were esteemed by their own generation qualified for that high post, stand there. . . . Our Campidoglio should be the most glorious and the most sacred spot on earth—except the spot where the Redeemer died.86

This is “the look” of the nation’s Capitol delineated by one man’s aesthetic principles, but what had it to do with the hard facts of the nation’s “business”? Could a line of marble statues be part of practical architectural considerations in the building of a proper workspace for the everyday needs of the members of Congress? These were pertinent questions that had to be faced during the early decades of the city’s material growth. They were then, and still are, directly connected with the answers given to an aesthetic of architecture for a city whose buildings must simultaneously symbolize political beliefs and adhere to scientific principles of construction. In November 1859 “Christianity and the Formative Arts,” appeared in the Crayon. It defined architecture as “Formative” (thus utilitarian) and the other arts as “Imitative” (thus committed to intangible values), while noting that architecture at its inception was based on religious principles. In 1914 Geoffrey

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Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism suggested the complications at work when architectural structures are engulfed in a series of “fallacies” such as the “ethical” (moral values) and the “mechanical” (utilitarianism). When emphasizing the “scientific/mechanical” nature of the building crafts, contemporary experts are prone to assume that “architecture is still the ‘distinctively political’ art; its virtue, to ‘reflect a national aspiration,’” wherein “all the faults and merits of a class or nation, are seen reflected in the architecture that serves their use.” In 2005 the Rand Report, titled “Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts,” reversed this argument by taking arts advocates to task for their reliance on economic arguments to state their case for government funding. Rather than underscoring “quantifiable and utilitarian benefits” that prattle about “business growth and kids’ math and reading scores,” people who seek government support for the arts should “stress intangibles such as enchantment, enlightenment, and community-building.”87 Thus it was that in the midst of what continues to be an unending debate over the “uses” of the arts, the builders of Washington, D.C. set to work. From a National Aesthetic to Nationalist Art

Resistant as members of Congress might be to shift money away from the needs of the “real” Washington, D.C. in order to create an “ideal” capital, it might be that they were shrewder than they knew. In the minds of many, “the resulting colossal statues were in the conventional classical style as understood and practiced by second-rate Italian sculptors of the period—that is, copied, with some changes, usually for the worse, from the statues of Mars and Minerva at Rome.”88 Honest attempts were made to rectify the dearth of art in order to provide appropriate symbols for the new nation’s virtues. The exchange between Benjamin Latrobe and Philip Mazzei (Italian-born physician, merchant, entrepreneur in viniculture, resident of Virginia, and correspondent with Thomas Jefferson) makes painfully clear the efforts Latrobe made and the difficulties he faced in 1805 in solving what can be called “the eagle problem.” He complained to Mazzei that despite the fact that the country was “entirely destitute of artists, and even of good workmen in the branches of architecture,” he must somehow obtain “an eagle of colossal size” to be placed in the frieze in the Hall of Representatives. He expressed his wish to commission Antonio Canova or Bertel Thorvalsen but realized there was no money to hire sculptors of that stature. Could Mazzei’s connections in Italy make it possible to import men of “good temper and good morals” who would satisfy Congress? With Mazzei’s help, the



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Franzoni brothers and Giovanni Andrei arrived in 1806, together with other artists and their wives. With relief, Latrobe noted that the Italians were amiable, although “the irritability of good artists is well known.” They set to work making models for the eagle. But Latrobe was still unhappy. He wrote to Charles Willson Peale that although the eagle was “necessary as the principal decoration of the center of the Hall in the frieze,” the foreigners were creating “an Italian, or a Roman, or a Greek eagle, and I want an American Bald Eagle.” Eventually, Latrobe informed Mazzei that success had been achieved. Franzoni had sculpted an eagle that was “the most spirited Eagle I have seen in sculpture either modern or antique.” Further, “I have seen enough of his talents to believe that he will not disgrace us by his Sculpture.” He added a proviso (“Canova & probably Thorvalsen & Flaxman are his superiors in a great degree”), yet under an inadequate patronage system hesitantly run by a reluctant Congress, beggars cannot be choosers.89 Shortly after, more artists arrived from Italy, including Luigi Persico and Constantino Brumidi. Twenty-six years later, open minds could pronounce that Brumidi “may almost now be called the ‘Michael Angelo of the Capitol.’”90 Not so during the early years. If the unhappy necessity of importing foreigners was initially met by resignation, by the 1850s Congress began to bristle over all those Italians scrambling over the Capitol. In addition to stale xenophobic aspersions against the Latin race at large (they could not speak English, were temperamental, came with large families, practiced popery, and took jobs away from native-borns whether or not there were Americans capable of doing the work), congressional proceedings spoke to the need for a nationalistic aesthetic—visual homiletics that protected “republican simplicity” from “the gingerbread and tinsel work” of Europe.91 There was no need to worry if one listened to Dr. Samuel Osgood’s speech at the Publisher’s Festival to Authors in 1855. The American continent was itself a splendid “decoration,” a vast landscape garden. Given time, the nation’s landscape and its people will be realized in “historical Paintings and Ideal Pictures.” In addition, America already possesses sculpture “beyond the Art of Michael Angelo or Thorwalsen. Have we not moulded a giant statue, not out of marble or brass, but of more stubborn materials—a mighty people, formed from all climates, faiths, and races, into one massive nationality, and kindled into life.”92 Literal-minded Congressmen could not accept Osgood’s optimism. On May 26, 1856 they sent their fellow members on a tour around the Capitol with these instructions. Take a look around the Capitol and wonder why “our Republican Government” is made “to play the poor part of a wretched imitator of the broken-down monarchies in the Old World”? Further instructions were laid out

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on May 19, 1858. Visit the Agricultural Committee room and feel dismay: “Over head, we have pictures of Bacchus, Ceres, and so on, surrounded with cupids, cherubs, etc., to the end of heathen mythology. All this we have, but not a single specimen of the valuable breeds of cattle, horses, sheep, etc., which are now found in the country”—“not a single picture to represent maize.” The following month, on June 1, there was more perturbation. “Go through the Capitol” and ask, “Have we no commerce to illustrate—no history to perpetuate? Have we made no mechanical, no scientific discoveries worthy of record here, that we are compelled to employ the poorest Italian painters to collect scraps from antiquity upon these walls as a lasting disgrace to the age—mere tinsel, a libel upon the taste and intelligence of the people?”93 The worst was yet to come, on June 15, 1860. “[I]stead of representing here, in the fidelity of painting and sculpture, the great deeds and men of the better eras of the Republic, the whole building appears to have been delivered over to the gross and flashy conceits of second-rate German or Italian fresco painters, who have covered the walls of corridors and committee-rooms with inappropriate designs of flowers and fruits, Venuses, bacchantes, flying dragons with heads of chicken cocks, and curious combinations neither human, divine, mythological, nor allegorical.” Any doubt as to what had to be done was answered. Why put up with “Italian art, introduced here from Rome, from Florence, or any other place abroad, so long as it did not originate upon these American shores. . . . Italian taste has exhibited on every side of this Hall the vermillion hue of Italy, instead of the sober, sensible hue of American intellect.” The Capitol’s mission to be the site of republican laws will fail “until we are permitted to sit as sober, tasteful American gentlemen, amid American scenes, and not as exaggerated American patriots under the influence of Italian art.” Until then, “we never shall have produced a congruous scene for American legislation.”94 There is little awareness in the congressmen’s remarks of the role to be taken by color and form in the advancement of artistic success. Theme was all. Theme would win out if Congress kept its eye on the realistic boundaries offered to “the sober, sensible hue of American intellect” through the genre of history painting practiced in America.95 To project (and protect) republican simplicity there could be no place for Italianate vocabularies of the mythic and the allegorical, notwithstanding the centuries of service these techniques had given to the telling of red-hued stories of Italy’s history. “Republican simplicity” was best expressed in representations of virtue’s past victories over adversity. The approved inventory of images included scenes from the American Revolution, tableaux of the First Fathers, who stood steadfast against that ever-howling wilderness, and monuments commemorating Columbus—crucial moments that vouched for



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the triumph of civilization over savagery.96 Indeed, any history of an American aesthetic pertaining to Washington, D.C. is one with the history of the United States. The clearest statement of the efforts to define American Art Thoughts for the ages came on March 3, 1858. The House of Representatives charged the newly formed “Arts Commission” to submit a “memorial,” setting down the argument that only American artists be engaged to execute future art for the Capitol. “Art is a language; and it is peculiarly useful as an index to the civilization of a people— a key to the volume of their national life. . . . The American people have a history many of whose passages deserve to be engraved upon imperishable materials. It embodies a new idea. It imports an advanced step in the elevation of man to the true dignity of his nature . . . [it provides] the display of the most conspicuous examples of valor, prudence, fortitude, genius, wisdom and patriotism. . . . [It is] part of the nation’s fame. How shall this history be written in the most enduring form?”97 Pericles, Phidias, and Michelangelo had once been summoned to celebrate their countries’ valor. “Why may not American artists turn with solicitude to their government for similar encouragement?” Large sums had been spent on the Capitol, but the congressmen were painfully conscious that the work has been prosecuted by foreign workmen under the immediate supervision of a foreigner. . . . An eagle and the national flag may be discovered occasionally amidst the confusion of scroll-work and mythological figures presented to the eye, but the presence of conventional gods and goddesses, with meaningless scrolls and arabesques, albeit they may be wrapped in the “red, white, and blue,” will never suggest to the American . . . any idea to touch his heart or to inspire his patriotism. He beholds nothing to remind him of the grandeur of his country, its origin or history; nothing to make him seek these halls again to refresh his memory of the deeds of the good and great, who won the independence and secured the liberties, or expanded the boundaries of a great nation.98

On February 22, 1860, shortly before the start of the Civil War, the Arts Commission submitted its report, signed by Henry Kirke Brown, James Lambdin, and John Kensett. It noted at great length the negative effects of art traditions brought over by the Italians: shall we sponsor the work of “an effete and decayed race which in no way represents us? Our pride should revolt at the very idea. We should not forget so soon the homely manners and tastes of our ancestors, and the hardships they endured with undaunted hearts.” Unfortunately, the Arts Commission had nothing to offer; it outlined no explicit aesthetic born of the

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American imagination. All it could say was: Hire no foreigners and support an American art that has “no nightmares, no vagaries, but is clear-seeing” and “renders truth palpable to duller senses.”99 The Arts Commission report was rejected by the Senate on June 11, 1860. The Committee on Finance could find in it merely the view “that American art is not quite up to the work” and that “by and by native talent in this time will be developed.” As “we have really nothing for these gentlemen to do . . . it is scarcely worth while to continue this art commission, which was got up in a hurry, and forced upon the Senate by the house of Representatives.” There was no need to “trouble the Senate further.” In 1860 a great war would have to be fought and financed. Artistic embellishments of the Capitol (always in question when Congress was pressed to appropriate funds) were set aside—except, as we shall see, for completion of the Capitol dome and the figure of “Freedom” placed on its crest.100 Some considered that the years leading to the Civil War was a time of failure, yet there were on view all those sculpted eagles, busts of eminent senators, and paintings of American conquest over alien forces. There had to be a way for visitors to understand what they were seeing since aesthetic sophistication played little or no part in their responses. It had been the same when illiterate pilgrims arriving in medieval Rome were led by Mirabilia Urbis Romae past ancient monuments and sacred shrines about which they had no previous knowledge. It was the same when nineteenth-century tourists wandered through Italy’s museums at the behest of Murray, Baedeker, and Tauchnitz. The same burden was placed on guidebooks to the American Capitol. In 1839, prompted by the text of Public Buildings and Statuary, visitors came upon four doors leading to the Capitol’s rotunda. Over the entry to the House of Representatives was a relief of Daniel Boone defeating the Indians; over the entry to the Senate stood William Penn presenting his treaty to the Indians. Observers were informed that the much-maligned painting of Penn by Nicholas Gevelo is “below mediocrity,” yet an “object of interest” because “it perpetuates a great event.” Enrico Causici’s rendition of Daniel Boone’s victory, which reveals “the ferocity of the Indian, and the cool deliberate courage of the intrepid white,” offers “the history of the two races, represented by the chisel of genius; the fierce revenge of the one, the calculating, calm courage of the other.” It was easy to comprehend the scenes of American domination over the east and west doors to the Senate (Causici’s The Landing of the Pilgrims and Antonio Capellano’s The Preservation of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas) and the east portico (Persico’s Discovery Group, with its triumphant Columbus and cowering Indian). Girding the walls are four paintings by John Trumball, an artist given



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special credentials because his father Jonathan was governor of Connecticut during the Revolution. Trumball’s Resignation is singled out as the painting that depicts “that grandest of all human actions, the resignation by George Washington of the scepter of the western world.”101 At this time the interior decorations of the Capitol had minimal impact and its architectural details none at all. Pope Julius II, proud of the Renaissance glories his Rome had to offer, stated on his deathbed that “people ignorant of letters and wholly untouched by them” must be “moved by certain extraordinary sights.” The pope’s focus was on “great buildings” that aid “vulgar” belief founded on the doctrines devised by learned men; “those both present and future, who behold these admirable constructions” have their faith “continually confirmed and daily corroborated.”102 Before the American Capitol could be recognized as one of the city’s “admirable constructions,” the public’s faith had to be placed at the service of the “doctrines” devised by the learned men of the American Revolutionary period and implemented by appropriate representations of George Washington. The Washington Problem

The assumption that the Romans were expected to understand the true nature of Julius Caesar when looking upon his portrait bust is undercut by Herman Melville’s 1859 lecture “Statues in Rome,” which speaks to the tricky nature of audience response. Although “fancy” would see Julius Caesar’s head as “robust, grand, and noble . . . elevated and commanding,” a direct view of the actual bust “gives the countenance of a businesslike cast that the present practical age would regard as a good representation of the President of the New York and Erie Railroad, or any other magnificent corporation.”103 The “idea” of America’s own great leader was vulnerable to the same misreadings through problems that beset official representations. As far back as 1783, while George Washington was still alive and not yet installed as the first president, the Continental Congress passed a resolution to acquire a bronze equestrian statue of Washington in a Roman uniform. It was to be based on effigies of Marcus Aurelius and a statue of George III destroyed by the rebels in New York. However, its very form prompted the anxiety that General Washington might decide to become Emperor George in both the Roman and the British sense. The early Romans had believed that the expulsion of its kings would lead to an orderly city-state with a government directly responsible to its citizens. This is what Americans wished to believe was the result of their revolt against Great Britain, but what if their new republic became that other,

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later, more corrupt Rome? Over the next century arguments over the imaging of Washington forced a coming to terms with what exactly his “idea” contributed to the “idea” Americans held about their own history. Carlo Franzoni’s Car of History hovered in heavy marble over the north entrance to the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, yet few seemed to understand the nature of “history” in American terms. That it had something to do with Liberty, Freedom, and Justice led to the proliferation of allegorical symbols, together with increasing uncertainty over what they signified. Pope Julius II could rely on Rome’s edifices to inform “vulgar belief,” but President John Quincy Adams had doubts that “dull comprehension” could understand “the meaning and moral” of “America” and “Justice” without the addition of “an appropriate inscription.”104 The problem might be the same whenever the American eagle was put to use. In ancient times, the eagle had borne aloft the souls of gods, heroes, and emperors on imperial coins and sarcophagi. Through Latrobe’s badgering of Giuseppe Franzoni, a proper representation of America’s regal bird finally alighted in 1806 at the U.S. Capitol, but an eagle as such still required a label to make its meaning clear. What was needed was to bring the spirit of Washington (if not his body, held in permanent captivity at Mount Vernon) to the capital city. With a certain irony, it was congressmen from Georgia and Virginia who argued, “The way to cement the Union was to imitate the virtues of Washington: to remove not his body, but, if possible, to transfer his spirit to these Halls.”105 C. Edwards Lester acknowledged the value of pilgrimages up the Potomac to Mount Vernon to pay tribute to the dead president (“Who can go to the tomb of Washington, without coming away a better citizen, and a better man?”), but he also recognized the need to bring him close in effigy to the nation’s heart. Only the placement of “a colossal bronze statue of Washington” in the Capitol’s rotunda would suffice to declare his mythic eminence. “No other should be erected near it, unless a few of the greatest statesmen and chieftains of that period be grouped around him, as the ancients represented the gods, in council at the feet of Jupiter, on Mount Olympus.”106 There was nothing Congress might do to elevate Washington to the heights of Jupiter, with themselves as Olympian members of the godly council, but they could try. In 1863 Constantino Brumidi was assigned the task of decorating the canopy of the rotunda of the Capitol. He proposed an immense fresco, The Apotheosis of George Washington, an approximation of the outrageously magnificent and totally alien ceiling canopies that reign above the counselor activities in the Sala del Maggiore Consiglio of Venice’s Palazzo Ducale.107 Brumidi’s fresco provides an example of the aesthetic (and political) problems



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that plagued the Capitol decorations.108 Relying as he did upon the tradition of quadratura (the pictorial “extension” of architectural space in ceilings and vaults), Brumidi’s technical skills were adequate (no more) and the composition design is decent enough (no more). The thematic concept of “apotheosis” to which he set his hand was patently derivative, as it would have been for any quadraturista working in the mid-nineteenth century. How then did the artists who flung all too many elements (allegorical, mythological, historical) onto the ceilings of the Palazzo Ducale get away with what they did? It is acknowledged that a Titian, a Tiepolo, and a Veronese were simply better at their trade, but the particular staleness and strain that loom overhead in the Capitol rotunda were inevitable once an aesthetic that worked well for another time, another place, was imported into an American context that did not believe in it. Many in Congress had little understanding of what this or any fresco was intended to say. They were distrustful of Italian workmen, of their use of “heathen mythology,” and of any image that lacked both commonsense realism and a romantic commitment to noble countenances reflecting the nobility of men’s souls. By midcentury there were signs that those who represented the United States in the Senate and the House of Representatives were unworthy to be looked down upon in judgment by the semidivine figure of George Washington. It was noted that America’s political power had fallen into the hands of paltry men. Where were the portrait heads that Henry Clay and Daniel Webster once offered as testimony to the presence of good Americans and sound art?109 Feelings of historical regression were not unique to Washington, D.C. By the latter years of the Renaissance, Florentines began to realize their city was in the flaccid hands of men of mediocrity, instability, and self-interest. Men of valor worthy to carry on the mythic past of which Florence had been so proud were absent, as were the avatars that inspired artists in the years to come. By the midnineteenth century, a wandering tourist such as Nathaniel Hawthorne was quick to note the discrepancies between the Real and the Ideal as he stood before the Medici tombs of Ferdinand I and Cosimo II. “They were a bad breed, and few of them deserved any better monument than a dung-hill; and yet they have this grand chapel for the family at large, and yonder grand statue for one of its most worthless members. I am glad for it; and as for the statue, Michel Angelo wrought it through the efficacy of a kingly idea, which had no reference to the individual whose name it bears.”110 Hawthorne chose the Ideal of art over the Real of history. So did many in Congress who felt bound to celebrate the only true Hero that America had yet produced, but they came to the “George Washington Problem” by using Shakespearean Negative Capability negatively. As described by John Keats, true Nega-

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tive Capability is exampled by “a Man of Achievement . . . capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”111 It entails belief that the imagination brings one to a truth more real than conventional reasoning can fathom. Yet—and this is the Shakespearean/ Keatsian paradox—authentic leaps of the imagination must resist the spells thrown out by the pseudo-real of the fraudulent Ideal. It was unfortunate that the congressional “idea” of George Washington negated the disturbing facts of the real, wherein lie precious “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” The symbolic presence of an iconic Washington, the official personification of unreal republican ideals, constantly got in the way of what an American republic is about (just as the “idea” of Jesus has disturbed the business of Christianity ever since his time on earth). Was Washington’s “idea” reducible to that of vigorous warrior, calming administrator, or nothing other than an image of not-much-at-all? John Trumball (who was rebuked for his paintings of revolutionary scenes) wrote to Abigail Adams in 1790 about an incident whose significance he may not have grasped. A group of visiting Creek chieftains was shown Trumball’s portrait of “the Great Father” in Washington’s presence because “the President was curious to see the effect it would produce on their untutored minds.” The Creeks (admired by Trumball for their “dignity of manner, form, countenance and expression, worthy of Roman senators”) reacted with astonishment over the “magic in an art which could render a smooth flat surface so like to a real man.”112 It was not Washington as the conquering hero or good father who caused amazement. It was the skillful employment of the geometric techniques of scientific perspective (re)discovered by early Renaissance Italian artists that (re)introduced apparent naturalism into scenes projected with perfected illusion.

i ta l i a n pa l i mp s e s t s : Pride of Conquest Vasari argued that the glorious achievements of the Old Masters captured imagined worlds, inhabited by Christian divinities and contemporary mortals, which magically merged the diurnal and the ineffable onto painterly flat surfaces. The Italians were adept at applying these techniques to the walls of their public buildings, particularly when it came to the celebration of successful wars. Whereas the U.S. Capitol preferred scenes of victories won (American generals politely accepting the sword of defeat from adversaries grouped in poses of gentlemanly resignation), Italian muralists focused on the dramatic and bloody turmoil of battle. Viewers traversing the great council halls of Rome, Venice, and Florence experienced the full visual brutality by which superbly masculine (often



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nude) soldiers overwhelmed their enemies. Medieval and Renaissance ceilings were high and the walls measured innumerable meters in breadth. There was ample space to celebrate male virtu that had little to do with sober American virtue. The Sala dell’ Udenza in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio was a blank to be filled by artists like Salviatti, who used the occasion to glance back to 396 b.c., when Marcus Furius Camillus conquered the city of Veii. Even grander was the Salone dei Cinquecento, where the walls are crowded with canon, lances, horses, heaped bodies, and the bounty drawn from the defeat of Pisa and Siena. (Oh! if only the murals by Leonardo and Michelangelo for the battles of Anghiari and Cascina had not been lost or left unfinished.) Vividly violent battles waged against Lepanto, Constantinople, Genoa, and the Turks choke the magnificent warehouse that is Venice’s Palazzo Ducale.113 But it is Rome that figures as the supreme city of audacious conquerors. Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, each offering intricately carved spirals upon which legionnaires march with their captives, are strikingly positioned in the city’s squares. It is at the Vatican, however, that one finds the highest expression of fifteenth-century exuberance over the pleasures of battle rage. Raphael’s paintings in the Stanza of Heliodorus and Giulio Romano’s rendition of the battle of Constantine are tumults of color and bloody action fought in the name of securing the Kingdom of Heaven for Christ’s Vicar on earth.114 Giorgio Vasari and Taddeo Zuccaro executed the murals for the Sala Regia, the great hall dedicated to the popes’ glorious wars against the heretic Turks at Tunis and Lepanto, as well as the more duplicitously gained victory over the heretic Huguenots during the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre. Unlike paintings that commemorate mournful moments when great leaders such as England’s General Wolfe or Admiral Nelson expire heroically, victorious Rome’s generals live on to enjoy the glories bestowed upon them. By and large, public taste in the United States was not up to the balancing act that pits republican modesty against imperial pride. The prosaic commercial bent of Congress was matched by the Capitol itself. And when statuary was involved, a certain coarseness was the result. Any image of Washington ought to have the dignity of a citizen-orator-statesman, not that of a general. Still, there was no consensus as to how to present him, whether erect in a toga holding a scroll, as a nude equipped with a sword, or (as Edward Everett, former chair of Greek literature at Harvard, suggested), seated in the mode of Phidias’s Zeus.115

Hiram Powers expressed impatience with the delays in Congress over creating a monument to Washington’s memory. “I only hope that Congress will stop talk-

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ing about it, and go to doing something.”116 Yet Powers and Horatio Greenough were doomed to failure, as members of the unfortunate group set upon by demands to provide an idealized portrait of the nation’s Ideal. A slow turn was taking place, away from the constraints of a highly conventionalized devotion to the ideal toward a devotion to the nature-driven details a Veblenian would later appreciate. C. Edwards Lester’s book was copious in its praise of Powers’s talents, even as it included telling comments by Frederick Tuckerman. Tuckerman damned Powers with faint praise in stating that his particular “American qualities” meant he was a realist, not an idealist. Powers “is not the Raphael of Sculpture; for there is not in his organization any great refinement. Of much that is inward and profound in sympathy and feeling, he is an inadequate representative.”117 In the 1840s it would be hard to find an American sculptor, either in Rome or in the States, capable of being a fine realist, rather than a failed idealist, but there was in Powers’s nature the raw germ of a yet undeveloped ripeness of technique. In Lester’s “Conversations with Powers in His Studio in Florence,” he reports that Powers had many of the attributes that made him the Leonardo of sculpture. As a young man, Powers worked in a Cincinnati clock factory. A continuing interest in mechanical inventions led to his fascination with relations between “the movements of the most complicated machinery” and “the eddies and the dashings of flowing and falling water.” Powers said, “It’s all nature, mysterious force applied to her purposes.” Through his studies, he felt he could “read all the secrets of the steam engine and the lightning rod.” Powers arrived in Florence, backed by the financial aid of two American benefactors. He reacted against the European-style academies whose students were set to copying old pictures and statues, their minds “crowded with machinery—but of the mechanical kind, not of the force of nature’s divine engine.” Theirs was “not genius—they were not nature, and they never will be.”118 Although lacking in true talent and caught up in a time when questionable aesthetic principles had to vie with Yankee interest in good machinery, Powers intuited something of great importance: the study of natural forms can result in exceptional art—an art that moves farther from the ideal. Congress was mired in questions over Washington’s corporality as opposed to his spirit. Powers’s The Greek Slave was accepted by its viewers because it could pass as the symbol of Virtue, threatened but pure, but Greenough’s togadraped Washington was given little slack. Greenough articulated his aesthetic convictions fully when it came to laying down his law of “form follows function” in regard to the building of fine ships, but he failed with his statue of Washington. Representative Henry Wise of Virginia scorned “a naked statue of George



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Washington! of a man whose skin had probably never been looked upon by any living,” while adding, “It might possibly suit modern Italian taste, but certainly it did not the American taste.”119 A note of practicality entered into the general pronouncements of moral indignation. “Washington was too prudent and careful of his health to expose himself thus in a climate so uncertain as ours, to say nothing of the indecency of such an exposure.” Nathaniel Hawthorne inserted a bit of wit to his assessment. “Did anyone ever see Washington naked? It is inconceivable. He has no nakedness, but I imagine was born with his clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”120 Greenough tried to fight back. He, like the ancients, wished “to show, not the attire, but the man. . . . the grand type of the human race” that goes beyond “the ephemeral legislation of the tailor and the haberdasher.” Alas, for Greenough, his statue was rejected since “it is not our Washington that he has represented.” Representative Cary of Georgia declared he was opposed to statuary in general. Since George Washington’s image resides in every American’s heart, “[w]e will commit it to no perishable stone.”121 This, then, would be the ultimate consequence of allegorizing the man: he was removed from mortal existence and nonmythologized history. John Quincy Adams, dead in 1848, would not have cared for Brumidi’s vast allegorical painting that hovered in the rotunda dome after 1866. He “disclaimed all wish to exhibit triumphal cars and emblems of Victory, and all allusions to heathen mythology,” which is precisely what the Italian artisans at the Capitol supplied, albeit in the tired versions handed down over too many centuries. Europeans at least understood what the bulk of these mythic figures and objects of allegory represented. Most members of the American public did not. In that sense, Adams was right to insist that “the duties of the Nation or its Legislators should be expressed in an obvious and intelligent manner.”122 If those “duties” furthered future western expansionism or commemorated past achievements in the mythic history advanced by the North (the Plymouth myth) or by the South (the Jamestown myth), then images of John Smith or Daniel Boone could easily be used in an “obvious and intelligent manner” to decorate pediments and staircases, door casings and bronze doors, while Leutze’s Crossing the Delaware (realistic in manner and mythic in detail) did its “American” duty in perpetuating Washington’s place in “American history.” Yet the “Problem of Washington” remained unresolved as long as his image was embellished by Italianate allegorical art introduced within a painted scene or around a statue’s base. Allegorical acts were better. Their perfect moment came on the day in 1789 when Washington became the president.

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En route to New York City, Washington stopped outside Trenton, where the banks of the Delaware River were lined by militia and the applauding populace. After he passed through a twenty-foot arch, he was met by young women in white, their heads adorned with wreaths, baskets of flowers in their hands, who sang of the gratitude felt by “Virgins fair and Matrons grave, / Those thy conquering arms did save.” Allegorical resonance, carried down over the centuries from classical Rome, complete with triumphal arch and vestal virgins, needed no “appropriate inscription” to explain the event. This magical moment was sanctified even further by the emotional effect of Washington’s inauguration address delivered in the Senate Chamber of New York’s Federal Hall. As recalled by Senator Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, Washington through his words became “an allegory in which virtue was personified. . . . Her power over the heart was never greater, and the illustration of her doctrine by her own example, was never more perfect.” In reiterating his belief in the allegorical Washington as “virtue personified,” Ames added yet another significant observation: “The crowd was great, but not a stupid one—each expressing as much admiration and joy as a painter would have on his canvas.” Although the “modesty, benevolence, and dignity of the President cannot be described,” the emotions of the populace were transformed into a “painting” once the president was translated through apotheosis into the realm of “allegory.”123 It would never be as good again! Reacting to Rome et al.

Dissimilarities between cities located on two different continents and founded thousands of years apart by distinctly unlike cultures are obvious, but when it came to American responses to the Italian model, more was involved than the powerful attraction of opposites. Nineteenth-century Italians did not lavish upon Washington, D.C. the often obsessive interest Americans expended upon the Eternal City and the legacy of Italy’s checkered past. Once the revolutionary spirit was set afire during the Risorgimento, however, the followers of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi could take inspiration in the course taken by the American colonies to found a confederation of states independent of foreign powers, an achievement shakily replicated by Italian patriots as they fought against the occupying French and supporters of the pope. In 1849 Italy’s Constituent Assembly claimed it acted in “the glorious name of the Roman Republic,” but that was not the case.124 It became a monarchy located in Rome, capital of a united Italy in 1871. Back in the United States, unification of North and South was accomplished in 1865 (at terrible cost), but any profound American interest in symbolic parallels between the violent events transpiring in both



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countries seemed limited to the fashionable stir caused by the red of Garibaldi’s shirts. As it played out its own tired version of the problems endemic to the American art scene, Italian art was stagnant throughout much of the nineteenth century. The artistic temper labored against the rigid rules of tradition-bound academies in a country broken up into provinces and fractured by foreign occupation, economic hardships, and internecine arguments. While others fought to reach the goal of political unification and the dismemberment of churchly power, the young men of the Macchiaioli came and went, their efforts largely left unrecognized. Attempts to revive Italian art life lay well ahead, through the establishment of the Biennale Exhibitions in 1896 and the futurist insurgency in 1909.125

ita l i a n pa l i mps e s t s : The Matter of Mary Midcentury attitudes toward Italy held by post−Civil War Americans were marked by both fascination and revulsion in ways that affected what they wished to borrow or to reject. Three obvious areas of contention and difference stood out to those who stayed home or traveled abroad: Italian religious doctrine, art forms, and political structures—especially the first. Rome was far too “Romish” for a nation that continued to view itself as Protestant, in the face of counterevidence arising from the religious practices of an evergrowing, ever-diversifying population. The possession of a Raphael Madonna by Americans of great wealth willing to spend it on the Old Masters was a good thing, a safe thing. But the connoisseur’s pleasure in an art piece on one’s walls at home was different from going into a Roman church or chapel to worship the image of the woman who usurped the divine roles intended for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. On view in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore were glorious mosaics, placed there after the Council of Ephesus gave Mary the title “Mother of God” in 432. Protestant discomfiture prompted by tableaux of Mary’s conception, nativity, purification, translation, and coronation was heightened in 1848 with the newly sanctioned dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the elevation of Mary as “the Mother of the Church,” “Co-Redemptrix,” and “Mediatrix of All Graces.” American tourists recoiled over tawdry rituals surrounding the resurgence of Mariolatry, compounded by the decision of the First Vatican Council to declare papal infallibility.126 What part in all this had the deist God of America’s Founding Fathers or the Living Christ of the Second Awakening?

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Anna Brownell Jameson’s detailed discussions of Italian art made her an authority in the eyes of many Americans. She was as tenderly tactful as possible in suggesting how her compatriots could admire the art while disagreeing with the doctrines. In 1852 Jameson cautioned that “it has been impossible to treat of the representations of the Blessed Virgin without touching on doctrines such as constitute the principal differences between the creeds of Christendom. I have had to ascend most perilous heights, to dive into terrible obscure depths. Not for worlds would I be guilty of a scoffing allusion to any belief or any object held sacred by sincere and earnest hearts; but neither has it been possible for me to write in a tone of acquiescence, where I altogether differ in feeling and opinion.”127 Mary would not figure in official American art. Her place was commandeered by the female figures of America, Liberty, and Justice—although in ways that reiterated the images of the Mediatrix of All Graces handed down from pagan and papal times. Washington’s Capitol would spurn the Italian baroque of Borromini and Bernini in its architecture and statuary. The visual extravagance, the emotional excess, the sensual curves and spirals let loose by papal order to do the bidding of the Counter-Reformation were viewed as “the lowest stage of degeneracy.”128 Only the rational, geometric forms of (pagan) neoclassicism were acceptable for America’s capitol or the sculpture that began to line its corridors.

Whether in full consciousness of the fact, or by way of intuitive response, most Americans who gave any thought to these matters recognized the relations that bound together the politics of architecture and the arts, the politics of religion, and the politics of a nation’s system of government played out in the United States and in Rome.129 There were still areas of ambiguity to confuse the questioning mind. The members of the Senate to whom the child Henry Adams was introduced looked like Romans. But which Romans were they, and to which Senate of Rome did the men in charge of the nation’s business belong? Rome, once the most influential political power in the ancient world, was the primary reference point for Americans trying to devise a good government of their own. But Rome’s history had started back so far and continued for so long that it enacted every stage from raw to ripe to rot. Which point in that sequence ought good Americans to abide by when setting standards for the years ahead? Over the centuries, the Roman Senate’s rule embodied examples of excellence, but also of weakness, of corruption, of lurid decay. How could a busy group of American politicians select from the critical, historical mass made so famous by Gibbon? Would they attempt to emulate the mythic virtues of the Etruscan



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republic (if ever it had had one), the early strengths of Rome’s republic, or an imperial power guided by its statesmen? Or were they on the edge of decline into the chaos that came once the Roman Senate was replaced by rulers who were madmen, ruthless generals, or weaklings at the mercy of events?

i ta l i a n pa l i mps e s t s : Civic Lessons in Brick, Stone, Marble, and Murals A great deal of creative energy had to go into extracting useful elements from “the entangled bank” of Italy’s history. These choices would reflect the nature of the political ambitions that drove them, the oratorical tones by which they rolled out requisite rhetorical phrases, the manner by which they protected their political power, and the architectural conceptions that favored that power. Florence and Siena could be cited as models for well-run city-states that realized that business is business. A few might appreciate the clever ways by which Venice balanced bits and pieces of republicanism and oligarchy. Yet Rome remained the primary model. Historians and political scientists still try to comprehend the full nature of the shifts that shaped intricate relations between the common people, families of property, and the men of high power, whether in Rome, Florence, or Siena. Scholars of cultural history and art history have similar burdens as they point out the disparities between the persons in positions of authority in medieval and Renaissance Italy and the members of the U.S. Congress concerning the importance each age and nation gives to the arts that enhance, by pictorializing, treasured political ideals. It is for us to relish (and be instructed by) the manner in which, by the example of the arts, the communes of Florence and Siena were able to celebrate themselves in ways the U.S. Congress did not. Throughout the 1300s and 1400s, when construction was under way for the Duomos and Baptisteries of Siena and Florence, the two cities were proudly independent centers of banking and mercantile enterprises with extensive international contacts and ambitions regarding territorial expansion.130 Members of the city’s communes were hardheaded men, and expert at making bureaucratic systems work. Because of the strength of their economies, surplus money was available to be expended on major civic projects. In Siena, the city’s Duomo was under ecclesiastical care, but members of the commune planned and executed the cathedral’s building and ornamentation. It was the same in Florence. The construction of the Duomo was under the supervision of the Arete della Lana, the guildsmen in charge of the Opera, and the

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board of works assigned the task by the city’s commune. In both Siena and Florence, iconic images established by approved artistic programs celebrated the Virgin Mary and the saints who cared for the cities’ good fortune. The sacred role taken by the Tuscan cathedrals has no relation to that of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., that resolutely ecumenical site used primarily for public ceremonies such as the consecratio of dead presidents. Nor is there an easy fit between the Senate Chambers of the U.S. Capitol and the legislative halls of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, seat of the Council of Nine, but there might have been. America’s congressmen would have had to set aside the presence of an extraordinary range of local talent available to fourteenth-century Tuscan communes, as well as to strip away Siena’s insistent references to the protective majesty of the Virgin Mary, which glows forth from the panels of Simone Martini’s Maestà of 1315.131 It was unlikely that Congress would consider the murals of military victory in the Sala del Mappamondo (also known as the Sala del Consiglio) appropriate for the Capitol. But what is present in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico and sorely missed in the Capitol are frescoes that are visual indicators of what is required of a country’s civic leaders if they wish to advance beyond mere economic and military victories. The three walls in the Sala della Pace (or Sala d’ Nove) are covered by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s murals of 1338–39, allegories known as Good Government and Bad Government. Beyond their great beauty and the proud position they hold in art history for initiating major innovations in theme and technique is their quiet affirmation of the importance of the city’s commitment to a system based on serving the people with honesty and justice.132

In 1845 C. Edwards Lester urged the creation of a long thoroughfare leading up to the Capitol Building, along which the city’s pilgrims would receive lessons in American virtue by walking past rows of bronze and marble statues of the great heroes of the Revolution and the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In 1858 Congressman Branch took a different approach. Rather than allot funds for the creation of such statues, let the Capitol’s “art” consist of the “deeds” of “men of wisdom and sound statesmanship” seated in the Senate Chamber. But the art the Capitol got was a result of the law passed in 1864 to create the Statuary Hall. It eventually became lined with self-laudatory effigies “of deceased persons who have been citizens thereof, and illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military service such as each State may deem to be worthy of this national commemoration”—few, if any, among them capable of stirring heightened responses of patriotic (much less moral) fervor.133



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The tradition of self-introspection advanced by the allegorical figures that hover within Siena’s administrative chambers is absent from the workspaces of the U.S. Capitol, where they could have served some purpose. Washington, D.C. was unable to provide what the Italian tradition had so much of—well-trained artists and artisans possessed of many skills, the cooperation of guildsmen and bureaucrats, and the willingness of the communes to pay the necessary costs in money and patronage—yet there are certain similarities between what Florence and Rome achieved through their art and architecture and the motives that lay behind America’s capital. Some of these connections are strong, others are loose, but together they provide comparative perspectives that aid in a better understanding of what is involved in making a public art that matches public policies. Both decided that what mattered most was the celebration of the virtus of governmental power, not the virtu of good government.

ital i a n pa l i mp s e s t s : The Tale of Two Palazzos Throughout much of the nineteenth century, there was no tangible evidence of the presence of Washington D.C.’s patron saint. America’s first president was primarily an invisible symbol until, in 1885, the marble pylon of the Washington Monument was finally finished. The situation was embarrassing to those who kept asking for more and larger public representations of Washington’s noble character. But Washington was dead and he had no active political constituency to press his claims. It had been entirely different for those who walked the streets of Florence throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Then (as now) it was impossible to miss innumerable signs that stated the power of the Medicis. During Siena’s brief period as an independent republic, the focus it placed on economic and financial solidity limited its aspirations toward extending power and authority across the Tuscan countryside. Conquests over local hill towns like Val d’Chiano or Monteimassi in the 1300s hardly counted as grand moments of self-promotion. Once the Medicis extended their dictates into the administrative chambers of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico in the 1400s, emphasis on good government in murals that denounced the vices of “fear,” “tyranny,” and “discord” was patently naive. To see what real power looks like, one must go across the hills to Florence and into the chambers and halls of the Palazzo Vecchio. Florentines liked to believe their city carried on a proud tradition of municipal independence linked by myth to Rome’s republican past and embodied by Salviati’s Triumph of Camillus. But the historical facts were hardly

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that simple. The original Florentine commune was replaced by a short-lived popular republic in 1250, quickly followed by a series of nasty upheavals, as when Guelphs (backed by the aristocracy) fought Ghibellines (supported by the guilds). Politics may be “local” but since it was also territorial, Florence spent much energy in conflicts with or against the popes and the emperors, as well as against Pisa and Siena. The Medici dynasty might fall (stripped of power by murder or exile) or rise (through expert guile). Either way a mockery was made of the idea of a pure republicanism. Nonetheless, in 1299 the Palazzo Vecchio was erected to house the Signoria who did the business of the city, abiding by whatever form of government was currently in power. After 1540, however, it was impossible to pretend that Florence was a republic by nature. Duke Cosimo I moved into the Palazzo Vecchio, where he “lived over the store,” setting up apartments for his family on the floors above the Salone dei Cinquecento, where Florence’s government was conducted Medici-style by the Consiglio Maggiore. The walls of the vast government chamber were weighed down by battle scenes primed by the violent details of Florence’s favorite military victories, in ways that contrast with the febrile scenes placed, almost apologetically, on the walls of the U.S. Capitol. That fifteenth-century artists and their political patrons liked the look of blood when recording their history is seen throughout the Italian peninsula, but the Medicis introduced special touches that augment the sense of what “great” (not necessarily “good”) politics require.134 Hard-edged military victories stand in for moral abstractions. So does the art spread across the city that traces the Medicis’ power. Any guidebook tour starts at the Bargello, originally the seat of the short-lived Capitano del Popolo, who ruled the city in the thirteenth century; next the seat of the city’s magistrate; and later the police headquarters, complete with prisons, where one finds Giambologna’s immense statue Virtue Repressing Vice, identified with Florence’s defeat of Pisa. Keep walking through the older sections of Florence, where the heraldic shield centered by the Medici balls and ostrich feathers confronts one at almost every corner, since shyness was not an attribute of the Medicis at the height of their authority. Inside the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi to Bethlehem, the fresco executed in the mid-1400s for the private family chapel, is delightfully arrogant in its resplendent display of the Medicis riding forth to worship the newborn Christ.135 If the Pitti Palace (inhabited by the Medicis and future ruling families over the next four centuries) is a huge domestic warehouse for the display of great wealth and some remarkable art, the Medici Chapel located in San Lorenzo is an echoing ego-chamber dominated by astonishingly ornate stonework. The nearby Sagrestia Nuova, with its marble stat-



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ues of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Guiliano flanked by Day and Night, are magnificent because Michelangelo’s consummate talent offset the “bad breed” label applied to the dukes by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The paintings in the Uffizi Galleries present their own narratives of Medici greatness, lavished upon rooms originally intended for use as government offices for Cosimo I.

Visual statements of the Medici presence, impossible to escape, raise the ever-fascinating question of the relation between political power and artistic largesse. Florence would be an aesthetically poorer place had not the Medicis ruled there; but it is hardly the city that Washington, D.C. aspired to match. The image truest to the ideals Congress wished to uphold is George Washington’s “resignation” as painted by John Trumball, memorializing the moment when the Best American relinquished his right to rule. Counterimages to Florence’s reign of power under the Medicis suggest other ways to govern the Cities of Man. The Virgin Mary does not display dominance over this Florence of masculine might, as in other Italian cities. There is of course the church of Santa Maria Novella, but who refers to the Duomo as the cathedral of Santa Maria del Flore? Goodness imaged as gentleness rings the Ospedale degli Innocenti, with the glazed blue ovals of Della Robbia infants. Fra Angelico’s minute Last Judgment in the Museo di San Marco has more joyous souls dancing in flowered meadows before blue-winged angels than Vasari’s and Zuccari’s vast fresco of the Last Days in the Duomo could ever accommodate. Upstairs—past the cells where the Dominican friars (and Cosmo, on occasion) meditated in a holy serenity that has no place in complex civic affairs—are rooms once occupied by Savonarola, who preached for political reform at the cost of banishing beauty—and his own life.136 It was a Florence that gravitated between practical, if corrupt, politics and holiness, bought in exchange for a Botticelli tossed onto the bonfire. Why always a choice between good art and good government? Did fifteenth-century Florence have to make pacts with Lucifer at his most beguiling in order to gain vast resources of beauty through the forfeiture of its citizens’ say? Did nineteenthcentury Washington, D.C. make a bargain with a second-rate devil, gaining political advantages at the cost of aesthetic mediocrity? Cannot one have Good Government as well as the gigantic mosaic in the Baptistery where Christ’s powerful toes grip the waters of the universe? Or Jacopo Pontormo’s figure of a youth, who expresses stunned astonishment (can this be happening!) as he struggles to hold up the sagging body of the dead Christ in the Church of Santa Felicita? Or the twist of torso and the length of leg of the figure at the forefront

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of Masaccio’s The Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine? In 1882 Vernon Lee was ready with an answer. Writing from Siena, she freely admitted that the Renaissance was a “horrible anomaly of improvement and degradation.” It paid a high price for its intellectual freedom and heightened sense of individualism—loss of moral standards and community. Still, Lee proclaims, later generations enjoy the result of the consequences of Renaissance guilt.137 Nevertheless, we continue to ask. A History of One’s Choosing

We “read” the art and architecture of Rome as a many-layered record of the city’s long history. Nineteenth-century Americans who rambled over Rome’s crumbling ruins seemed unaware that similar readings could be taken when addressing the overlapping processes out of which their own capital was emerging. Nonetheless, they were choosing the history they wanted and discarding the rest as inappropriate to the idea of Good Rome/Bad Rome needed for their own sense of self-worth. If Washington, D.C. felt the heavy weight of Rome’s influence, Rome had had to bear the burden of what the ancient Greeks had accomplished long before. Rome had to accept the fact (as Washington, D.C. did with even greater reluctance) that, while it had advanced the practical arts of conquest and government, superior cultures such as the Greeks had excelled in poetry, sculpture, and philosophy.138 ital i a n pa l i mps e s t s : Views from the Capitoline Hill Rome gave itself credit for having originated the concept of republicanism, the form of governance (however altered by the late eighteenth century) that Americans named their own. Rome also advanced the model of Caesarism, by which the citizenship of the free male was not dependent on residence in the capital. Although only a “city” (defined in Max Weber’s terms as a local commune), Rome (like Washington, D.C. in the future) aspired to represent the national will. More was involved than viewing America’s capital as a pallid shadow image of Rome, what with its many hills, reclaimed swamps, working aqueducts, immense domes, and white facades. Notwithstanding signature gaps and breaks, each city is defined by a kind of architectural progression through urban history.139 The tracing of movements forward in time is the common practice, yet Rome and Washington, D.C. open possibilities for



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moving backward over the years. But whereas the American capital’s tourist trolleys dash up and down the Mall, and tour buses briskly go from 1800 to the present, it is best to “walk” Rome’s history at a slow and deliberate pace. Set out from the Piazza Venezia in Rome where Mussolini’s office was located—its balcony noted for public declarations of the codes of the Fascist regime and its Sala del Mappamondo, where the Duce sketched the boundaries of the new Italian empire.140 Nearby is the moderately hilarious monument to Vitorrio Emanuele II, which soberly commemorates Italy’s unification during the Risorgimento years of the mid-nineteenth century. Slogging onward and upward, one mounts the Capitoline Hill to the Piazza del Campidoglio, site of the Palazzo Senatorio, the seat of civic government associated with the years of the High Renaissance. At the peak of the hill stands the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, built before the seventh century on the site where, according to legend, it was announced to Caesar Augustus that Christ, not the Caesars, was the world’s future. It was also where Edward Gibbon (and later Henry Adams) looked out from the Capitol to assess Rome’s gloriously decadent past and fascinatingly decayed present. Finally, there is the descent from Michelangelo’s fifteenth century into the valley of the ancient Forum, which lies between the Capitoline and Palatine hills, whose stones are jumbled remnants of Etruscan kings, of the Senate of the republic, and of the Imperial City.

There is little in the material artifacts of Rome or Washington, D.C. to convince post-Darwinian analysts that worldly powers make steady progress in the cause of moral probity. Chroniclers of the lives of vaunted Roman heroes were seldom shy in admitting that the icons of the Eternal City had held out for glory, not for virtue, but early enthusiasts over the American project preferred to speak of their belief that “[o]ur Campidoglio should be the most glorious and the most sacred spot on earth—except the spot where the Redeemer died.”141 More candid than most of his contemporaries, Henry Adams, in his customary hyperventilated, supremely ironic style, took a look at Rome in 1860 just as Darwin’s book came into view. Perched on “the steps of the Church of Santa Maria di Ara Coeli,” Adams noted that Edmund Gibbon once delivered a diatribe against “priest or politician” who denied evidence that there had ever been “the just judgments of an outraged God against all the doings of man.” It was the same accusation America’s elders liked to fling against Rome, but Adams sought a lesson for his own generation, one that joined Rome with Washington, D.C. in league with the world’s devils who denied the purified, edifying, exceptionalist course of American-style history.

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Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be America. Rome could not be fitted into an orderly, middle-class, Bostonian, systematic scheme of evolution. No law of progress applied to it. Not even time-sequences—the last refuge of helpless historians—had value for it. The Forum no more led to the Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum. Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed up in any relation of time, along with a thousand more, and never lead to a sequence. The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1850, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.142

The very materiality of Rome exposed its high-sounding rhetoric of grandeur as “flat contradiction.” The fact of the city is achingly there. The Roman Catholic Church circumvented this problem when it declared that “the papacy had always existed as an abstract construct.”143 In its interpretation of the Petrine texts, the church strengthened its claim to dynastic control through its list of “originals” traced through the apostolic succession. By what was left unsaid, the acts of antipopes, French popes, popes who lived but a month or so, popes good and bad, were removed to the shadows. The governing powers of the United States also reside in the abstract concepts of the Constitution. It, too, has “always existed.” As long as “the originals”—the presidents—follow in sequence, and as long as senators and congressmen fill their slots according to calendar chronology, it hardly matters that few Americans can recall their names, so meager in merit are they. Progress in Roman terms, if progress it was, takes into account the manner in which Rome constantly shifted about over the centuries. It rebuilt itself from pieces of ancient ruins and intrusive additions, leaving “the feeling that Rome was like an organism that perpetually renewed itself,” a constant site for those on a pilgrimage.144 Why not realize that Washington, D.C. has become just such an organism and just such a lure to its pilgrims—therefore in need of a marble physical presence that (like Rome) both confirms the reality of its being and denies the duplicities of its ideals? By the fact that they are there, pilgrims to Rome over the centuries assert their right to be heard. America’s Rome, Vance’s two-volume compilation of the Americans who lingered in the Imperial City throughout the nineteenth century, exhaustively details their motives, their emotions, and their aesthetic and personal needs. The “notebooks” kept by visitors like Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne reveal the thoughts of the many latter-day pilgrims with New Englandy views as to how decent societies should present themselves. Few are com-



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plimentary (or could be) regarding the physical condition to which the ancient city had arrived: the squalor, the poverty, the shabbiness of untended churches and decayed palazzi, and the dark and crowded rooms where the Old Masters hung chockablock. Of particular note, however, are the observations the Hawthornes made about the uncanny discrepancies that destroyed their faith in sensible, rational “Bostonian” logic by which history is supposed to conduct itself. To Sophia, “history might never have destroyed my fancies if I had not come to Rome. Here I both feel how it all was, and strange to say, I am also magnetized with the power that hovers invisibly in this air, like the spirit of the eagle that never stooped in the hand of the Roman standard-bearer. What then, is this Rome that will hold sway over mankind, whether or not, in past and present time?”145 Nathaniel Hawthorne carried even further Sophia’s sense that time had gone askew. “It is strange how our ideas of what antiquity is become altered here in Rome; the sixteenth century, in which many of the churches and fountains seem to have been built or re-edified, seems close at hand, even like our own days; a thousand years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent epoch than the reign of Constantine.”146 For the Hawthornes, Rome’s “present” was constituted of the immediate moment (the 1840s) and of the classical era thousands of years into the past. Once Constantine came to power, the desire to cling to the thought of the city as “venerable” disappeared. The rejection of twelve centuries of Roman history and arts means that “their Rome” leaps backward in time to erase the CounterReformation, the High Renaissance, the early Renaissance, and the medieval era.147 One hundred years earlier Giovanni Piranesi’s series of “views” of Rome created “equilibrium” between “what is for him still modern and what is already, for him as for us, the antique.”148 But Piranesi’s moderna was linked to the baroque, the style that for many Americans of Hawthorne’s generation was an architecture of disorientation that held no promise for those immersed in the present. As it was for many of their compatriots, the Hawthornian “present” was filled with Raphaels, Titians, Guidos, and Domenichinos darkened with age and isolated within decrepit palaces. It is small wonder that Hawthorne’s gothic romance, The Marble Faun, seizes its Donatello from the pagan past and drops him into the decadence of the nineteenth-century papal city moments before the church’s own loss of temporal power. For Hawthorne, “Christian Rome” was the darkness and death buried deep within the catacombs, the ungoverned Saturnalia of the Roman Carnival, and the lurking figures of hooded monks.

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ita l i a n pa l i mps e s t s : Center of the Universe The same power of imaginative disjunction in time that is common to the gothic romance was taking place in Washington, D.C. Noticeable gaps were detected between the dream city of George Washington and the capital under construction in the Civil War years. As we shall see, the man who helped inaugurate this leap over time was Major Montgomery Meigs, army engineer, a singularly ungothic figure. But first, a review of what happened during and after “Constantine’s reign,” which made the “rest” of Rome disappear from Hawthorne’s historical awareness. Augustus Caesar is said to have found Rome in brick and left it in marble. Constantine found Rome pagan and left it Christian. After the Edict of Milan in a.d. 313, communities of Christian believers emerged from hiding free from fear of random persecutions. Places for public worship began to proliferate, replacing clandestine shrines at the city’s outskirts. In a.d. 326 the basilica to St. Peter was opened. By the close of the fourth century, a ban was placed on pagan worship and Christianity was named the official religion of the Roman Empire. As the authority of the bishop of Rome grew, the urban center of Rome began to tilt away from the Palatine and the ancient forums toward new areas across the Tiber. That Constantine’s decision in a.d. 313 made Christianity acceptable was most likely a matter of shrewd expediency. In the long run it was of little matter that Constantine did not declare himself a Christian until the time of his dying and that he relocated the capital of the empire away from Rome eastward to Constantinople and Ravenna.149 What counted was that the new religion was recognized, protected, and allowed to flourish until it became not only a fact in Rome’s everyday life but the primary image and ideology for the Western world. The very look of Rome altered. Buildings of the classical period fell into decay. The city’s riches were decimated by the “sacks” aggressively carried out throughout the 400s by foreign tribes. Yet the church grew in spite of (and as the result of ) struggles for power among the Roman people, the papacy, and the emperors, whose authority was crimped (symbolically at least) when the Holy Roman Empire was founded on Christmas Day of a.d. 800. “Roman time” is long time, yet one is able to trace throughout the physical city the successive marks of Augustus, Constantine, and Pope Julius II. Centuries separated the decision to move the imperial capital to Constantinople, then to Ravenna, before its return to Rome, when it was refigured by the ambitious building schemes of Julius II. Yet Constantine’s own calculated programs of architectural development had made it clear that Rome would be the future center of the Christian universe. (No wonder that lavish space was



Capitol of Best Intentions given over in the Vatican to Raphael’s murals in celebration of Constantine’s role at the inception of Rome’s Christian power.) Once Constantine saw the need to promote an architecture that recognizes the twin forces of the civic and the churchly, an end was put to the notion that Rome would simply repeat the patterns of an established political order. The Basilica of Constantine in the Forum replaced the old Basilica Nova, with added elements for the use of the city’s prefects and tribunals. Built on land donated by Constantine, San Giovanni in Laterano was the first building designed to meet the spiritual activities of the newly installed religion. These and other projects sanctioned by Constantine reinforced the political intentions of the church and reshaped the “idea” of Rome in the minds of people across the empire through the force of its architectural thought.150 A thousand years later, the Capitoline Hill (ancient center of political and religious importance) received further fame when, at the behest of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo redesigned the Palazzo de Senatore, the seat of the Senate since 1150. The bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius still holds forth atop the hill, while the remnants of the colossal statue of Constantine command the inner courtyard. Connected to the Borgo Vaticano by the Via Giulia, which runs through the heavily populated areas of Rome, the Capitol served as “a civic monumental center, a ‘Forum Julium’ in the midst of the city’s commercial district”—its political identity amplified by Michelangelo’s further embellishments. Pope Julius II matched the success of his military campaigns with the energy of his plans to endow Rome with buildings commensurate with his intentions to create “a national Italian empire, equal in political and military power to the great kingdoms of France and Spain.”151 Both forward looking and regressive in nature, Julius remained under the spell of the age-old model of the Roman Empire. He leapt back over the centuries to seize inspiration from the pre-Constantinian past. He made clear that his Rome would become the seat of a papal power that was truly Caesarian by circulation in 1506 of a medal inscribed “Julius Caesar Pope II” and by the Vatican’s command over legal institutions formerly represented by the Senate. The city’s plan was juggled by Julius to reinforce topographical links between the Capitol and the Vatican. In the words of Stanislaus von Moos, Michelangelo’s design for the Piazza del Campidoglio signified “the complex interdependence of communal autonomy and papal authority, each relying on the other’s complicity in their struggle against the overpowering presence of the local nobility. Thus arose the complex political meaning of the Capitol as the traditional seat of the civic institution of the populus romanus and, at the same time, the theater for a splendid demonstration of the secular authority of the church.”152

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It is a pity that Nathaniel Hawthorne chose to forget the fifteen hundred years swallowed up by post-Constantinian and Julian Rome. The Rome of his generation was undergoing birth pangs that would lead, after decades of travail, to the not wholly successful unification of Italy in 1871 and the diminishment of the church’s temporal powers.153 Despite the excellence of his narratives of America’s colonial past, Hawthorne’s blinkered vision gave him an acute sense of personal time, but not of Italian time. He seemed impervious to the events taking shape around him during his stay in Rome—events that, had he visited the U.S. Capitol before his death in 1864, might have revealed similarities to what Washington, D.C. was undergoing. If he had done what he did so often in his stories in noting the crucial connections between architectural types and the persons they housed (for example, Salem’s House of the Seven Gables), he might have seen how Constantinian atriums and Julian domes anticipated the atriums and domes his nation’s capital now wished to possess. In re-creating the topography and architectural face of Old Rome, the men of the New Rome of the post-Constantinian era left colossal statements that asserted the greatness of who they were and of the state they served. Nineteenthcentury Americans abroad—men like Henry James’s Gilbert Osmond—would remark that they did not like entering the Basilica of St. Peter. It made them feel so small, a condition remedied only if they could become the pope. The men who occupied the chambers of the new capitol in Washington, D.C.—those who replaced the men who once sat in the Old Capitol—also seemed of lesser stature.154 While the power of Rome (clearly political and assumedly moral) as represented by St. Peter’s Basilica increased, the status of America’s moral authority as represented by George Washington remained vulnerable to mockery, sectional tensions, and crass takeovers by entrepreneurial opportunists. Oldtime Cliff-Dwellers of Washington (the residents, as it were, of the city’s original Palatine Hill) who lingered on after the close of the Civil War felt that the cityscape and population (both official and residential) had altered almost beyond recognition. But whatever else the nation’s capital became throughout the nineteenth century, by the century’s close it was on the way to becoming the wellmade city. Washington, D.C. always had to deal in “short time,” in contrast to Rome’s “long time.” Thanks to Captain Montgomery Meigs, an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—and the engineers and architects who followed once the McMillan Plan was put into effect—the city quickly gained an infrastructure comparable to the Rome of the Caesars down through Constantine’s reign and the urban projects sponsored by the Renaissance popes. That Captain Meigs was also placed in charge of ornamenting the Capitol, inside and out, cre-



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ated problems and possibilities of its own, affecting the look of the city we see today.155 Montgomery Meigs and the Remaking of Washington, D.C.

Enlightened admiration for the talents of the protos—the master builders— extends to the city structures of Abyssinia, Egypt, Mycenae, Jerusalem, and Athens. The feats of engineering that reshaped Rome and extended its material plunge into the far reaches of the empire gain high praise. They were necessary if lands plagued by swamps, flooding, and malaria were to be freed for habitation.156 With the coming of Christianity, each wave of innovative building styles (Byzantine in the east, Romanesque in the south, Gothic in the north) had a notable impact on the way great cities expressed their will. Still, the anonymity of the artisan and building contractor continued until the early years of the Renaissance. It took time and shifts in the evaluation of individual worth before the men who erected cathedrals and public buildings were viewed as other than skilled masons. The favorite examples cited by art historians—the domes Brunelleschi designed for Florence’s Duomo and Michelangelo for St. Peter’s— confirmed that major engineering projects are also great art. Brunelleschi early or Michelangelo later required no specialized accreditation. Although construction problems did arise, such men were expected to know their craft well enough that their buildings would neither cost too much nor collapse under strain. The narrative of the growth of an “American” architectural tradition recapitulates the same slow recognition of the value of the work shared among architects, engineers, carpenters, and masons.157 Any review of the men associated with the development of Washington, D.C. throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century reveals the difficulty in knowing what to call practitioners of the building trades. Architects—defined as members of a professional organization, trained at institutions grounded in the planning of physical structures of some complexity—are creatures of the modern age. A strong example of this problem can be traced through the efforts to secure passage of the McMillan Plan in 1902, which set into contention Congress, army engineers, and members of the American Institute of Architects. After fifty years of spotty building within the environs of the District of Columbia (often haphazard and poorly executed), the Army Corps of Engineers assigned to the U.S. War Department became a single group of professionals upon whom Congress relied. Yet Congress was often reluctant to hand over funds to the War Department, said to be populated by spendthrifts. It was even more re-

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luctant when the finished buildings required appropriations for the decoration of facades and interiors.158 On several occasions Congress was compelled to have sections of the Capitol replaced in order to install proper heating, ventilation, acoustical aids, and sanitation, but the nagging sense remained that the structure should offer appropriate spaces for the display of the kind of art the nation’s capital deserved. By the early 1850s Lieutenant (later Captain, then Major, later still Quartermaster General) Montgomery C. Meigs comes into the narrative. Meigs was never honored like L’Enfant as “Engineer, Idealist, Artist!”—the man elevated by the efforts of Glenn Brown because L’Enfant’s vision was the same as that of Brown’s true hero, George Washington. But Meigs was the type Veblen would later extol—the engineer devoted to antipecuniary productivity. Meigs was a career army man whose failings and achievements have been demonized or lauded through his association with the officials under whom he served. Henry Fairman can hardly get through a page of his official account of the changes (both in building and in art) taking place during the 1850s and early 1860s without citing Meigs, the man whom Fairman said assumed the burden of an Atlas.159 Vivien Fryd quite rightly states that the history of the Capitol at this time must take into account the journals Meigs kept and the correspondence he had with various artists and builders. Russell F. Weighley’s biography, Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M.C. Meigs, has been followed by Harold K. Skramstad’s “The Engineer as Architect in Washington: The Contributions of Montgomery Meigs” as well as Weighley’s equally informative essay “Captain Meigs and the Artists of the Capitol: Federal Patronage of Art in the 1850s.”160 What emerges from the contemporary records and more recent scholarly appraisals is the engrossing portrait of an army man who renovated the original Capitol, then set out to commission painters and sculptures to fill the empty spaces with symbolic art. All this while he took charge, as good engineers have done from ancient times, of solving the physical problems that beset the Washington area from its inception. Once Meigs received the congressional assignment to regulate water flow within the District, he stated his goals in his journal of November 30, 1852. “Let our aqueduct be worthy of the nation, and, emulous as we are of the ancient Roman republic, let us show that the rulers chosen by the people are not less careful of the safety, health, and beauty of their capital than the emperors who, after enslaving their nation, by their great works conferred benefits upon their city which, their treason almost forgotten, cause their names to be remembered with respect and affection by those who still drink the water supplied by their magnificent aqueducts.”161



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Meigs would fill the same role as had Rome’s engineers in clearing out the city’s swamps and erecting its aqueduct, but even the driest résumé of Meigs’s career underscores the partisan nature of political allegiances and presidential appointments during the crucial decade leading up to the Civil War. Born in 1816, Meigs entered West Point in 1832 when it was the one place to receive instruction in basic engineering methods prior to the granting of degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1850 Meigs was assigned to the U.S. Corps of Engineers, serving under General Joseph G. Totten, chief of the corps. In 1852, Meigs was charged to study the District’s water resources. As well, he supervised the addition of two new wings to the Capitol that corrected problems in the ventilation and heating system and remedied the building’s lamentable acoustics. Named supervising engineer in authority over Thomas U. Walter, the current architect of the Capitol, Meigs reported directly to the War Department and to Jefferson Davis, secretary of war. When Walter was accused of (never-proven) irregularities in arranging marble contracts, his authority was lessened and that of Meigs was raised. He was appointed engineer in charge of the Capitol extension, as well as chief engineer of the Washington aqueduct and of the post office extension. Meigs was up and Walter down in the Washington rankings, but—inevitably, in light of the city’s long history of sudden changes in power structures—Meigs’s authority was soon threatened. The newly elected president James Buchanan began to make conciliatory gestures toward southern political interests in an attempt to lessen the increasingly serious divisions over the slavery issue. Once John B. Floyd was appointed by Buchanan to replace Davis as secretary of war, Floyd raised Walter back into power. In 1859 Meigs was “exiled” to Florida to build a group of forts, but Davis, now chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, continued to give Meigs his political support. Meigs was able to complete work on the city’s aqueduct and the post office. By 1860, after yet another shift in North/South politics, Joseph Holt became secretary of war, and Meigs was called back to Washington. He was named quartermaster general, with one million men under his jurisdiction. Given Meigs’ new duties, direct involvement in work on the Capitol was cut back, but under his supervision the all-important erection of the cast-iron dome for the Capitol was completed on December 2, 1863, topped by the towering figure of “Freedom” commissioned from Thomas Crawford.162 If Meigs is praised by his biographers for having given his nation “her great symbol in granite and stone, the Capitol of the United States,” other commentators at the time (such as Scribner’s) expressed distaste over the results. Still, Weighley’s perceptive comments about the dual nature of Meigs’s contributions

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are well taken.163 Major Meigs had the fortune (or, perhaps, misfortune) to be responsible for imposing his engineering skills upon the city’s exterior and for commissioning art for the Capitol’s interior. He abided by the letter and spirit of Jefferson’s earlier concern “that the infant American Republic forsake the effeminate architectural niceties of England under the Adam influence for a sturdy, pure, and masculine mode inspired by republican Rome,” which necessitated buildings committed to “symmetry, balance, sturdiness, and restraint.” These were the accepted principles of beauty, bearing great political and aesthetic weight, that Meigs inherited in the 1850s. Yet it was as an army engineer trained in the use of the newest methods and materials that Meigs acted when assigned to bring the look and functionality of the nation’s capital up-to-date. Meigs was a man of the new day, of the materialistic, mechanically and scientifically inclined American born in the second half of the century of industrialization, urbanization, and technological change. . . . In his work as a construction engineer he often was a builder in cast iron, that peculiarly symbolic material of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution; the great stone arch which he built over Cabin John Creek for the Washington Aqueduct is a monument of functional design. In his passion for mechanical gadgets and his continual tinkering with new inventions, Meigs was the embodiment of the ingenious Yankee. Yet the spirit of the new age of materialism and realism and the spirit of M.C. Meigs were not always at one.

Meigs’s career supports the view that his was “a dedication to service and duty as the great ends of life.” There “stirred in him also a strong element of a characteristically American nineteenth-century Protestantism, with its roots in the Calvinist past.”164 What is most striking is the manner in which Meigs the army engineer became the arbiter of official art for the nation’s Capitol, an assignment he accepted with alacrity, unprepared or not.165 It is this dual role that makes him represent the juncture at which the old and the new met with the authority to unite them through an aesthetics of practical scientific inquiry, advanced through engineering skills committed to the national Art Idea. Members of Congress were ill prepared to accept the full implications of a man with a dual role to play in their city. Congress agreed to double the size of the Capitol and to replace the old dome, all the while grumbling that engineering expenses were “a military vice.” It hesitated over assigning Meigs to oversee the addition of art to the building’s interior. Meigs might be trusted to do the engineering work, but what kind of artistic judgment did he have? As for Meigs,



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he felt contempt for those congressmen who did not, in his view (a very Renaissance view), realize that artistic judgment must govern an engineer’s thinking, whether he is supervising building plans or the execution of decorative embellishments. Taste (that nineteenth-century obsession) must be governed by the principles of science. “There seems not to be in the House a man of cultivated taste, of general classical and scientific education” capable of understanding “the science and care and study of taste.”166 Meigs had to stand toe to toe with Thomas Walter, the titular architect of the Capitol, who resented being under the direction of an army engineer (“a mere stonemason or carpenter”).167 In turn, Meigs viewed Walter’s role as one who served as “his draftsman.” Clearly a man ready to take on adversaries, Meigs had Congress and the Capitol’s official architect at his throat. He was further disparaged by members of the struggling American art community, who protested his decisions, for here was an army man with power to allocate federal funds to commission frescoes, sculptures, and paintings. Meigs was caught in the midst of the debates of 1858 to 1860 cited above regarding the formation of the Arts Commission. That the inadequacy of the commission’s “memorial” led to its rejection by the Senate did not stop the pressure to initiate a federal policy for arts funding and a protective tariff to defend Americans from the infiltration of foreign artists, a pressure to which Meigs’s activities ran counter. Meigs proceeded to act under his own guidance. He entered into detailed correspondence with Thomas Crawford regarding a statue to stand atop the Capitol dome. Crawford concurred with Meigs’s broader views. He was ready to act in the name of “that poetry and grandeur . . . inescapably connected with the history of our country’s past and future,” and to offer “what people love and understand.”168 Obviously, issues of aesthetics as we understand them were largely overlooked. Subject matter remained all important: true “American” themes extracted from narratives of freedoms won by valiant white settlers. If Meigs could have hired more American artists such as Crawford to work up these themes, he would have been pleased. In the end, the nationality of the artists he hired was not as important to him as to whether they had the talents and techniques to execute the best work. Meigs had his idea for the “Freedom” statue and a sculptor willing to do it, but one lone American based in Rome was not enough. When he brought in Constantino Brumidi and Giovanni Andrei and set them to work, the anger leveled against him by resident Americans and irritated congressmen increased even more. In his role as engineer, Meigs fulfilled his duties to the government with skill. The construction of the city’s aqueduct helped solve past water-flow problems and cleared the malaria-ridden swamplands. The new wings to the Capitol

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brought about needed improvements. When the city felt the threat of attack in the opening months of the Civil War, he erected fortresslike bastions and completed the final stages of the Capitol dome. His accomplishments add a decent footnote to the long history of those who put together major cities. But Rome’s builders had done as much and more over the centuries, as had the experts behind the construction of Italy’s major medieval cities. Italy’s roster of engineerarchitects who went beyond the basic task of placing brick on brick or of facing concrete walls with marble included Giotto, Brunelleschi, Arnolfo di Cambrio, Michelangelo, Vasari, Leonardo, Raphael, Bernini, Bramante, Borromini, and Jacobo Sansovino. In Meigs’s case, when it came time for him to attempt the merger of “science” and “taste” (that is, art), his work was placed under intense scrutiny. He was ill served by Congress, by criticism from American artists aching to receive government patronage, and by his lack of training in areas out of the reach of most of his contemporaries. His situation helps to underline the problems that continued to threaten attempts to formulate and execute a splendid Art Idea for America: one that would celebrate a nation that saw itself as the modern world’s hope for good government and elevated culture. Take the statue of “Freedom,” whose making was placed in the hands of Thomas Crawford—the figure that crowns the cast-iron dome atop the Capitol, the icon designed to represent what the United States believes it is. The ideological confusions that beset “Freedom” then and now were compounded by the sculptural stabs at “Justice” and “Liberty” that had encroached upon the Capitol almost from the inception of the New World’s republican city.169 In sharp contrast, there was the political self-confidence and aesthetic ease by which Venice, formerly the Western world’s model republic, had spread its icons of “Justice” across its lagoons. America’s “Freedom”/ Venice’s “Justice”

Thomas Crawford, Meigs’s own man, died in 1857 in the midst of several projects undertaken for the Capitol. Meigs made every effort to bring his models for the bronze doors of the Senate over from Rome to Washington, D.C., where they were completed and put in place by 1863. Above the Senate’s east portico there is a relatively modest arrangement of reclining marble figures of “Justice” and “History.” The former bears a tablet inscribed “Justice, Law, Order”; the latter holds a scroll incised with the date “History, July 1776.” Crawford’s elaborate marble pediment looks out over the east front of the Senate building, grandly titled Progress of Civilization. It is centered by “America,” with eagle and haloed



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by the sun. To the left of “America’” stand heroes of the frontier period (cutters of wood, hunters of game) and creatures of the savage life they replaced (Indian chief and mother and child). To her right are figures presenting the promised future for the new nation: progress advanced by soldier, merchant, young men, schoolmaster, child, and mechanic. Wheat (sign of fertility) and anchor (sign of hope) complete the niche, in contrast to the death sign of the Indian grave to the left of “America.” “America” stands for “Progress,” which requires “Freedom” but—it would seem—not necessarily “Justice.”170 The Freedom statue was Meigs’s most important commission as the arts man appointed by Congress. Posthumously shipped from Rome in 1858, Crawford’s plaster model arrived in the States in 1859 after an arduous journey. Once its casting in iron was completed, it was mounted atop the Capitol dome in December 1863.171 It continues to prompt questions about what “Freedom” meant then in the United States, what it is supposed to mean today, what relation it had to Crawford’s Justice, placed within the marble pediment in celebration of the nation’s “progress of civilization,” and—most important of all—its relation to other icons of Liberty. The rhetoric employed by Patrick Henry in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 made much of the importance of the need to gain liberty; it centered the drive toward the American Revolution. Once the colonies broke away from the British, liberty was theirs. To the common perception liberty was an absolute, denoting the unique quality the United States had always possessed, but to later generations, the wilder implications of liberty seeking, springing forth during the French Revolution, carried Jacobin terrors well into the next century. Southerners such as Jefferson Davis rejected the use of the Liberty Cap because it referred to those who had not been born free; it had been given to Roman slaves receiving manumission as a gift, not as an eternal right. On the other hand, the French government’s gift of Bartholdi’s gigantic Statue of Liberty might please immigrants arriving after 1886 who embraced the notion of liberty they had fled Europe to enjoy. By the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement derided the lies of a land where Justice did not prevail, shunted aside by spurious claims that America was the home of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Liberty was a troubling term, too often used to destabilize what many of the nation’s leaders wished to believe was their birthright of Freedom.172 As for Justice, ideally, it was one of the attendant attributes of a free society, along with Peace, Wisdom, Progress—the seemingly interchangeable qualities clustered around the figure of America. Through sleight of hand, Justice could be applied

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to the nation’s reason for being, but disturbing questions remained, prompted by the visual ambiguities imbedded in its traditional attributes—the sword (crimes punished) and the scales (merit rewarded). In any Americanized version of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Thomas Crawford figures as the pathetic representative of the fate of the native-born art lover selfexiled to Rome. New York−born in 1814, Crawford took himself to Italy at the age of twenty. He remained there, struggling to reach a level of greatness he never attained before his death in 1857. Although he received assignments for a series of neoclassical allegorical sculptures that met the criteria for the official art Congress was willing to fund, he was not first choice for the colossal statue intended to crown the Capitol dome. In Meigs’s capacity as liaison between his employers and the meager supply of available artists, Meigs initially contacted Randolph Rogers to take over the task. When Rogers turned down Meigs’s request (too busy designing the bronze doors for the Capitol rotunda), Meigs turned to Crawford. His first letter to Crawford expressed his own lack of interest in the idea promoted by his adversary, Thomas Walter—a woman holding a pike, topped by a Liberty Cap. “We have too many Washington’s, we have America in the pediment. . . . Liberty I fear is the best we can get. A stature of some kind it must be.”173 Between 1855 and his death in 1857, Crawford forwarded three different designs from his studio in Rome in the hope of riding the political winds sweeping the United States over the slavery question. Crawford’s final design complied with the authoritative “suggestions” provided by Jefferson Davis, who served as secretary of war under President Pierce between 1853 and 1857 and as senator from Mississippi under President Buchanan (two presidents whose attempts to placate the southern wings of Congress had already shaped Captain Meigs’s official duties). Davis took the lead in defining art’s obligation to serve the nation’s interests. That Davis objected to the Liberty Cap of Crawford’s original design is one more indication that members of Congress (whether from the South or the North) shied away from the thought that the country’s history might ever have to recognize those who had been freed from bondage. Congress could appropriate the Roman sword, shield, and armor of the pagan goddess Minerva, tactfully incorporating them into the image of America Militant, but not the use of the pileus, which recalled manumission rites carried out in republican Rome. This would not do. Congress could condone only art that asserted that its citizens had always been free.174 As Meigs had sourly observed, representations of Washingtons and Americas were all too common, as were ill-defined icons of Liberty, Freedom, and Justice. Somehow abstract terms had to be brought into material form, saved from the bland but officially mandated figures that crowded every pediment and niche of



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the Capitol.175 When Crawford’s statue was lifted to the Capitol’s dome, its name had been changed from America to Freedom. “Liberty” was eliminated since it touched upon Jacobin terrors. “Freedom” joined with “Justice” was the safer word to associate with “America.” Justice rules under the law, and in the United States that law is the Constitution, as the nineteenth century interpreted it. It did not speak to later concerns over democratic justice (fair procedures based on public consent of all the people) or social justice (uncurbed by boundaries that restricts its gifts to white free males of property). Justice, meted out in equal portions to persons in bondage, persons of color, persons in poverty, females, and nonheterosexuals, comes late (very late) into the American tradition—well after the time of congressional patronage, of Captain Meigs as expeditor of national artworks, and of artisan conventions by which Justice might be doled out during an unjust nineteenth century.176

itali a n pa l i mp s e s t s : Venice: The Sacred Moment It is unwise to romanticize either ancient Rome or early Renaissance Florence as models for republicanism. (Even Siena—my favorite—was a republic of the medieval variety for only the briefest period of time.) Athenian “democracy” and Italian “republicanism” are terms that failed to guide America in its own flawed pursuit of republican virtue throughout the nineteenth century. Nor was Venice, self-proclaimed as the Most Serene Republic of the Western World, any such entity. Yet the idea of Venice continued to seduce its observers into accepting the belief that it was a bona fide republic, rather than just another oligarchy run by rich and powerful men. Despite the title of James S. Grubb’s essay—“When Myths Lose Their Power”—he, as have many other historians of the Venetian phenomenon who work to separate the harsh actualities of history from the soft enticements of myth, admits to its continuing influence. In the early 800s, one thousand years before Washington, D.C. emerged into its raw state as the republic of the newly formed nation, engineers were pounding countless wooden piles into the muddy base of the Adriatic lagoon—piles still in place today. (Santa Maria della Salute, erected between 1660 and 1687, rests on 1,156,627 piles.) This primal dating, fixed in 1543 by Gasparo Contarini’s De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum, reenforced the city’s mythic aura well after the fading of its actual power. The Idea of Venice had great potency during the growth of various European nationalisms in the nineteenth century; it was a model that roughly adhered to the triadic balance of a nobility (a.k.a. the doges), the aristocracy (a.k.a. the doges’

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councilors), and democracy (a.k.a. the members of the Great Council). Just as analysts of governmental practices in the United States ponder the extent to which this nation deserves being viewed as an exceptional example of republican virtue, students of Italian polity sift through records to test the ways by which Venice’s power was lifted aloft by a self-governing citizenry.177 The emphasis here is not on the ways Venice handled its everyday affairs (fascinating as they are), but rather on its ability to solidify its reputation as a unique city blessed by God, by nature, and by common sense through its canny choice of highly charged images.178 It claimed that it had always been free (notwithstanding certain inconvenient facts concerning a lack of independence from other territorial powers during its early years). Venice’s strengths were based on the self-confident belief it held in itself—that quality Henry James argued is the only form of success a place may have: a belief (as we shall see) James found lacking in Washington, D.C. The importance given to where a major city-state is located and the time of its origins has been noted, and the somewhat shabby history of how the United States capital came into being has been rehearsed. As for the official date for its inception, one can point to July 16, 1790, when the Residence Bill was passed, which designated the site for Washington, D.C., or one can choose November 17, 1800, which has more flair since that is when the nation’s senators and state representatives arrived at the rude lands beside Tiber Creek and began (slowly) to develop a physical setting for its republican government and (slowly) to add officially sanctioned emblems in honor of that government. Venice relied on more sophisticated measures to verify before God its claim to glory through the date of its founding. True, the centuries prior to a.d. 800 (when rudimentary evidence of the magnificent city of the future began to come into focus) had not been simple times. The people of the lagoons had had to relocate themselves on several occasions as they fled before the barbarians advancing across the mainland. Who was in authority in those early days was as murky as the mud upon which the nascent city rested. Nonetheless, Venetians pointed to the specific day, year, and time when Venice’s greatness was established: noon on March 25, a.d. 421.179 Rome tied its own pre-Julian myths to March as the first and fertile month of its calendar, but its selection of April 21, 754 b.c. for the official date of its founding lacked the drama of the powerful associations upon which Venetian audacity drew, resting on the Christian tradition of the Annunciation as its base. By the eleventh century, the beginning of each Christian year was linked to March 25, the day of the Annunciation—designated on the Julian calendar as the vernal equinox. It was at noon on that date that Mary’s womb was



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impregnated by the Holy Spirit, with the startling promise that the Christ Incarnate was about to emerge upon the mortal scene. When, with careful hindsight, early chroniclers stated that on or around noon of March 25, a.d. 421 the city now known as Venice was founded on the lagoon, the essential elements of the sacred legend were in place. There was the additional point of pride in the fact that, by being linked to the long-held belief in the Immaculate Conception (officially sanctioned by the church in 1854), Venice’s purity as an independent city-state had never been corrupted by the dank touch of the world around it. As Edward Muir so aptly put it, “the founding day of the city was mystically conjoined with the founding of Rome, the beginning of the Christian era, the annual rebirth of nature, and the first day of the calendar year.” In the words of Antonio Sabellico, Venice’s inception was linked to the most sacred moment in the world’s timeless history—the day when “for the perpetual glory of mankind . . . the omnipotent God formed our first ancestor” and “the son of God was conceived in the womb of the Virgin.”180

The United States has a dearth of dates that reach the celestial heights made possible through Italy’s power to create legends out of a merger of pagan, Christian, and historical events. As an “origin date,” July 4, 1776 is the only one to gain a certain frisson, resulting in a spillover that allows some Americans to revel in the fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on that mystical day.181 Nothing comparable to the Venetian legends of its beginnings can be made of July 1790 (Residence Act) or November 1800 (the move to Washington, D.C.). The capital had to fall back on its ability to glorify its local hero through statues and pediment designs of slight artistic merit, whereas Venice benefited from a wealth of divine illusions, with her founding on the Day of the Annunciation, amplified by angelic prophecies regarding St. Mark and his winged lion as protectors of the Most Serene Republic.182 The fixed formula for greatness utilized by fourteenth-century Venice was enhanced by a richness of images, all ready to be put on display within any selfglorifying context it chose.183 When one adds to the interpretative possibilities of these carefully cultivated myths, the concerted efforts of a long line of doges and counselors with the money and the will to embellish the city with emblems of its splendor, the contributions of skilled engineers and builders, and the talent of several of the major artists of the Italian tradition, it is plain to see why Washington, D.C. is at an embarrassing disadvantage. Sensitive nineteenth-century Americans could take heart only in the fact that Venice lost her independence through annexation to the Kingdom of Italy in 1805, just as the newly created republic of the United States was settling into Washington, D.C.

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i ta l i a n pa l i mps ests: The Palazzo That Believed in Itself The central elements of Venetia figurata required “an essential precondition”—belief that “the abstract concept of the state” was based on Justice, however much that concept was manipulated over time in actual practice.184 “Justice” is defined throughout the architectural flow that joins the Basilica of San Marco to the Palazzo Ducale. The “Deus Caritas Est” states that just societies are not formed by churchly doctrines but through political devices, but with its highly conscious merger of religious ardor and statescraft, Venice elected to have its cake of justice and eat it, too. Empowered by iconographical equations among “Justice = Virgin = Venice or Winged Lion = St. Mark = Solomon’s Wisdom = Justice = Venice, “the highest virtues of their Republic” were placed on public view.185 The city’s political activities and its official set of emblems were placed within the Palazzo Ducale. This single structure, evolving over time to offset the damage done by great fires, met the practical needs of governance and afforded the architectural space in which artists expressed the concepts by which the commune was defined. L’Enfant’ s original plan dispersed the sites of governance over wide areas: the executive branch in the White House, the legislative branches in the Capitol, and legal matters in the Supreme Court Building (later set further apart upon outgrowing its original chambers in the Capitol). In contrast, Florence and Siena’s town halls accommodated the cities’ business (with the Palazzo Vecchio fitted up to house Medicis en famille), while the Vatican became an independent state within the city of Rome upon the signing of the Lateran Treaty in 1929—a tiny territory where the all contains the everything. Yet it is the Palazzo Ducale that remarkably contains, as it were, the White House, Capitol Building, Supreme Court, and (what with its own armory and dungeons) the Pentagon and Leavenworth Prison. Venice’s actual business was that of business. No embarrassment was attached to this fact, although the physical needs exacted by commercial enterprise were located elsewhere. Commerce, industry, and technology were unabashedly in place within vast warehouses beside the Rialto, the private residences of its merchant princes, the shipyards of the Arsenal, and the glass factories of Murano. That the city’s pragmatic business concerns might contradict its multivocal, multivisual commitment to the abstractions of just rule was neither disguised nor apologized for.186 But as a sustained work of the art and rhetoric of justice, the Palazzo Ducale liked to believe in itself. To walk with deliberate pace through the Palazzo Ducale is to experience



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both the cohesion of its political structure and the coherence this physical place and symbolic space gave to Venice’s claim to rule by Justice. When going from floor to floor, room to room, one gains the kinetic experience of moving through time from republic to oligarchy.187 The doges’ apartments are on the level reached by the Scala d’Oro, where the walls of the Sala Grimani are handsomely guarded by the lions of St. Mark, dating from the early sixteenth century. On the next floor the first thing one encounters is Tintoretto’s ceiling design of Justice with Sword and Scales. Ambassadors coming to conduct diplomatic business once waited in either the Sala delle Quarttro Porte or the Anticollegio. In the adjacent Sala del Collegio the doge conferred with the twenty-six members of his cabinet under the ceiling with Veronese’s Justice and Peace Offering the Sword, Scales, and Olive Branch to Venice Enthroned. (For Veronese, “Justice” bears some importance but bows before “Venice” in a coupling like that between the figures of “Justice” and “America” at the U.S. Capitol.) Next is the Sala del Senato, the seat of the republic’s main legislative body. In Tintoretto’s ceilings, connections between Justice and Venice are lessened somewhat. Venice receives due homage by the gods and the cities it has conquered, appropriate for the room in which wars were declared and extraterritorial issues were settled. But there is more, much more. One arrives at the Sala del Consiglior dei Dieci, where the Council of Ten (elevated by the sight of Veronese’s Juno Offering Gifts to Venice) tried those accused of political crimes that surfaced in times of crisis, even in this Serenissima of Republics. Nearby are rooms that housed a private armory and space set aside for important prisoners. Close by is the Sala della Quarantia Civil Vecchi, where a forty-member council tried civil cases. Finally, one arrives in the immense Sala del Maggiore Consiglio, meeting hall for the city’s main governing body. The room could hold seventeen hundred tightly packed bodies—the entire number of Venetian patricians who inherited the right to attend, although changes over time shook off remnants of the republic Venice had tried to be (pretended to be) once it became an acting oligarchy. Approval of the city’s laws and election of the highest officials took place in the presence of the panoramic Coronation of the Virgin (Paradise) by Tintoretto and his assistants. Facing them at the far end of the hall is Jacopo Palma di Giovane’s The Triumph of Venice—Venice as militant warrior queen reminiscent of the pagan goddess Dea Roma. The attendees sat under Tintoretto’s Venice Surrounded by the Gods and Veronese’s The Apotheosis of Venice. Here Venice assumes the attributes of Juno, queen of Olympus, as well as those of Mary, Queen of Heaven.188 Hubristic self-confidence could reach no higher, even in the face of the fact that Venice’s actual power was on the wane.

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Business was conducted in the name of Justice within rooms that extended beyond the Sala del Maggiore Consiglio, including the Sala del Quarantia Criminale, the corridors leading toward the so-called Bridge of Sighs and the prisons filled by the state’s inquisitors. As one traces the sequence of time’s passage, matched by the increasing size of the chambers within the Doge’s Palace, the Virgin as Justice (Divine Retribution) is transformed into Divine Love (amplified by identification with the Venus of pagan love and the Juno of pagan power), who intercedes with the Son who judges.189 Those who awaited execution in the lower dungeons or were enclosed within the iron cages that hung under the arcades of the Piazza San Marco would question whether Justice had ever fully ruled in the doges’ city. Nonetheless, in Venice, as in Florence, Rome, and Washington, D.C., allegorical figures were pressed to present moral (rather, political) mandates. The messier details of the actual are relative and of little importance in commitments to the absolutes of celebratory art. The power of these images (lies or not) came from their unstinting concentration upon a strong set of tightly locked symbolic references. The particular power they possess was held fast within the walls of the single building, the Palazzo Ducale, which seems to float like a fabled realm beside a fabled sea. Venice had no single set of narratives pertaining to the rule of Justice, but all move in the harmony that the aesthetic (if not politics) allows. The several roles enacted by the Virgin, Venice, and Justice demonstrated how the formula evolved over the centuries. In the great fresco The Coronation of the Virgin by Guariento, originally placed in the Sala del Maggiore Consiglio around 1365 (grievously damaged by fire in 1577), the Virgin was the protectress of the laws of Venice, which exacted punishment as well as provided mercy, just as surely as did the regal figure of Justice in Jacobello del Fiore’s triptych of 1421.190 The earlier insistence that Venice is the city of Justice, a power granted by its steadfast allegiance to the Virgin, is gradually weakened in the art that fills the council chambers. Under the hands of the greatest painters at the height of the city’s Renaissance, the glory of an embodied Venice (seated in voluptuous splendor, hovering with the gods in the heavens) rises as Justice wanes. By 1588 the Virgin of Tintoretto’s The Coronation of the Virgin (Paradise), which replaced Guariento’s fresco, acts as intercessor. Flanked by Michael, unbendingly stern, with his sword and scales, Christ is petitioned to temper his judgment. As the city moved deeper into the sixteenth century to become the Western world’s greatest spectacle of worldly pleasures, the doges sanctioned what Rosand calls “The Appropriation of Olympus.” Pagan figures were granted full entry into the Palazzo Ducale. Outside in the courtyard,



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Mars and Neptune stand guard in coldly marble masculinity on the Scala dei Giganti. Inside, on the ceilings of the great council chamber, Juno Moneta (goddess of wealth) shares painterly heat with Venus (ambiguous sign of both divine love and human desire). Almost lost in the wild swirl overhead, Justice no longer holds center stage as Venice’s emblem of moral power, and Mary the Mother of God is no less and no more than she is elsewhere in Italy.191

Over time the icon of Venice became the gracious mistress of diplomacy, not the goddess of imperial power, not the Olympian emblem of voluptuous love, nor the Christian representative of stern justice, and certainly not the “Freedom” offered by Thomas Crawford to Jefferson Davis, secretary of war, on the eve of the Civil War, whereby benign symbols of peace were replaced by helmet and sword. This was a clever move on the part of Venice’s propagandists. They disguised whatever regret they might feel over the diminishment of the city’s former role as conqueror of the seas by projecting gleaming images for the state’s future role as protectress of peace. In the decades following America’s Civil War, Washington, D.C. had another future in mind: less peaceful, more imperial. Its allegories would become increasingly assertive regarding America’s imprint upon the world. Justice as power began to dominate Capitol Hill. By forgoing the coherence gained through the controlled use of the icons (pagan and Christian) that formed the repertoire of the artists of the Old World, and by denying the ambiguities that riddle republican images of virtue, allegorical decorations were distributed helter-skelter among the buildings newly introduced into postbellum Washington, D.C. Although these emblems were meant to display the clarity of strength, they betray a growing confusion of intent. The New Washington, D.C.

Victory was declared in 1865, though it was yet to be seen whether Justice would have any part in the business. The war was over. Certain southern families returned to the city that had reaffirmed itself as the capital of the Union, while many removed themselves to the West or stayed in the South. Washington, D.C. solidified its position as the nation’s center of political power, yet it kept the feel and look of a quiet southern village in the months Congress was not in session. During the brief Reconstruction period, voices were raised in Congress to relocate the capital to the west, with Cincinnati as the oft-repeated candidate for its new site. By the 1880s, however, the long-held sense that the site along the

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Potomac was a mistake began to wane and finally died out—aided by the fact that westerners now chose to come eastward to the capital, either with wealth on hand to spend or looking to make money through the seizure of political influence. The slave pens were gone and freedmen arrived in large numbers, many joining a new black middle class, many forced downward into the city’s seamier backstreets. The carefully guarded conservatism of Washington’s white society affected the paintings created by the city’s tight little art circle in an atmosphere that “tacitly prohibited artists from probing the poverty-ridden but picturesque slums of the black quarters.”192 Then came the reign of Alexander Shepherd, businessman, land speculator, and politician in training. Once Shepherd was named head of the Board of Public Works for municipal improvements, he pushed through reform measures on an unprecedented scale. Between 1871 and 1873, new streets, new sidewalks, new sewers, new parks, new suburbs, and new everything began to fill the city’s empty spaces and to extend its boundaries, but at a cost. New debts resulted from a strong man’s will to impose an extravagant vision for a future for which the city’s inhabitants were not prepared.193 Exorbitant overages and a flurry of accusations over graft led to two congressional investigations, public hearings, attacks and counterattacks in the newspapers, Shepherd’s resignation, and a list of unfinished public works. For better or worse, with his departure Shepherd left behind a different city—or rather, two cities: the symbolic city that had been in the works since 1800 and the modern city of the post−Civil War era—the “unreal” utopian dreamscape envisioned by L’Enfant and the “real” financially and politically driven “Seat of Empire.” In either case, Washington, D.C. struck a visiting English drama critic in 1899 as an unfinished production. Even after Shepherd’s improvements, “will be” was the fatal verb applied to the city’s present. “I am impressed by that sense of rawness and incompleteness which is said to be characteristic of America. Washington will one day be a magnificent city, of that there is no doubt, but for the present it is distinctly unfinished. The very breadth of its avenues, contrasted with the comparative lowness of the buildings which line them, gives it the air rather of a magnified and glorified frontier township than of a great capital on the European scale. Here, for the first time, I am really conscious of the newness of things.”194 In 1845 C. Edwards Lester had argued that it requires despotic powers to endow a major city-state with physical greatness. Lester may have deplored the heavy hand of the Medicis, but he longed for Congress to possess the aggressive will and political power that initiated the grandeur of Renaissance Florence.195 (That dynasty’s ever-proliferating bureaucratic system led to the erection of the Uffizi, which later housed its pride of magnificent art. Washington’s chunky



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official buildings remained no more than cells for its Bartlebys.) The ruling bodies of the U.S. capital hardly lacked talent for Medician ruthlessness and corruption, but they were short on the dynastic force and aesthetic flair that created the Florence upon whose wanton beauties nineteenth-century travelers lavished their love. However tawdry the Piazza della Signoria had become and smudged its bricks and stones, it stood in contrast to Washington’s Mall, poised on the edge of becoming a late-nineteenth-century version of an early-twentyfirst century commercial mall. The easy money to be grabbed during and after the war years, the scandals that marred the Grant administration, and the gross presence of the Bonanza Kings left little interest for art connoisseurship. Words like “chaste” and “noble” to express reverence toward the city’s symbolic ideals now seemed naive. The satires that had been leveled upon Washington’s inadequacies by Trollope, Martineau, and Dickens were what one would expect. They were English, after all. After the Civil War, brash irreverence and sharp criticism came from the Americans. Whereas in Rome, satirists posted jibes directly upon the Pasquino, one of the city’s “talking statues,” homegrown ridicule began to appear in American print journals. The opening paragraph of Scribner’s “Art at the Capitol” of 1873 suggests that the unnamed author had mastered the style Samuel Clemens was making his trademark—a populist humor free to point out the braggadocio of the American Common Man. In this case it was directed at the naive pleasure he takes in the nation’s capitol. “Why sir,” said he, “them fellers (this phrase means all civilized Europe) seem to hate a white wall. . . . Now you know, we (this phrase means all civilized Americans) think a white, hard-finish wall jest the nicest thing a man can have and he don’t want to put nothing on to it. . . . I’ve seen every famous building in Europe . . . and I never seen a building yet that can come anyways near the Capitol at Washington, it’s so big, and so white!”196 Scribner’s concedes that “there is some excuse for the popular admiration of the Capitol, even if it be called forth by nothing more in reality than a striking bit of stage-effect.” Unlike “better buildings,” like Europe’s St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, which are “never seen until they hang in far horizons,” America’s “Capitol is as a city set on a hill that cannot be hid. . . . This is one advantage not to be denied, and the size and whiteness of the dome are no doubt impressive at first view to everybody.” At this point, the author’s animus flares forth. We are pulled back to arguments over refinement versus rawness, which is more reflective of the Crayon in its sourest mood than of Mark Twain having it both ways when mocking European pretensions and American naiveté in The Innocents Abroad. The Capitol—“a sham” and “an ugly excrescence”—“cannot stand a thoughtful

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examination, and will one day be outgrown by all Americans. It was a childish, if not a barbarous taste that erected the present dome.”197 The Scribner’s article is apt in its criticism of the lame efforts to bring the European Art Idea to the capital’s aid. The city is marred by “the retiring waves of the renaissance,—fairly retired, in fact, and no longer any life or movement in them, settling down into dull imagination.” But out of stasis comes fake movement. It is “set spasmodically rolling again by the sentimental enthusiasm, or make-believe enthusiasm, for so-called classic ideas and ways which sprang up in France just before the Revolution,” singing “in a melodramatic manner about Liberty—with a large L.” The familiar note of American chauvinism takes over, backed by rebuke. The Frenchified, Napoleonic taste in the “Empire” style, which followed the “wrong” Revolution, “finally spilled over to these shores of ours in a softly refluent manner, and made our sensible, prosaic Revolutionary fathers and mothers strike a great many attitudes, and say and do many things not at all natural to them, or to any human beings, at any time or in any country.” Equally degrading is the fact that the reliefs imposed upon the American Capitol were done by Italians, “probably mere stone-cutters out of work at home,” who came “in the wake of their countryman Columbus . . . as to an El Dorado or land of easy riches!”198 The same year Scribner’s took on the un-American absurdities inflicted upon Washington D.C., Samuel Clemens, in league with Charles Dudley Warner, published The Gilded Age. The narrative starts to uncoil in Tennessee. Not until chapter 24 does it settle into the nation’s capital to follow the fortunes of yet another Twainian naïf, Washington Hawkins. It is of note that the narrative voice is posed in the second-person singular (or plural), in a manner used later to great effect in How the Other Half Lives (Jacob Riis’s “guidebook” to New York City of 1890). This is the Washington presented to “you who come to visit for the first time.” You see a “long, snowy palace projecting above a grove of trees, and a tall, graceful white dome with a statue on it surmounting the palace and pleasantly contrasting with the back-ground of blue sky.” You treat yourself to “a very noble” view but should realize that the original property owners raised land costs so that the city had to be built “in the muddy low marsh behind the temple of liberty; so now the lordly front of the building, with its imposing colonnades, its projecting, graceful wings, its picturesque group of statuary, and its long terraced ranges of steps, flowing down in white marble waves to the ground, merely looks out upon a sorrowful little desert of cheap boarding houses.” In wandering about Washington, D.C. you will also see “the fine large white barn, with wide unhandsome ground about it” where the president lives, but if you want to “find out everything,” it is imperative to realize that every individual met along the



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way “represents Political Influence.”199 How are you, as an American democrat, to deal with a city whose buildings, in particular its Capitol, signal the fact that Washington, D.C. primarily exists to display political power?

ital i a n pa l i mp s e s t s : Total Unity, Total Control The civic buildings under construction in Rome during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries set in marble and stone the drive to authority by the popes, the populus romanus, and the local nobility.200 Since the Middle Ages, buildings on the Capitoline Hill had served as important visualizations of the powers of both the papacy and the commune. From Pope Julius II onward, the goal was to instill unified papal control across Italy, with the Roman Empire as its obvious model. That authority had first to find full expression within Rome itself. Julius II laid plans for the Via Guila to connect the thickly populated sections of the city with the Borgo Vatican—the site of courts of law attached to a “monumental civic center” located within the commercial district. Proud buildings that threatened traditional senatorial authority centralized the Vatican’s secular power over public life, both civic and legal. Between the death of Julius and the reigns of Sixtus V and Nicholas V, architectural renovations were halted, revived, halted again, but throughout those years the emphasis remained on the Capitol as the “physical as well as the symbolic center of Rome.” Its fortresslike grandeur expressed “the complex interdependence of communal autonomy and papal authority, each relying on the other’s complicity in their struggle against the overpowering presence of the local nobility. Thus arose the complex political meaning of the Capitol as the traditional seat of the civic institutions of the populus romanus, and at the same time the theater for a splendid demonstration of the secular authority of the church.”201 The urban plan for Washington, D.C., which aspired to unite disparate elements of ideological intentions with the materiality of government institutions, remained. The physical and symbolic relations that linked, yet disrupted, the purposes of the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court could not be overlooked. Nor might the ambiguities they elicited.

Henry Adams’s early meditations on the southern village he first visited in 1850 (viewed with the wide-eyed gaze of a Bostonian Huckleberry Finn) were replaced with thoughts concerning the city where presidents such as Rutherford B. Hayes fell under the power of a Congress still riddled by the scandals

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of Grant’s administration. In Democracy, Adams’s novel of 1880, the likes of Daniel Webster and Charles Sumner had long since been replaced by Silas P. Ratcliffe, the Prairie Giant of Peonia, brilliantly corrupt and effective at serving his own interests.202 Ratcliffe’s personalized “Political Influence” calls forth the following mediation by the novel’s heroine, Madeleine Lee. In her horror over the practices of post-Federalist politics (populist theories of the majority gone amuck), she concludes, “Of all the titles ever assumed by prince or potentate, the proudest is that of the Roman pontiffs: ‘Servus servorum Dei’—‘Servant of the servants of God.’ In former days it was not admitted that the devil’s servants could by right have any share in government. They were to be shut out, punished, exiled, maimed, and burned. There must be some mistakes about a doctrine which makes the wicked, when a majority, the mouthpiece of God against the virtuous, but the hopes of mankind are staked on it” (181). By the story’s end, Madeleine has rejected Ratcliffe’s pressure to marry him (a marital campaign conducted in the same manner by which he, with more success, takes control of the Senate floor). Declaring that American-style democracy as practiced in Washington, D.C. has “shaken my nerves to pieces,” she flees to Egypt, the most ancient (and hardly the most innocent) of societies. “Oh, what rest it would be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out for ever at the polar star” (371). The shocks to Madeleine’s consciousness wrought by Ratcliffe’s brutally pragmatic presence, by “the raw and incoherent ugliness of the city,” only partially idealized into “dreamy beauty by the atmosphere, and the soft background of purple hills behind,” and by the crude festivities to celebrate the newly inaugurated president (“it was of the earth, earthy,” in honor of a man who was “not a hero”) are further heightened on the day she and her friends go to Mount Vernon, itself filled with conflicting views about its patron saint (191, 219). There is much bantering on the part of Madeleine’s companions. They teasingly confuse the visiting English lord, whose own “flattering description of General Washington” was “compounded of Stuart’s portrait and Greenough’s statue of Olympian Jove with Washington’s features, in the Capitol Square” (123). One of the American party admits that “we idolize him. To us he is Morality, Justice, Duty, Truth; half a dozen Roman gods with capital letters. He is austere, solitary, grand; he ought to be deified” (135). However, it is Ratcliffe who accurately sounds the contemporary note. True, Washington was once “a sort of American Jehovah. But the West is a poor school for Reverence” (135–36). Although Washington had “a curious Yankee shrewdness in money-matters,” he “stood outside of politics. The thing couldn’t be done to-day” (135, 140). Ratcliffe elaborates on this theme: “If virtue won’t answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our oppo-



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nents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington’s day as it is now, and always will be” (141). During the brief interlude spent at the sacred shrine where Washington’s body lies in “the beauty of this Virginia winter softness,” the little group realizes “that dreadful Capitol and its office-seekers are only ten miles off ” (125, 132). Poor Madeleine asks herself how it could be that “everything Washington touched, he purified,” while “everything we touch seems soiled? Why do I feel unclean when I look at Mount Vernon?” (144). Her soul cannot be solaced by the Claude/ Poussin distances that once pleased viewers of the city from afar. In 1783 the Congressional Congress had appropriated funds to erect a magnificent monument within the city to honor the nation’s first president. Fifty years later, in 1833, nothing had been accomplished. Pressure had to be applied. A special association led by John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court, was formed. Competition for the best design was held, won by Robert Mills, the architect of the Capitol. Mills’s design was an eerie foretaste of the patchedtogether design for the World War II monument erected in 2004. It included a circular colonnade measuring one hundred feet in height that consisted of thirty Doric columns twelve feet around and forty-five feet tall, embellished by a frieze commemorating each state. There would be a gallery with more statues placed within seven-and-one-half foot niches, as well as a thirty-foot doorway leading into another area that housed more paintings and statues. At the crest, a triumphal car would bear the sculpted likeness of Washington. Jutting out from the center of the base, an obelisk would tower six hundred feet from the ground. Fifteen years passed, until July 4, 1848, when the monument’s cornerstone was laid, a parade was held, Masonic ceremonies were conducted, and orations were delivered in the presence of President Polk and twenty-one infantry companies and cavalry troops. Work was commenced, then stalled in 1854. At that point the monument sat unfinished, an embarrassed obelisk only one hundred and fifty-four feet in height. Appropriations ceased and the Civil War came and went. In 1876 a funding bill was passed in the hope that the sorry affair could finally be completed. New designs were offered (including a Florentine campanile suggested by William Wetmore Story), and a succession of engineers and architects were placed in charge, each introducing problems that continued to delay the monument’s construction: the instability of the foundation; stone in different shades that did not match top to bottom; the obelisk’s tip discovered to be too wide.203 By the time Washington Hawkins arrives to take part in “the gilded age,” he finds that the “Monument to the Father of his Country towers out of the mud—

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sacred soil is the customary term. It has the aspect of a factory chimney, with the top broken off.” (When the Capitol dome stood unfinished during the war, it was viewed as the stark symbol of the nation’s disunity. It was even worse when coarse jokes were made about the stub of Washington’s monument.) Hopes remained. “The Monument is to be finished some day, and at that time our Washington will have risen still higher in the nation’s veneration and will be known as the Great-Great-Grandfather of his Country.” Once again, that damning phrase: will be someday. In the present moment, however, Hawkins found only “contented sheep nibbling pebbles in the desert solitudes that surround it, and the tired pigs dozing in the holy calm of its protecting shadow.”204 Little wonder that on February 21, 1885, as part of the final celebration (Masonic ceremonies, militia parades, congressional representatives, and war veterans), the orator spoke of the shame experienced through the decades over “the sorry-spectacle which those 156 feet in their seemingly helpless condition, with that dismal derrick still standing as in mockery upon its summit presented to the eye of every comer to the National Capital for nearly a quarter of a century. No wonder the unsightly pile became the subject of pity and derision. . . . That truncated shaft, with its untidy surroundings looked only like an insult to Washington. . . . If our Union had then perished (it stood in this condition through the Civil War) our unfinished, fragmentary, crumbling monument to Washington would have been a fit emblem of a divided and ruined country.” An emasculate hero and an emasculated nation had, at last, mercifully, been replaced by “a simple sublime obelisk of pure white marble, its proportions in spite of its immense height conforming exactly to those of the most celebrated obelisks of antiquity.”205 The White City

In January 1902 a lavish exhibit went on view in the Corcoran Gallery, attended by President Theodore Roosevelt, members of the Cabinet, Congress, and other officials. Spread out before viewers were the plans for reshaping the Mall and adjoining areas proposed by Daniel H. Burnham, Augustus SaintGaudens, Charles F. McKim, and Frederic Law Olmsted Jr., prominent members of the newly formed Park Commission. The formation and funding for the Park Commission had been initiated by passage of an amendment of May 29, 1900, known as the McMillan Plan—named for its sponsor, Senator James McMillan, chairman of the Senate Committee of the District of Columbia.206 The story of how the McMillan Plan came about at the time of the capital’s centennial celebrations, the contributions of the Park Commission, and the con-



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sequences to the city’s symbolic role in the twentieth century is a complex and fascinating compendium of contending forces: infighting by members of the Senate and the House of Representatives and members of the capital’s myriad bureaucracies; struggles over authority waged among the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, building constructors, and the American Institute of Architects; deals made and concessions won from powerful commercial interests to protect the Mall from the encroachment of power plants, railroad traffic, and other excrescences; glowing tributes to, and attacks from, the country’s art world; backroom political connivings; the inception of the American Academy of Rome; contested decisions over the aesthetic principles that would fix the future appearance of the nation’s capital.207 There were designated heroes—namely President Theodore Roosevelt, a man in the mold of a modern Medici with the executive powers to advance the arts—and villains—namely Uncle Joe Cannon of Illinois, “Tsar of the House of Representatives,” scathing opponent of all that was nonutilitarian.208 Other important figures in the tale besides the eminent members of the Park Commission (Burnham, McKim, Saint-Gaudens, Olmstead) were those who held status in the newly flourishing art scene. All wished to stop having to repeat the tired litany of someday there will be an American art. But it is Glenn Brown who planted himself at the center of the argument: not simply because of his dedication to the “crusade to revive George Washington’s vision of a capital city,” but because of what that crusade, compelled by that vision, says about the myth of Washington, D.C.209 In the efficient manner one might expect of a man trained at MIT in civil engineering (expert in matters of drains and water closets), proponent of scientific management, and future secretary of the AIA, Brown opens his 1860– 1930, Memories: A Winning Crusade to Revive George Washington’s Vision of a Capital City, with “Topic I. Training for the Crusade.” He immediately records “Early Memories,” which at first glance seems an odd prelude to the detailed account he gives of his long career as engineer, architect, advocate of urban planning, and battler against foes within the capital’s bureaucratic structure. Yet all falls into place to support the pleasure Brown finds in the Capitol’s whiteness, the “chaste” and “refined” facade of the White House (the proper habitation for “an American gentleman”), and the architecture of the early days of the southern colonies. Everything is brought together by his boyhood memories of simplicity, dignity, spirituality, purity, nobility, and grace—the operative words for the virtues he associates with the iconic figure from Virginia in whose name the nation’s capital must be returned to its origins.210 The first sentence of Brown’s Memories lays down the basis for the living aesthetics for which he will fight throughout his lifetime as one who was “[b]orn on

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a southern plantation” owned by his grandfather, “a planter and politician.” Prior to the war, the “sowing, reaping and storing” of its crops “was in the hands of capable overseers.” This freed his grandfather to serve for twelve years as senator from North Carolina. Brown’s boyhood memories are of the “constant and ready service of slaves [that] fostered in me a still existing pleasure in being served,” and the image of the reaping of wheat by a “proud leader and ten joyful, singing darkies in line swaying cradles in unison, keeping rhythmic time to a jolly tune.” This pastoral idyll ended in 1865, when Brown was eleven. I will never forget, sitting on the back porch steps, my grandfather standing on the platform, and some one hundred and fifty negroes grouped in the back yard. He and I were the only whites present, and he was telling them they were free. There was no joyousness or jubilation among these newly made free men, but the men were grave and serious and women were hysterically moaning and groaning. They reminded one of children who, without warning, had been thrown out of home with nowhere to go. My sympathy was with the distressed negroes; it never occurred to me that their freedom impoverished my grandfather, his children and grandchildren. There was no appreciation of having before me, in him, a noble example of courage and sportsmanship.211

Despite his grandfather’s losses, “he stood unruffled, dignified, calmly telling his former slaves they were free and sympathetically advising them what to do, and how to conduct themselves.” Taking this tableau to heart, Brown settled upon his personal creed: “I have been an Idealist, fighting for the right, craving service, and placing women on a pedestal”—a creed that fired his passion to recreate Washington, D.C. in the image of the refined southern virtues of George Washington.212 Brown’s crusade took place during the Progressive Era (as well as the postReconstruction years). These were the years that, as one historian has observed, “the Renaissance complex” found its true place on the national political scene. The McMillan Plan sought to achieve “the Renaissance ideal of artistic collaboration among architects, sculptors, painters, and fine craftsmen . . . symbolic of public, not private aspirations . . . [and to] symbolize order, civilization, and, above all, the new ethos of citizenship, public service, and civic duty then prominent in political discourse, especially among the reform minded. Public art would also celebrate the new pride of the American people in their recently attained stature as a world power.”213 The “Renaissance ideal”—as well as the Imperial Ideal of ancient Rome— constantly posed problems, moral and aesthetic, for a city that continued to declare its desire to represent republican virtues. The question remained: what



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kind of look would result from the final implementation of the McMillan Plan? To what extent did the “Renaissance style” play into the choices made by the Park Commission’s team—McKim, Olmstead, Saint-Gaudens, and Burnham (the latter flush with success in the creation of “the White City” at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition)? Would the architectural models based on the Southern Colonial tradition associated with Brown’s hero, George Washington, form the basis for the new Washington, D.C.? After visits to the Georgian manor houses of Virginia and Maryland and a stop at Williamsburg, the commission said no. It “stubbornly looked across the ocean for aesthetic examples,” setting sail for Europe in June 1901. The resulting Washington plan may have “had more of France than Italy in its design for the city’s boulevards and park areas,” but the “Roman experience” entered into the decision “to plan on a Roman scale. . . . It was in the spirit of solemnity, pomp, and the architectonic grandeur of the plan that the influence of the Italian leg of the trip may be seen. Burnham said that it was ‘as if the very spirit of Rome—its ordered bigness, its grandeur, its essence of the eternal—stole into their souls.’”214 Washington, D.C. would never experience the conditions, splendid and horrific, that erected and embellished Italian civic structures of the past. Active, knowledgeable, willing patronage of the arts by emperors, popes, ruling families, and city counselors, executed by a deep reserve of accomplished “official artists,” would not be duplicated in the political world governed by America’s congressmen and presidents. Whatever “Renaissance ideal” figured in turn-ofthe-century America emerged from the great art collections formed by persons of wealth (ruthlessly gained or not) and taste (self-generated or not). It matched the pattern aptly represented by Adam Verver of James’s The Golden Bowl, who carries his loot of European masterpieces back to American City. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities were the earliest recipients of private largess. Eventually, Washington, D.C. art life was burnished by collections endowed by Alexander Cochran (1897), Duncan Phillips (1921), Charles L. Freer (1923), and Andrew Mellon, whose Italian Old Masters formed the nucleus of the West Wing of the National Gallery (1941). No longer would members of Congress have to debate whether to allow the Capitol rotunda to be used as a gallery where artists might offer their paintings for sale. The circuitous means by which art treasures are offered for public viewing through private bequests work well within the American political system, which often counts on individuals to support civic programs unrelated to utilitarian needs. The tenuous give-and-take between governmental action and civilian intercession lessened the chance for dangerous mistakes of the kind made by Benito Mussolini when he tried to draw Rome’s past forward into his vision

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of the future greatness of Italy. Glenn Brown’s quasi-personal, quasi-political “crusade” failed to raise George Washington’s spirit from the grave at Mount Vernon. The McMillan Plan, which smoothed out the city’s earlier patchedtogether look, is more Parisian boulevardism, Roman grandeur, and updated technological touches than moonlit southern simplicity. In contrast, Mussolini would command his engineers to demolish an ancient section of Rome in order to uncover the mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus Caesar—a material declaration of the continuity between the Roman Empire and the Fascist Empire completed in May 1936. Augustus’s tomb was on view in 1937 in time for the bimillennial of the emperor’s birth, followed by the Mostra Augustea of 1938 dedicated to “The Immortality of the Idea of Rome. The Renaissance of Empire in Fascist Italy.” The exhibition featured triumphal arches, an obelisk, and the flag of Italy joined with that of the Vatican. For the occasion, G. Bottai, minister of education, wrote L’Italia de’Augusto et l’Italia d’oggi, a testament that flew in the face of everything that Max Weber had warned against: the attempt to stress “that unity of concept and method in the most diverse periods and historical climates” that bound the politics of ancient Rome to the Duce’s own “Mission in the World.”215 Authoritarian structures still achieve results in ways that resemble directives laid down by Rome’s emperors, Florence’s Medicis, and the Renaissance popes. That democratic procedures of the American kind seem able only to stumble toward the fulfillment of a vision do not, however, suggest that versions of the “old ways” have no civic consequences. The creation of the “new Washington,” implemented by the McMillan Plan, came at the time when the imperial mood of global expansionism manifested itself through moves into the Caribbean, the Pacific, and across the border into Latin America. The symbolism of the White City played into the capital’s view of its mission to take advanced technological and business procedures, together with homegrown moral values, into countries and communities that were (as the United States had once been) still “raw.” But could it satisfy the hunger expressed by Barrett Wendell (Harvard professor of literature), who viewed America’s egalitarian political system as the foe of cultural excellence, while taking personal solace in the “certain ethereal purity” promised by “those high sounding commonplaces of triumphant democracy”— illusory forms that for him erased bruising stains from America’s past history?216 The Unbearable Lightness of the Void

There was work to be done at home by right-minded whites inside the District of Columbia to uplift the local black community. Yet it was more expedient to



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shunt the freedmen aside into the history-less void (as had the local arts community) while America’s administrators moved aggressively ahead to meet the nation’s economic and military expectations. The separate social levels at which the capital’s affairs were administered center one of the final sections of W. E. B. DuBois’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Having drawn its lead characters (black and white) from the swamps and cotton fields of post-Reconstruction Alabama to Washington, D.C., it pauses to attend the inaugural balls held in honor of the new president (unnamed, but most likely William McKinley). Mary Creswell, wretched wife of an Alabama plantation owner, attends the official ball held in “the red barn of the census shack,” decorated like an “artificial fairyland.” She is then conveyed to “the other ball”—a “slumming” junket meant to bring amusement to whites who wanted to observe the city’s blacks at play. Mary witnesses this “most extraordinary scene”: There was a black man waltzing with a white woman—no, she was not white, for Mary caught the cream and curl of the girl as she swept past; but there was a white man (was he white?) and a black woman. The color of the scene was wonderful. The hard human white seemed to glow and live and run a mad gamut of the spectrum, from morn till night, from white to black; through red and sombre browns, pale and brilliant yellows, dead and living blacks. . . . Her eyes went dreaming; there below was the gathering of the worlds. She saw types of all nations and lands swirling beneath her in human brotherhood and a great wonder shook her. They seemed so happy. Surely this was no nether world; it was upper earth, and—her husband beckoned; he had been laughing incontinently. He saw nothing but a crowd of queer looking people doing things they were not made to do and appearing absurdly happy over it. It irritated him unreasonably.217

During his visit to Washington, D.C. in 1904, Henry James had allowed himself, as a “rank outsider,” to feel “somewhat irritated” over what he found there. His responses were not (as were DuBois’s) prompted by the multicolored panorama spread upon the impressionistic canvas of the city that lay outside the capital’s “official society.” Rather, the scene James faced down was quite the opposite. It was the stark white blankness of the capital, “which was the public and official, the monumental, with features all more or less majestically playing in the great administrative, or, as we nowadays put it, Imperial part.”218 The chapter from James’s The American Scene devoted to Washington, D.C. contains continual references to that other environment—the “City of Conversation,” populated by highly articulate men and women who are neither politicians nor people of color, but James lavishes the greater part of his uniquely

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phrased readings on the spaces and structures of “the public and official, the monumental” summertime landscape seeming bereft of people, yet filled by the thingness of large white buildings. This was precisely the Washington, D.C. in the process of being “reformed” by the McMillan Plan, a “clustered, yet at the same time oddly scattered, city, a general impression of high granite steps, of light grey corniced colonnades, rather harmoniously low, contending for effect with slaty mansard roofs and masses of iron excrescence, a general impression of somewhat vague, empty, sketchy, fundamentals, however expectant, however spacious, overweighted by a single Dome and overaccented by a single Shaft— this loose congregation of values seemed strangely, a matter disconnected and remote, though remaining in its way portentous and bristling all incoherently at the back of the scene” (250). What, to James’s aesthetic consciousness, is wrong here? The same thing that had been wrong in the view of Horatio Greenough fifty years earlier. Greenough also attacked any “attempt to realize in art the physical truth that many little things form one great one, which in art is not true.”219 If James is made uneasy by the “cluttered, yet at the same time oddly scattered, city,” with its “loose congregation of values,” he is further disturbed by the way the dome and shaft seem to lie behind “an immense painted, yet unfinished cloth, hung there to a confessedly provisional end and marked with the queerness, among many queernesses, of looking always the same, painted once for all in clear, bright, fresh tones, but never emerging from its flatness, after the fashion of other capitals, into the truly, the variously, modelled and rounded state” (251). In 1904 there were still reasons for the attentive critic to drop back into the reiteration of the magic phrase of hope uttered since the early 1800s: “someday this will be . . . .” James adds his concern that if “someday” something will happen, that something may not mean much. True, “we are promised these enhancements, these illustrations, of the great general text, on the most magnificent scale, a splendid projected and announced Washington of the future, with approaches even now grandly outlined and massively marked, in face of which one should perhaps confess to the futility of any current estimate” (260). The “American voter” is promised that, in the forthcoming “‘artistic’ Federal city,” whose plans have been “elaborated down to the finer details—a city of palaces and monuments and gardens, symmetries and circles and far radiations, with the big Potomac for water-power and water-effect”—he will receive “on the spot and in the pride of possession, quite a new kind of civic consciousness.” This gift will be brought to him “under the wide-spread wings of the general Government, which fairly make it figure to the rapt vision as the object caught up in eagle claws and lifted into fields of air,” an act that “will blow the work,



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at all steps and stages, clean and clear, disinfect it quite ideally of any germ of the job” (262). Civic aspirations will be gloriously accomplished. What concerns James is whether “the taste of the new consciousness, finding him so fresh to it, [will] prove the right medicine?” As always in America, “we must still rather indefinitely wait to see. . . . The thing is happening, or will have to happen, in the American way—that American way which is more different from all other native ways, taking country with country.” James strikes a familiar note, one for which his critics are delighted to chastise him: that here, as in the rest of “the American scene,” “the whole aesthetic law [takes place] in the historic void.” American arts of design appear “not having things enough” to express, nor having “enough tone and resonance furthermore to give them” (263). James makes earnest efforts to discover whether there are “things enough” in American history to say. Obstacles do not come about through the capital’s lack of trying to remedy these absences, but the question remains whether its politicians, engineers, and artists have ever succeeded in joining the facts of history with responsible aesthetic statements.220 At the time of the McMillan Plan it was reasonable to inquire, “What therefore will the multitudinous and elaborate forms of the Washington to come have to ‘say,’ and what, above all, besides gold and silver, stone and marble and trees and flowers, will they be able to say it with?” (264). There is real enjoyment to be had as the pilgrim examines this “ark of the American covenant” on display in Washington. It serves “as a compendium of all the national ideals, a museum, crammed full, even to overflowing, of all the national terms and standards, weight and measures and emblems of greatness and glory, and indeed as a building record of half the collective vibrations of a people, their conscious spirit, their public faith, their bewildered taste, their ceaseless curiosity, their arduous and interrupted education.” James is happy to live with “the association [that] assaults the wondering mind” as he makes a leisurely circuit around the Capitol’s exterior. As concerned as all cultural historians must be to avoid the mistakes Max Weber warned against, James is wary, yet open to compassion. The analogy may seem forced, but it affected me as playing in Washington life very much the part that St. Peter’s of old, had seemed to me to play in Rome; it offered afternoon entertainment, at the end of a longish walk, to any spirit in the humour for the uplifted and flattered vision—and this without suggesting that the sublimities in the two cases, even as measured by the profanest mind, tend at all to be equal. The Washington dome is indeed capable, in the Washington air, of admirable, of sublime effects, and there are cases in which,

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seen at a distance above its yellow Potomac, it varies but by a shade from the sense—yes, absolutely the divine campagna-sense—of St. Peter’s and the likecoloured Tiber. (265)

Once James enters the Capitol, however, he is removed from recollections of the sacred icons encountered in Italy’s churches and civic buildings. Nowhere in sight are stern busts of the Caesars likened to Olympian gods, glittering mosaics of the Virgin’s majestic reception into the empyrean, sweeping frescos that elevate the figure of Divine Justice, or allegories of Venice as the Most Serene Republic received into the exalted company of Venus, Juno, and the Mother of God. That Brumidi’s attempt to center George Washington within the swirl of an “Apotheosis” on the rotunda’s canopy collapses under the weight of its inadequacy to image transcendence is beside the point. It is not the nation’s military hero and premier statesman that serves James as the defining image for the Capitol’s “large, final benignity” (source of the “colossal revenue” kept on tap for the nation’s citizenry). For James, America’s definitive icon is not to be found “in a temple or a citadel” but rather at “the warm domestic hearth of Columbia herself, a motherly, chatty, clear-spectacled Columbia” (266). It is perhaps odd that, at this point, James honors this image of Columbia, when it is the statue of “Armed Freedom” atop the Capitol’s dome that had become the official icon for America around the globe. Nonetheless, the homey virtues of the hearthside well suit James. They represent the Capitol’s “democratic assimilation of the greater dignities and majesties” in ways that “amuse,” that make its “general logic . . . supremely interesting.” All hangs together as long as Washington, D.C., is dealt with in “so sociably and humourously” a manner (265). Banished are past efforts to attain “nobility,” “grandeur,” and “virtue.” A “domestic Jupiter” fits better beside the democratic hearth, with no room left for oversized assertions of militaristic might and (even worse) inflated moral force.221 This is Henry James matching the mode of Henry Adams in their mutual approach to the “general logic” of the manner in which the official business of the nation’s capital is conducted.222 So unbearable a lightness of the void can be met only with a brutal humor, just slightly disguised. James concludes this section with the following scene set outside the Capitol. A man whose consciousness is ever given to making “distinctions,” James observes “that to exchange the inner aspects of the vast monument for the outer is to be reminded with some sharpness of a Washington in which half the sides that have held our attention drop, as if rather abashed, out of sight. . . . Here, in the vast spaces—mere empty light and air, though such pleasant air and such pretty light as yet—the great Federal future seems, under vague bright forms, to hover and to stalk, making the hori-



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zon recede to take it in, making the terraces too, below the long colonnades, the admirable standpoints, the sheltering porches, of political philosophy” (267). As James strolls past the facade of the “comparatively new wings of the building,” whose “marble embrace appears so the complement of the vast democratic lap,” he meets “a trio of Indian braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie, but as free of the building labyrinth as they had ever been of these.” In league with other tourists, they are “arrayed in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats, with their pockets, I am sure, full of photographs and cigarettes.” James catches “their resemblance, on a much bigger scale, to Japanese celebrities, or to specimens, on show, of what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing.” For an imagination once “fed betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales,” the Indians naturally “project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time.” James’s consciousness is always nourished by images from narratives of literature and art that contain the prerequisite notations of sharp “footsteps.” Why, then, have the official historical records been bleached of the blood of the innocents within the capital’s “historic void”? Why is “the brazen face of history” that shines “there, at its highest polish” in images like the Capitol’s defeated Indian and the figure of the Armed Freedom the only history on view? Why does the city insist on “printless pavements of the State” that bowdlerize the nation’s narrative (268)? Americans abroad have to deal with the unsettling fact that Rome is Life in all its multiplicity.223 Why, then, did Washington, D.C. find its equivalence in Death through its reduction to “this loose congregation of values”? Aesthetics of Death: The Mall and Beyond

The McMillan Plan brought a sense of material clarity to the capital’s physical layout, although the same disjunctions between ideas and ideals remained. Still pending was the question of what to do with the Mall. L’Enfant had originally envisioned the low and boggy land as a splendid vista extending westward from the Capitol, marked by a broad boulevard worthy of the great European capitals, but his intentions, like other aspects of his initial plans, faded quickly away. Matters looked up when construction on the Smithsonian Castle and the Washington Monument began in the late 1840s. In the 1850s Andrew Jackson Downing was asked to suggest ways to beautify the area, but Downing drowned before his plans were acted upon. The war intervened in the 1860s, and troops and cattle took over the landscape. Development of the Mall was sluggish prior to the Civil War. It was hardly that in the Gilded Age that followed.

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“Development” in the 1870s meant proposals promoted by a faceless bureaucracy for an increase of railroad traffic and the building of the Baltimore and Ohio Station. The passive voice takes over in accounts of subsequent actions. The Mall was largely unkempt and wholly vulnerable to private commercial schemes intended to enhance real estate values: a highway from Gettysburg, a power plant, more train tracks, and the erection of a station to accommodate the influx of new arrivals. Through means that were not entirely savory, commercial deals were made and trade-offs were arranged. Partisan wrangling in Congress was continual between the Progressives and the Cannonites, followers of the senator from New York. Personalities reentered the story once Joe Cannon spoke out in rage against Theodore Roosevelt, who ordered the old railroad station to be razed and tracks removed, but eventually the Mall came under the bland jurisdiction of the Park Commission.224 By 1905 a broad expanse of land (rather like an outsized version of a New England green) stretched toward the now-completed Washington Monument. The bold Norman-Romanesque-Gothic outline of the Smithsonian Castle (designed by James Renwick), on view since 1855, has been joined along the edges of the Mall by the Freer, Sackler, and Hirshhorn collections, and by the museums of African Art, American History, Natural History, Indian History, and Air and Space. Today varied enticements that rim the greensward supply evidence that Washington, D.C. recognizes the importance to its image as a major city of supporting the arts; its museum row is no more but no less than is expected of a nation’s capital.225 The “new Washington” continues to be more a creature of political pragmatism than of the love of art and culture backed by uncompromised passion. One would like to think it need not be this way, but the most recent addition to the list of museums to find its way onto the Mall suggests otherwise. In January 2006 the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution voted into being the future National Museum of African-American History and Culture. With the federal government funding half its cost, it is scheduled for completion within the next decade and is to be located next to the Washington Monument at the end of the Mall. It is clearly one of the nation’s scandals that government approval for the museum has dragged on since the early 1900s, blocked in the past by men like Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. But old doubts still center on the motives that rule campaigns to gain access to the sacred territory of the Mall. While its advocates stated it would be an insult to black Americans if the new museum did not claim space on the Mall, two other groups currently stand in opposition to the placement of any new structures on the Mall. It is almost a happenstance that it was the museum of African-American History and Cul-



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ture that touched off the recent battle. The first group advances the argument that was used during the years of contention over the McMillan Plan: don’t add clutter that alters the balance of the current vista; the goal: no more additions. The second argues from the stand launched in 2000: inaugurate a “twenty-first century Mall” totally separate from the old one; the goal: many more structures to be constructed extending ever outward from the present site. By now, visitors to Washington D.C. have many museums to choose among. At their best, they are works of art as well as receptacles for various art forms of excellence. What is most striking, however, is the way the capital affects one as having become a vast, cluttered, whitened sepulcher of the nation’s dead. The capital’s infatuation with its monuments and memorials is not restricted to the practical arrangements for burial made by any city, great or ordinary, whether or not as famous as Venice’s San Michaele in Isola, Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale, Los Angeles’ Forest Lawn, Boston’s Mount Auburn, New York’s Potter’s Fields, or Green-Wood near Brooklyn. The reputation of Washington, D.C. as a gleaming necropolis is different in kind from that of Paris’s Pere Lachaise, London’s Highgate, Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, or Concord’s graveyard, all of which house thinkers and artists of note. Places of internment for private individuals are part of the long history of burial traditions, whether designed as columbaria, sarcophagi, catacombs, or mausoleums.226 What sets Washington, D.C. apart is the proliferation of statues, plaques, grave markers, tombs, visitors’ centers, and gift shops that memorialize those who have died in the nation’s wars. They are momenti mori that tend to sweep the dead under generalized labels that make individuality moot. In the capital of a nation proud of its military record, it seems that it is wars that matter most and direct its primary aesthetic. Among the welter are the following, given in alphabetical order: the Confederate Statue, Grand Army of the Republic Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, Navy Memorial, Tomb of the Unknowns, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution, United States Marine Corps War Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Women in Military Service for America Memorial, and the World War II Memorial.227 Can a pattern be extracted from the monuments and memorials that fill the official roster—a pattern that speaks to the national ideals the war dead are meant to represent, by way of an aesthetic that dictates the manner by which the fallen are memorialized and that determines who gets buried, where, why, and how? Notwithstanding the pressures applied by lobbyists for special interest groups and funding supplied by various government agencies, the sincerity of efforts to raise money and to control the manner in which public recognition is given is not directly under question here.228 What merits attention are the emo-

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tions on display when an essentially incoherent set of ideals, coupled with random aesthetic expression, is set on display within the parameters of the nation’s capital. To be expected in national centers of governing power, individuals said to be responsible for that power receive primary attention. In Washington, D.C., this points to the men elected to the highest post, yet only a select few of America’s presidents have been fitted out with large-scale physical tokens in their honor: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.229 The honoring of hallowed names has been the occasion for querulous arguments over design elements (should the Pantheon suggest the design for the Jefferson Memorial, are Doric columns appropriate for Lincoln’s, can an Egyptian obelisk capture the sense of Washington’s “republican simplicity”?) and unavoidable delays (soggy sites, disruptive wars, lack of funds, flagging interest). The implementation of a major memorial can consume years, even a century: the Washington Monument in 1885, the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, and the Jefferson Memorial in 1943 (with its central statue not in place until 1947). But what stirs (or ought to stir) questions in the minds of today’s visitors to the Mall are the monuments to America’s war dead that have been rushed onto the scene over the past few decades. Arlington Cemetery was established in 1862 during the Civil War. By the end of the conflict it was the burial site of sixteen thousand soldiers.230 The grounds now contain nearly a quarter of a million military dead. It is estimated that by 2020 no space will remain for future rows of stark white markers—a thought that causes the heart either to swell with patriotic pride or to tear with grief. Arlington shelters other notables who lived out the natural term of life (William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Foster Dulles, Joe Louis, members of the Supreme Court, and builders of the nation’s capital such as Pierre L’Enfant and Montgomery Meigs). But it is the sheer number of memorials erected in the name of collective military action that prompts wonder over the value official Washington, D.C. has chosen to give to the costs of war. It has been remarked that the artwork introduced into the U.S. Capitol during the 1830s and 1840s favored generic military scenes that suppressed the more intense elements of the grand heroic. Unlike the scenes of bloody gore in battle spread exuberantly across the walls and ceilings of the Sala Regia, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Palazzo Ducale, the vogue for violence found little place within the Capitol. Based on these depictions, no one seems to have died in the American Revolution. That it was a gentleman’s disagreement transacted with quiet decorum is reflected in narratives that are easy to read and perhaps to forget. In like manner the Mall’s most recent memorials hardly seem to ad-



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dress the issue of what happened to bring them into being. Every American war is meticulously represented, while—like Russian dolls that open to reveal still more figures—each branch of every military entity claims yet more memorials. Death in military combat is the traditional way for “heroes” to gain “honor” and display “valor”—the very words that label the driveways, plazas, and halls throughout the Arlington grounds. Since no American, civilian or not, may be left out in a world defined by war, death is being reshaped to include the victims of the explosions that destroyed the U.S. Maine, the Challenger, the Iran Rescue Mission, and Pan Am Flight 103. Yet how anonymous they remain at the hands of an aesthetic that privileges anonymity. A striking fact is the way that, sooner or later, somehow or other, all roads lead back to George Washington and the imprint of his spirit. By happenstance, the Arlington Cemetery was founded on land belonging to John Parke Custis, son of Martha Custis Washington. His son George Washington Parke Custis built Arlington House, which passed into the hands of his daughter Mary Anna Randolph Custis, wife of Robert E. Lee. During the Civil War, the U.S. government commandeered Arlington from the Lees. The National Cemetery Act of 1862 was put into place by Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. The homestead of the Custis/ Washington/Lee clan became the official burying ground for the Union dead as well as the location for Freedman Village. As a result of this circuitous history, a private eighteenth-century country mansion became the site of latter-day memorials to an entirely different kind of national present. Members of Congress could be niggardly in the appropriation of funds to build and to decorate. They often expressed displeasure over the type of arts and the artists chosen to tell stories from the past, but they did not doubt the power of that past. After the War between the States, concern over regional loyalties offset passionate interest in abstractions of “Americanism.” Henry Cabot Lodge had thought to settle that tricky question with his declaration that no one could be an “American” unless his family had come to the colonies prior to the American Revolution, but thousands, then millions, of “new people” continued to arrive on these shores. It was they who would spur the determination to define what “being American” meant, while those on the margins of race had to make their own history.231 Breaking past an “American history” defined solely by the historical societies of New England or Virginia was a constructive move, but it took another generation or two to generate a sense of history fit for consumption by the public at large. Time, and certain events such as the coming of more wars, absorbed former outsiders into the national whole under a consensus-driven rubric of “American ideals.” Inevitably, the inclusion of “more” people involved

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in “more” traumatic events led to “more” kinds of responses, and a proliferation of ways this “moreness” might be represented through officially sanctioned art. Control over responses is advanced when pictorial narratives are enclosed within official spaces that set the desired tone, just as Constantine’s atrium churches used a similar strategy to great political effect. The halls of the U.S. Capitol are expected to exact hushed reverence, whether or not this is the actual result.232 To venture upon the grounds of Arlington Cemetery is to be caught up in emotions that do homage to the gallant dead, from whom any personal blemish of individual character has been erased for eternity. But once the visitor is released upon the expanse of the Mall, the capital’s assertion of protective custody over individual emotions breaks down. Not that there will be fewer responses: just not necessarily the ones that were intended. It is unlikely that many visitors become teary-eyed over the Washington Monument. The tendency is to appropriate the obelisk as a backdrop for family snapshots. It is even less likely that those who make the foray across the tidal basin to the Jefferson Memorial are deeply affected. (Judy Holliday’s wide-eyed reaction in Born Yesterday is the charming exception.) For keener responses to what these icons of Washington and Jefferson signify, for good or ill, a trip to Mount Vernon or to Monticello is mandatory. The Lincoln Memorial has the greatest potential for impact of all. The Daniel Chester French statue may be too large in scale and set too high for easy access for the devout pilgrim. Its toes will not be worn away by reverent kisses, as have those of the bronze statue of St. Peter inside Rome’s Basilica. Yet the sight of that strong, calm, marble figure has marked the changes taking place since 1922, once the icon of Lincoln began to function as the nation’s savior rather than as the emancipator of its slaves. Placed above the incised words of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address, the murals by Jules Guerin contain the figures of “Emancipation” and “Reunion.” For an earlier generation they reinforced the satisfying notion that after the South’s slaves were freed and certain accommodations were made along economic lines, enmity was over between North and South.233 “Dull comprehension” ruled the moment when the unwelcome presence of one of the dedicatory speakers in 1922, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was roughly dragged away from the stage. Only later would the Good Father look down on the massed gatherings for Marian Anderson in 1939 and on Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. Two recent examples of memorial art and political commentary suggest the contested ways in which death and the arts of death operate now that the spirits of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln have been placated by stone and marble. Prior to the Vietnam War the government had generally been able to control



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public responses to its military campaigns. The Union had acquired Arlington to bury its Civil War dead. In time, the Confederate dead were included, in recognition that brave men die for the causes in which they believe. The dead from subsequent wars were quietly added to its tranquil acres, carefully managed as a place of solace for the living for whom the ethos of war seems to embody the best thoughts the nation ever has about itself. However, responses to the Vietnam War ended ready acceptance of how military narratives are to be related. Attempts to design a memorial for the fifty-eight thousand who died in Vietnam could not expect consensual respect for the merits of its art. Upon the dedication in 1983 of Maya Ying Lin’s black panels inscribed with the names of the dead, reactions were swift and often violent.234 The initial outcry against what was seen by many as the desecration of the cause for which all too many died has been largely set aside, but at the time the black granite wall, bare of heroic bronze statues, marbleized allegories, and the identification of which war was being memorialized, struck the grieving as an insult. The symbolic representation of a war that had roused clashing public passions, this stark black slate seemed to imply the tragic defeat of duped victims, with no attempt to offer elevating sentiments about why they died. When questioned about the political views expressed by an abstraction seemingly drained of readable significance, Maya Ying Lin, the twenty-year-old Yale student whose design won out over 1, 420 other competitors, stated, “I just ignore the world.” Accused of hating what the war had entailed, the black wall earned the name “Tribute to Jane Fonda,” while some excused Lin for being too young and unknowing about what war “means” to those left behind. The New Republic concluded, “There is no mention of Vietnam, duty, country, sacrifice, courage, or even tragedy. The memorial says one thing: only the dead, nothing besides, remain.”235 Two years later, the addition of Frederick Hart’s realistic bronze statues nearby appear to balance the tilt toward “nothingness.” Pilgrims to the site now have a choice of ways to extract history from the void of “printless pavements.” The abstract form of Lin’s memorial does not “aestheticize” the horrors of war, in the sense that it leaves no prints of the moments to which it alludes. Rather, the very fact that it “ignores” the official world of politics assures that its granite surface becomes the pavement upon which that history is indelibly engraved. The profoundly moving list of names is untouched by official dictates as to whether the Vietnam engagement was a “just” war. The multifold responses of its viewers create their own emotional “entangled bank.” The memorial functions in ways quite unlike the more recent World War II Memorial, whose ersatz grandeur tries to pull its viewers in a predetermined direction and strives to im-

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pose a specific reading of history. Lin’s black walls do no more, and no less, than offer two rare qualities: the “republican simplicity” of freedom to think one’s own thoughts and the justice done to names that speak in silence, “These are the men who died.” In May 2004 the National World War II Memorial was inaugurated on the Mall with a series of highly controlled official ceremonies, attended by great pomp and ceremony. Located at the end of the vista that separates the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, its design has become a center of controversy between those who abhor it and those who abhor its detractors. In the words of Christopher Knight, one of its harshest critics, “One tragedy of the WW II Memorial, for example, is that it colors the adjacent monuments to Washington and Lincoln. They’re changed into memorials to the Revolutionary and Civil wars, which they were never meant to be, conforming to our more militaristic times.”236 Critics have made much of the thematics of a memorial that deconstructs the space of the Mall, which once stretched unbroken by intervening structures. Honor due to “great citizens” (for the acts of living that monuments are expected to reflect) is replaced by the sentiments embossed at the base of the central flagstaff of the World War II Memorial: the U.S. military comes “to liberate, not to conquer . . . to restore freedom and to end tyranny.” The true role of a war memorial is to remember the cost of acts of dying. The World War II Memorial essentially sidesteps this duty. It may seem as though “this triumphal act of hubris in stone and bronze” is dedicated to Bill Malden’s grunts, “Willie and Joe,” but although they “deserved much better this is what they got.”237 Carved into one of the stone walls are the words of General Marshall: “our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other” (emphasis added). In 1804 the new republic wished to believe it sustained, “on the one hand,” the moral power cited above. Still raw, it was not yet able to cultivate world-sweeping power. In 1904, however, with the wars in Cuba and the Philippines going apace, the nation was reaching ripeness; it had begun to march toward its goal of attaining, “on the other [hand],” full global superiority. By 1944 the time had come for “the great crusade” (the vow of General Eisenhower, carved into yet another wall of the World War II Memorial). By 2004 the national mood was primed to erect a complacent testament in stone that confirmed that the one hand of “virtue” (goodness) now clasped the other hand of “virtu” (military might). In advancing post−cold war themes, grounded in policies engaged in “the rise of the American imperium,” the nature of the aesthetics involved cannot be overlooked. The long-held desire for an official art expressive of republi-



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can simplicity is, in Knight’s view, stridently replaced by “Imperial kitsch.” The “bombastic” style of the memorial fails to reflect on the cautionary tale of Rome’s descent into vainglory. “Arbitrariness and crude generality defeat the acute specificity that great art demands.”238 If these are political critiques of the politics that underlie the memorial, what of the aesthetics that lend to its failure? It is unnecessary to rely on contemporary critics in order to place the World War II Memorial within the scope of aesthetic concerns central to Washington, D.C. One hundred and fifty years ago, Horatio Greenough’s essay “Aesthetics in Washington” measured out the faults that would flaw the attempt in 2004 to grace the nation’s capital. With characteristic candor, Greenough sized up his generation’s awkward efforts to instill workable design principles. Encumbered with “monuments of chaotic disorder in all that relates to aesthetics,” Americans have yet to “rise to zero.”239 Greenough lays down with clarity the elements that keep official art off balance—hurtful elements all too evident in the minds of many who believe “zero” is the point to which we have regressed. The items on Greenough’s checklist include the fact of “so much outlay” that produces “so unsatisfactory a result” (17); the presence of “heterogeneous and chaotic characters” that “arises from an ill-judged interference and arrangements on the part of the men in authority” (18); an eccentric “amalgamation” of disparate parts that ends in the “corrupting and destroying” of elements jammed into unreceptive spaces (23); the belief “that many little things united form one great one; which in art is not true” (27). Greenough’s wise observation, “I contend for Greek principles, not Greek things” (22), causes current appraisers of the World War II Memorial to ask whether the layout’s “chaotic disorder” is the result of the presence of fiftysix grave markers draped with 112 cast-bronze funeral wreaths derived from the Greek stele. Greenough considered that “[t]o be impressive,” such designs “must contain thought and feeling” (28), raising doubts whether “thought” as well as “feeling” ever entered into a memorial’s design. While he noted the consequences of “the transition of rhetoric into stone—a feat [that is] often fatal to the rhetoric, always fatal to the stone” (19), our own attention is placed on the excess of “homilies” and “platitudes” (Knight’s words) carved into the walls around the World War II Memorial. Greenough sounded the note heard throughout the earlier decades of the capital: America’s finest contributions must derive from the “aesthetic” quality of its leaders’ personal character and public deeds. “Monuments to really great men [and events] are opportunities on which to hang the proofs of the development of art. The great need them not. We need them” (29).

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For every Greenough with crisp convictions on how to attain an aesthetics that might keep Washington, D.C. true to its ideals while facing up to its political realities, there is the poignant need expressed by Barrett Wendell. As Wendell drew back from the sordid facts of everyday life splattered across the last decade of the nineteenth century, he turned toward the thrilling traditions that had nurtured him. Their “ethereal purity” let him look past elements of the democratic process that in his mind (like that of Brooks Adams) assured the degradation of “excellence.” Although Wendell knew what the polemicists had to say was not true, he chose to live by “those high sounding commonplaces of triumphant democracy.”240 That he tore the world into distinct pieces in order to love the lovely and reject the dross is an example of what leads to a flawed society and bad aesthetics. Others of Wendell’s generation did what they could to keep things together. In 1875 Henry James praised the artistry he found in Balzac’s anatomy of La comédie humaine. Balzac’s realm of art was literature, not the construction of monuments or memorials, but James approached the Frenchman’s success as an author in the same manner Greenough took toward the form and function of material design. Notwithstanding the broad sweep of Balzac’s social scene, his novels were “all of a piece and he hangs perfectly together.”241 In 1884 James spoke again about the aesthetic that stays true to the imperfections of social existence. As though he were speaking to Barrett Wendell over his shoulder, James repudiated “the aberration of a shallow optimism” that strews the ground with “brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must come to conclusions, let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember your duty is to be as complete as possible”—complete both in what you have to say and in the manner by which you express it, even in the face of life’s fragmented nature.242 The Mall’s memorial to the heroics of World War II testifies to the effectiveness of accomplished political maneuvering and commercial enterprise.243 The various bureaucracies involved included the American Battle Monuments Commission (which tapped into the popularity of Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan), the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the General Services Administration, with additional monies collected at Wal-Mart stores. Yet these collaborative efforts have not brought about a genial national consensus. Instead, the push continues to place highly personalized, often narcissistic, memories in public concrete. The Commemorative Works Act of 1986, urged by the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, was intended to halt the proliferation of monuments. Now named the “National Mall: Third Century Initiative,” the group has revealed its true purpose. Rather than restricting the placement of things within the Mall, it wishes to locate fifty-



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one memorial projects and four major museums out there. Whatever drives the emotions behind such proliferations—defined, if one chooses, as versions of “balkanization,” “identity politics,” or “special interest entitlements”—it alters the character of the original quest for “one true theory” that, however diverse, is capable of pleasing most of the people most of the time. Under such pressures, it is unlikely that “everybody” can be part of the “everything” Emerson and others once had in mind. The old focus, which backed either a national art or a nationalistic art, is replaced by the desire for an aesthetics of “us versus them.”244 Inevitably, memorials for the wars in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq lie ahead, plus whatever other preemptive strikes take place in the future. How they will be handled politically (rather than aesthetically) should be of great interest. But for now, the material presence of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the World War II Memorial opens up important issues, whereby Art Thoughts, densely tangled with crucial ideological emotions, prompt members of the public (individually and collectively) to react to occasions of suffering and loss.245 To honor its dead in the name of their sacrifice to save the nation, for whatever reasons a war is waged, America is reluctant to call upon the wrenching pictorialization of physical agony accessible to Italian Catholicism. Bare white grave markers in the form of a cross or inscribed by the Jewish star do not allude to the crosses that bear the burden of the twisted body of Christ. Crosses in military cemeteries remain an abstract allusion to that wooden thing upon which Christ sacrificed his life to save the world from death. Nor do American cemeteries include images of American Gold Star mothers. Aside from the soldier lying across a nurse’s lap at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, there is no place for the tradition of poignant Italian pietàs, whereby the grieving Mary holds her dead son upon her lap. Even when the Common Soldier (he who fought at the battle of Lexington or Shiloh and stands atop pedestals in town squares across the land) began to replace Great Generals on horseback, his figure displays the clean-cut features and stalwart body demanded of the iconic American male, free of gross evidence of physical pain or bodily mutilation. The names inscribed on Maya Lin’s black granite panels reject officially sanctioned emotional responses. Even the “eyes” by which Frederick Hart’s bronze fighting men express what they “saw” do minimal work. In material terms, each memorial accommodates the range of reactions felt by those who stand in its presence. They escape the exclusions that tend to compromise the capital’s attempt to merge the grandeur of “the great” with the simplicity of “the noble.”246 On the quest to find a theory that honors the Emersonian rejection of exclusivity in the name of “everything,” we return to the vital questions of perception

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over which William Stillman worried throughout his lifetime. Perception comes to the fore as the means by which we ask what a nationalistic aesthetic allows in the special case of official memorials for those sent to die for the nation’s ideals. Stillman was caught up in his century’s debate over how one sees. He kept hoping that intuitive devotion to God, Nature, and the Ideal might be reconciled to processes that legitimize scientific inquiry through direct observation. Like Ruskin before him, Stillman rejected what he viewed as an unbalanced interest in optics and artistic techniques based on the geometries of perspective. (These methods were centuries old, but either they were new news to American artists still in training or painfully associated with the arrogant artifice paraded in Old World art.) Questions of perception most forcefully intruded upon the art lovers’ role when it came to asking whether that art attracts passive spectators or active participants. Alastair Fowler and Edward S. Casey offer principles (sometimes in conflict) that theorize the ways by which pictorial narratives require acts of interpretation on the part of their viewers. As noted in Part One, Fowler’s study of the shifts over time from an art that prompts direct audience participation to an art that favors spectatorship rested in part on modes of perception that replaced the polyscenic with the post-Cartesian monoscenic. As announced by the title of his book, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art, the periods upon which Fowler focuses inch away from the arts memorativa of the Middle Ages. Whereas memory-prompting emblems and allegories once fostered associative sprawl, the urgency to retain older forms that incite intimate involvement fell prey to laws of mimetic realism that privilege disengagement. According to Fowler’s eloquent arguments, narratives of empathy that burrow deeply inside both the viewer and the viewed were overthrown as the result of altered notions of how persons see the world in general, as well as how they respond to a particular picture. Fowler refuses to conclude his subtle study with easy answers, but he is willing to make the following assertion: “These new conventions, arising from unified perspective methods and from reintegration of the narratorial viewpoint, amount to a changed conceptualization both of story and of history. Since the Renaissance, stories have been conceived as events observed or reported, not experienced by participating viewers or listeners.”247 Do Fowler’s comments (tied to the particulars of medieval and early modern “narrative” aesthetics) find verification in the responses (however varied) prompted by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Frederick Hart’s add-on of the 1980s and by the World War II Memorial of 2004—objects that, whatever their aesthetic types or merits, belong to the post-Cartesian era? Perhaps yes; probably not, according to Edward S. Casey.248 Casey works through



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modes of philosophy and psychology as he tests notions of “commemoration” that have little to do with the period particulars that key Fowler’s approach to heavily loaded emotional events embedded in past narratives. The general fact of “the monument” captures Casey’s attention. It is what happens as people gather around the site that interests him, such as the fingers that trace, as if reading Braille, the names of the dead etched into Lin’s granite panels. No matter the specific time frame, Casey believes that what counts is “the presence of others, with whom we commemorate together in a public ceremony.” The monument is a usable object, one that visitors “remember through.” Everything that happens at this place depends on group response; it “thrives on indirection; it lives from unresolved, unimagined remainders.”249 Casey’s arguments seem to unsettle Fowler’s attempt to separate past viewers who participated (whether as a community gazing at the stigmata-pierced body on the Crucifix or as individuals who meditated in private over the significance of Christ’s suffering) from those who only looked on. Casey’s views tend to upset the hope held by officials that public responses to sanctioned memorials can be controlled in advance. Fowler and Casey turn us toward questions of the roles we play in reaction to the arts of the abstract, the allegorical, the realistic, and the fantastic scattered at random throughout the aesthetic history of the nation’s capital and Capitol. There is yet another question that may have been shunted aside until now—one that forces a head-on clash between the Way of the Fact, as followed by the applied sciences, and the Way of the Symbolic, the path taken by those for whom the imagination supplies its own proofs. The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. is draped with emblems, allegories, and rhetorical homilies, but its pat literalism threatens to overpower its capacity to satisfy at the deepest imaginative level. The soothing naturalism of Hart’s Three Fightingmen tries to negotiate a middle path between the mimetic and the metaphoric. The blunt black panels of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would seem to be the most abstract and the least factual of the three, yet this is the artwork that provides a complete and literal record of the dead—names etched without embellishment: simply there for the seeing.250 Which memorial most nearly meets the conventional requirements of truth telling? Throughout this book, it has been necessary to ask, which Science are we thinking of, and which Art? Thus let us pause to ask which Truth—the one served by literal adherence to Fact or by belief in the power of Symbol? Once this is asked, there still remains the pressure of the demand to know which kind of Fact is involved, and which Symbol is at work? Early in 2006 an article titled “Discord over 9/11 Memorial’s Symbolism” announced that thousands of unidentified victims of the World Trade Center dis-

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aster are not to be entombed in the monolith to be placed at the bedrock level of the North Tower as part of the “footprints” of the proposed WTC memorial.251 Two years earlier the word had come down from Vartian Gregorian that “loved ones will be able to mourn privately” in a chamber centered by a large stone vessel thirty feet square and nine feet high that contained the remains, but the latest decision is to keep the body fragments in a climate-controlled room away from the symbolic vessel. This would allow them to be removed for further DNA analysis without preventing mourners from looking into that room. The problem? It comes from the statement that the stone vessel is intended to be symbolic in nature. Diane Horning, the president of the WTC Families for Proper Burial, objected. “Our loved ones aren’t symbolically dead. But everything that’s been given to us is symbolic.”252 Efforts have been made to explain the value of placing such a vessel within the monolith at the base of the void. Michael Arad, one of the designers of the memorial, suggested that “[i]t provides a touchstone, a center, something that people can gather around. I can imagine people leaving flowers or candles at the base of this. People may tape pictures to it.” He admits, “We don’t know how they will interact.” This poignant debate, yet to be resolved, speaks to the pain and anger that occur when acts of symbolism (that darling of the aesthetic temperament) offend the sense of “the real” (those hard facts esteemed by the persons Veblen collected under the term “the common man”). One cannot leave the issue without pursuing further the clash between what can be seen as “facts” and what are to be viewed as “symbols”—clashes that lead to acrimonious arguments over what is true and what is not. For example, when a devout Roman Catholic takes communion, through the act of transubstantiation he or she partakes of the real body and blood of the crucified Christ. The Protestant taking communion participates in a symbolic act that commemorates the Last Supper as the gathering on the night of the Passover prior to Christ’s death. Vicious wars have been fought over such doctrinal distinctions regarding which is the “true” form for remembrance. Current conflicts, both legal and cultural, are being fought between creationists and evolutionists over which are the facts concerning the origins of life on earth and what are made-up narratives. Fundamentalist Christians read the Bible literally, responding to each sentence as the Truth handed down by God. Christians of the nonfundamentalist persuasion respond to the Scriptures as sublime metaphors that lead them toward the basic but nonliteral truths of their faith. Fundamentalist literalism rejects evolutionary data projected by years of scientific study, dismissing it as “mere theory” caught in the snares of delusion and untruth. The consequences of such unresolved conflicts to the practice of



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religion and science cut deep. They may not seem as central to discussions of aesthetics, but they are. It should be understood, however, that there does not need to be a sharp choice between the one (Facts) and the other (Symbols). There are those in the service of the responsible arts who realize the value of having it both ways. Henry James wanted facts as much as does the scientist when conducting a rigorous clinical experiment. That James as “the restless analyst” refused to limit his inquiries to laboratory data made him no less ardent in calling up the historical actualities that lay around him wherever he looked.253 He had many faults to find with the wayward handling of American history in the nation’s capital and Capitol Building. As mentioned earlier, he also leveled sarcasm at the famed Saint-Gaudens statue poised at the edge of New York’s Central Park. General William Tecumseh Sherman, seated astride his horse, finely represents military glory down to the last realistic detail. But what is Peace, that splendidly allegorical figure, doing in leading Sherman forward to symbolic victory for the Union forces? Yes, Sherman’s March to the Sea helped bring the Civil War to its close, but the long swath Sherman’s troops cut through Georgia left many a bloody footprint in its wake—marks that cannot remain “printless” in the memories of either the victors or the defeated. James was not arguing against an aesthetic union of symbolism and realism. What he stingingly objected to was the alignment of Saint-Gaudens’s symbol in the form of a lovely American Girl bearing wreaths of Peace with the factual projection of the grim American General intent on furthering the destructiveness of War. There are few with the will to make such distinctions. It is easier to prefer clear-cut choices of the fact over the fiction, without taking into consideration how closely the two may be interwoven. Early proposals submitted for various memorials to be located in the void left by the toppling of the twin towers of the World Trade Center included the literalism of an apple (symbol for New York City) and the symbolism of two airplanes (a literal depiction of the death machines). Which of these age-old aesthetic conventions will solace those who mourn? Casey’s notion of collectively ritualistic responses surfaces in other attempts to deal with the unbearable: teddy bears placed where children were gunned down in Scotland; flowers placed where adolescents were slaughtered in Colorado; church congregations going en masse to see The Passion of the Christ in order to comprehend what it was necessary for Jesus to do to atone for their sins. This is not the place to wince over pathetically inadequate stabs at rituals of commemoration. Nor is it the place to mock those whose desire for beauty puts trust in the aesthetics of plastic flamingos or whitewashed tires to brighten up shabby front yards. The task remains to scrutinize the various artistic means

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by which official Washington, D.C. has aestheticized its ideological intentions while allowing the “printless pavements of history” to disappear into the void. First to glance back at the blinding whiteness of the national city that has the capacity to erase the people and the principles it is meant to serve. Washington by Moonlight

Upon his arrival in the capital soon after Lincoln’s assassination, S. D. Wyeth, author of the guidebook The Federal City, sits down by the Capitol topped by Crawford’s Freedom. He sinks into a deep sleep during which he has a dream vision of a giant Eagle, which slays a giant Snake. A few pages further on, intruding upon the guidebook’s pedestrian notations on the Capitol, Wyeth pauses at the sight of the dome: “It hangs there, up in the clouds, a real something of what haunted me, a dreaming schoolboy, as I sat gazing at the pictures of the world’s cathedrals.” Later, while strolling within the building, he is “lost in reverie” as he envisions “the great departed,” such as Webster and John Quincy Adams, so unlike the lesser men now in the Senate. The guidebook concludes with Wyeth’s return to a note of fantasy. Viewing a Senate debate, he feels as though he were at a theater: “It is all like looking on at, and hearing a marvelous play. The actors, men who have toiled the best part of their lives to gain this arena wherein to play their parts.”254 Wyeth’s dream notations come in different forms. The first markedly allegorical vision (Eagle and Snake) is not prophetic; it confirms what has already happened (the Union’s victory and the president’s death). The second reaches into the past to recapture a child’s ecstasy when contemplating pictures of Europe’s great cathedrals before the United States had a dome to compete with those of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Genevieve. The third reverie swings Wyeth between the past (Webster and Adams) and the present (congressional nonentities). The fourth places him solidly within the histrionics of the present moment. Wyeth’s dreamscapes are tailored for the guidebook mode—a commercial venture that itemizes factual information. Yet in a city that has always raised questions about what is real and what is not, such dreams are useful in testing the accuracy of one’s perception of either “hard” or “soft” facts. From the start, the “dreamlike quality” of the capital struck its earliest visitors as timeless, wondrously unreal.255 The actual Washington, D.C. was treated as a moonlit spectacle. It bred doubts over discrepancies between image and reality, yet fed hopes that one might wake from the beauty-induced dream to find it true. “On a clear moonlight night there is nothing more beautiful than this



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immense edifice of pure marble, glistening with the moonbeams, and almost speaking to the beholder of the vastness of his country’s power and the worth of its Union.”256 The new Patent Office prompted this particular vision, but once work on the Capitol was completed, further adoring swoons were incited by “the white dome rising grand and noble above [the capital] in the morning mist.”257 Midst moonlight reveries, hard questions still intruded. Did the dome represent the extent to which “grand and noble” laws were enacted within the Capitol’s chambers? Did Brumidi’s Apotheosis of George Washington under the dome advance the work of the “real” city by its elevation of Washingtonian virtue? Henry James thought not. The Capitol, and the grounds surrounding it, emptied of its politicians during the summer months, was to the fanciful mind “the real Washington, a place of enchantment,” white and chaste, stripped bare of the “hard facts” of the nation’s business. But James went further. As the selfproclaimed “restless analyst” in pursuit of the “modern” realism introduced by the spectator type of whom Alastair Fowler has much to say, James turns inward to assess what is real and what unreal. James clearly delights in the “great soft facts”—“as opposed to the little hard ones” he finds across the Potomac at Mount Vernon. But “soft facts” are Nature’s gifts. They are made possible by “the beauty of the site”—that “great white decent page” where the spirit of George Washington rests. Back at the capital, the “alien” (which James believes himself to be) is caught between “hard” and “soft,” “real” and “unreal.” Caught up in “seeing, judging, building, fearing, reporting with the alien sense,” he experiences a good deal of speculative tension; so that one’s case is refreshing in presence of the clear candour of such a proposition as that the national capital is charming in proportion as you don’t see it. For that is what it came to, in the bowery condition; the as yet unsurmounted bourgeois character of the whole was screened and disguised; the dressing-up, in other words, was complete, and the great park-aspect gained, and became nobly artificial, by the very complexity of the plan of the place—the perpetual perspectives, the converging, radiating avenues, the frequent circles and crossways, where all that was wanted for full illusion was that the bronze generals and admirals, on their named pedestals, should have been great garden gods, mossy mythological marble. . . . The power of the scene to evoke such visions sufficiently shows, I think, what had become, under the mercy of nature, of the hard facts, as one must call them; and yet though I could, diplomatically, particularly pretend, at the right moment, that such a Washington was the real one, my assent had all the while a still finer meaning for myself.258

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James likes Nature and its “soft facts” but as a realist, the “still finer meaning” of “the hard facts” had to come from History. For him, History happens where people come together in social converse. (W. E. B. DuBois concurred when he located “social conversation” at that “other ball,” the alternative inaugural festivity in The Quest of the Silver Fleece.) Hidden away in this City of Politics, James uncovered the City of Conversation, inhabited by men and women who talk of art, ideas, and culture—all that the other City (supposedly dedicated to making History) does not. But since the rules of the game played by members of the City of Conversation are “charming in proportion as you don’t see it,” their city is rendered unreal (just as is DuBois’s city) by the unrealities of the city you see. James noticed a great deal during his stay in Washington, D.C.—its hard facts and its soft enchantments—but he did not see the scene described by DuBois. This is a pity since it invokes the disturbing prints on the pavement of history James sought, which countered the “unreal” vision of blinding “whiteness” that is the ultimate deception. Nor did James experience those moments when the “actual city” is bathed in moonlight, but George C. Hazelton did. Although not the sharpest of intellects, Hazelton provides readers of his 1897 compendium, The National Capitol: Its Architecture, Art, and History, this vignette of moonlit moments passed on the marble esplanade that stretches across the front of the Capitol. On summer evenings, when the heat drives the townsfolk from their homes, there is no more popular resort than the terrace-promenade. The gay summer dresses, and the chatter of the voices of the merry throng upon the steps and along the balustrade, counting the stars or gazing languidly down the long line of lights that mark the avenues and streets of the heated city, form quite an Italian picture. In hushed moments, the idler’s ear catches rippling laughter from the shadow of some column, bespeaking the embrace stolen while a friendly cloud masks the moon. . . . for there the Roman poet in imagination invokes the pleasures of Youth. . . . the enticing laughter of the maid coyly crouching in a corner or angle of the streets or near houses of an evening in Rome, some two thousand years ago!259

Hazelton’s fancy envisions the “real” Washington in terms of ancient Rome, but he presses the idea that the Capitol becomes “the peoples’ shrine” on “nights when the moon is full and the great dome and columns are silvered by its rays.”260 This is hardly James’s notion of how to make Washington real. His people are elegantly gathered within their homes near Lafayette Square. His young women do not endanger themselves, as did Daisy Miller, by having romantic trysts in the Roman moonlight.



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James recognized the principles of narrative realism propounded by JulesAntoine Castagnary in 1867, which contain both “Nature and man, the countryside and the city.” Of particular importance to Castagnary was the inclusion of the “diversity of social spectacle freely displayed under the sun in the public square or discreetly encompassed within the confines of the house, all the recurring surprises of individual or collective life in the stark light of passion and morals.”261 James’s class predilections did not carry him out into Washington’s humid summer nights where young lovers snatched embraces in the moonlight. That would follow the love-on-the-fire-escape aesthetics currently advanced by New York’s Ash Can School. James should, however, have given second thoughts to what Nathaniel Hawthorne had to say about the aesthetic relations between moonlight’s fantasy and daylight’s reality, and how they bear upon narratives of political ideologies. With the election of James K. Polk in 1845 the Democrats were in power. One of the consequences, minor as it might have seemed, was that Nathaniel Hawthorne, as a nominal member of the ruling party, was appointed surveyor of the revenue in the Custom-House of Salem, Massachusetts. Between 1846 and 1849, Hawthorne dutifully came and went to the Custom-House, but the oncethriving seaport was in decline, so there was little to do. The decaying premises were treated like a club by the ancient Whigs left over from previous administrations, and Hawthorne felt the penalty of his idleness. When a man “leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support.”262 Under the sway of “the enervating magic,” Hawthorne asks, “Why should he toil and moil . . . when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him?” For “Uncle Sam’s gold” possesses “a quality of enchantment like that of the Devil’s wages” (38). Hawthorne liked to think he was saved by two circumstances over which he had no control: the Democrats lost the next election to General Zachary Taylor of the Whig faction, which ended his own term of service at the Custom-House, and he discovered (or said he did) an ancient set of documents, a faded cloth “A,” and an account of one Mistress Hester Prynne. “So little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-House to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ would ever have been brought before the public eye” (34). Historical accidents do not guarantee artistic success. It took more than being thrust out of political favor, more even than the chance finding of remnants of a long-ago event. As we have seen, Congress set many an artist, architect, and sculptor to work to create lasting images of America’s greatness. For Hawthorne,

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seated in the evening in his “deserted parlor,” the catalyst for artistic inventions was the merger of “the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes” to “flow out on the brightening page in many-hued description” (35). At this point in the famous introduction to his literary masterpiece, Hawthorne expounds on the aesthetics of moonlight, which makes what one sees “spiritualized by the unusual light” so “that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect.”263 Once it undergoes this transmutation, the familiar becomes “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (35). The glow of the coal fire also has “an essential influence. . . . This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up.” Introduce a looking-glass, and all is ready for the creative act: “the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative” (36). Hawthorne admits that he might have taken yet another route. Rather than offset “the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me” by “flinging myself back into another age,” the “wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day.” He might have written about contemporary Salem, seeking out “the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import” (37).264 And so he writes a tale of colonial Salem under the rule of a powerful theocracy, in which a woman becomes “an entangled bank” of uncontrollable images—Adulteress, Angel of the Revolution, Allegory—foretelling times to come in America that in the Hawthornian aesthetic gain reality through their unearthly mix of “materiality” and “spirituality.” On the other side of the Civil War (the conflict Hawthorne was unable to survive in body, spirit, or imagination), Henry James wrote a slight but telling biography of his New England predecessor. As one expects of James, his response to Hawthorne’s life and writings is complex, but two points are clear. First, as an author and critic making his way into the final decades of the nineteenth century, James does not care for the didactic “symbols and correspondences” that define traditional allegory, “that lighter exercise of the imagination.” In James’s view



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literary allegory is too mechanical, too provincial, too moralistic, too everything that (as we have seen) generally wound up adorning the walls and pediments of the U.S. Capitol.265 The second distinction James drew from the example of Hawthorne was the damage the war did to those unable to do more than “hang their heads and close their eyes” to the hard facts of “the best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage.” Indeed, “the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind.” James associates his own generation with those who understand “the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult.” As a consequence, “the good American, in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer.” In any effort to form either a national or nationalistic aesthetics, the man of imagination must come to terms with moonlight, as long as he does not submit to the peculiar power of moonlit illusions (flavored by the sweet odor of magnolias) long associated with “the southern factor”—elements powerfully written into antebellum life and carried on into the post-Reconstruction era, with consequences both aesthetic and political. Paraphrases of the Ideal/Allegories of the Real

Guided by the conditions by which Italian civic art functioned under the aegis of church and state between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was much its artists could do that the artists authorized by the American Congress could not. The Italians could get away with showing pride (often excessive), lack of literalism (since who minded?), grand gestures and bits of whimsy, vibrant swatches of vermillion splashed across scenes of jubilation over violent victories, the terribilità of Michelangelo’s heroic figures that rejects emotional reticence and crosses acceptable sexual boundaries. They could offer scenes with saints sedately seated at dinner attended by angels (Sogliani), saints accompanied by fluffy white dogs and acquiescent lions (Carpaccio), the blessed who leap with joy from their tombs while the damned writhe gently in flames (Fra Angelico), or voluptuous female bodies that couple earthly and divine love through the mutual adoration by which they were held by the Most Serene Republic (Tintoretto). To refer to that crucial attribute by which James defined success, Renaissance artists “believed in themselves.” By them doing so, their artwork became believable, even when it adorned public buildings with a welter of layered signs that were sometimes illogical, sometimes touching on the ludicrous.

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Throughout the nineteenth century William Stillman had done all he could to define the general terms of the aesthetic principles for an antebellum American (not an Italian) culture that honored both Nature and God. He struggled mightily to beat back the encroachment of the distorting sciences of objective materialism and to advance the truth-saying sciences of the subjective ideal. The Crayon was his pulpit in the 1850s. The Century was his lecture platform in the 1880s. In his introduction to the engravings by Timothy Cole in November 1888 for Century’s Old Masters Series, he seems to calm down when remarking on the postbellum impact of technology on the public’s perception of an art that was good for it. However, Stillman’s rage was still apparent in “The Decay of Art” of 1886 and the preface he wrote in Rome in 1892 for Century’s book version of Cole’s Old Italian Masters. In his view, naturalism had been the enemy since the days of the Italian Renaissance, and the Ideal was its victim. Stillman had placed his faith in Ruskin’s critique of the Pride of Science and in the meticulous rendering of natural objects by the Pre-Raphaelites that underscored the spiritual truths of God’s world. In “The Decay of Art,” Stillman acknowledged that Ruskin’s authority and the Pre-Raphaelite cause had been dashed by “the naturalistic spirit”—that which abides by “facts and physics, of the anatomist, the geologist, the botanist, and the portraitist.” The Image (reflection of God’s Idea) was replaced by the Object (the “just paint” of the secular Real), whereas the position Stillman once held in the 1850s spoke to the truth favored by those of “dull comprehension”—whether or not they practiced politics in and commissioned art for the nation’s Capitol.266 By the 1880s “the decline in art in modern times [taking] place at a time when scientific investigation ranges over every branch of human cognitions, is only to be explained by the conviction held even in highly organized political communities, that art in general has no especial function in a national life, and may be left out of the curriculum of the citizen of the world and he be none the worse citizen for it.”267 However distraught, Stillman reiterates his belief that “modern scientific synthesis” did have the capacity to address religion and art as well as science. He acknowledges the dangers in a relationship that runs on a dual track, based on the need to cling to post-Darwinian notions of Actual Nature in contention with pre-Darwinian visions of Ideal Nature. Whereas the artist synthesizes, the scientist analyzes. Stillman’s scrap of hope is “that we shall find even in the Actual the proof that the Ideal is something better and nobler than her accidental results, and that Art is no more bound to follow Nature than religion to serve Science.”268 The search continues. Contemporary physics still craves to find “the theory



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of everything.” Replacing Einstein’s dream of a unified field theory unable to include quantum mechanics is the current interest taken in string theories, which promises to blend the two recalcitrant theories. But in Stillman’s century his dreams confronted too many obstacles. He recognized the contributions of Alexander Baumgarten, eighteenth-century German professor of philosophy who introduced the field of aesthetics and provided it with a name. Baumgarten had also faced the oxymoronic nature of the aesthetic when he called it “the science” (objectivity) “of the beautiful” (subjectivity). Alas, his could not be the one true theory sought by Emerson and by Stillman. Baumgarten, like Emerson and Stillman, was caught in transition between conflicting sets of language. Scientists search for the simple mathematical formula that will provide the “language” of the one theory to explain the universe. So did theorists of the science of beauty. Stillman gloomily concluded that the “nomenclature of art was, as it still is, in no state to supply the terms of the logical discussion. There was no definition of an art which constituted a definite distinction from a science. What was an art at one time became a science later.”269 Stillman lived too long and died too soon; he was not able to enjoy what was taking place as the hard sciences of technology became subjects for the new art. The telegraph, the telephone, and electricity were on view as material objects and celebrated in allegorical art. The Corliss Engine of 1876 at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, the format of the White City of 1893 at Chicago’s Columbia Exhibition, and the Dynamo at the Great Exposition of Paris in 1900 rearranged the working relations between the arts and the sciences.270 For Stillman, science (defined as the technical skill that manifests itself in “realism and nature-reproduction”) had done away with authentic art, replacing it with a pandering art that is “the servant of all fashions and fancies, huckster of stuffs and bric-a-brac, tableaux vivants and still life, archeological restorations and mediaeval poses plastiques.”271 Stillman, aging and morose, was easily ignored by the members of the newly heralded American Renaissance. The Herter brothers, John La Farge, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler, and Louis Tiffany took no shame in the beauty they brought to the decorative arts scorned by Stillman. The new generation of artists (those whom James said had eaten “the apple from the tree of knowledge”) rejected the provincialism they associated with the Hudson River School and the heads bowed in abjection before Rome’s status as the center of true art. Students who now went to Paris or enrolled in the updated art schools of New York or Philadelphia were nonetheless caught, like Stillman, between conflicting impulses that necessitated certain compromises among the rejection of Ruskinian concern with natural fact, the desire to create “not goddesses but women,” and

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the wish to create a “national” art despite the unrestricted flow of models from the European Renaissance. Contra Stillman’s dedication to an avoidance of decadent ripeness, they were pleased when their artworks achieved the “disinterested perfection of design.” Art was about paint, not spirituality; about “give-andtake” style, not unchanging absolutes.272 It welcomed the delights of the poetically decorative rather than the austerity of the didactically moral. Of course, none of this announced the discovery of a one true theory that unlocks the mysteries of all creation. The proudly labeled American Renaissance reconfirmed the origins of that wily term. Being “reborn” in late-nineteenth-century America offered the excitements of breaking free from old constraints, while—for better and for worse—it simply added new links “to the chain of tradition” that took care not “to break the chain.”273 Artists of the American Renaissance confidently modernized their art efforts and their personal lives, but they were, in truth, “progressives”—not “moderns.” The question remained: What did the changes they brought into the look of things for the great homes of America’s wealthy mean to the formation of an American aesthetic appropriate to the nation’s capital and a democratic people? From the arrival in 1800 on the banks of the Potomac (and Tiber Creek) of the members of Congress, the president, and the administrative officers of the new republic, the construction of buildings to house their activities was of first importance. By the 1880s the capital merited good marks overall for the generally solid work done by experienced construction managers and army engineers. Yet it was clearly a time of transition for quasi-professionals lacking in the full command of the nascent architectural sciences. For architecture to become a recognized profession, the practice of an architectural aesthetic had to commit itself to modern scientific methods and an expertise in construction technologies. Americans who followed the beaux arts tradition into the 1900s became leaders in a scientifically mastered art that, in Stanford White’s view, far exceeded the trade skills of either engineers or businessmen. Architecture was “a coherent, rational process” with “elements of order that could be mastered” if students pursued “formal courses in history, construction, descriptive geometry, and physics.” Possessing a language fit for its needs and strengthened by “a recognizable grammar that could be manipulated,” beaux arts architecture was backed by the codified statements of Vitruvius, Alberti, Serlio, Palladio. Fulfilling “formal compositional rules such as proportion, axis, symmetry, the golden section, and mass,” its buildings were “understandable.”274 It had taken time, however, to earn these skills. The American Institute of Architects had been



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established in 1857 and MIT opened its school of architecture in 1866, but only in the last years of the century were architects-as-such recognized as taking a place with others of their generation in the pursuit of the “pride of science.” A new science commanded the exteriors. A new aesthetics embellished the interiors. Under the weight of the sluggish bureaucracy that characterized most congressional sanctions, how did these potentially contending concerns reveal themselves in the new Washington, D.C.? The Library of Congress opened on November 1, 1897, just before the start of the ardent crusade led by Glenn Brown, Charles Moore, and Senator McMillan. As in the imbroglios that had centered around L’Enfant, Bulfinch, Latrobe, Thorton, Hallet, Walter, and Meigs, the design and implementation of the library prompted anger over who was to have the final say. The story of the construction and embellishment of the Library of Congress has everything—controversies, claims, lawsuits, and permanent enmities among members of Congress, architects, engineers, army men, librarians, and designers. In comparison, the midcentury contentions between Walter and Meigs seem like schoolyard tiffs, as do the arguments that lay ahead over the Lincoln Memorial.275 In brief, the cast includes Bernard G. Green (civil engineer, the civilian acting as superintendent of construction), Paul J. Pelz (Green’s replacement, later dismissed as head architect), Brigadier General Thomas Lincoln Casey (the army chief of engineers in charge of the project), and John L. Smithmeyer (architect, replaced when Congress named General Casey as the man in charge). Pelz, an associate in the Smithmeyer firm, later turned against Smithmeyer by insisting that he was the one who designed the library’s exterior and interior. Not to be overlooked is Edward P. Casey (son of General Casey, Pelz’s replacement), who also claimed he was chiefly responsible for the library’s design. In summation, it was Green against Smithmeyer & Pelz; Pelz against Edward Casey, Congress against the American Institute of Architects, the AIA against the firm of Smithmeyer & Pelz, Smithmeyer & Pelz against the librarians, and Pelz against Smithmeyer. The Library of Congress was not the rational result of design by committee. It was success by default through the waging of its own wars. When major civic buildings, paid for by government funds, stumble toward completion, the artwork within their interiors is usually judged in terms of its ideological worth.276 Despite the turmoil attending the construction of this “Monument to Civilization” (the construction of which did little to advance civilized behavior), the art lavished upon the Library of Congress announced the arrival of the mural as the preeminent mode for an official modern aesthetics.277 With their matte surfaces, linearity, and unified lighting, the murals in the Library of Congress are calm, legible, and culturally safe. That their vague sense

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of spirituality says nothing that either advances or contests the American Ideal was in keeping with an aesthetic devoted to the placid pleasures of “just paint.” Add murals with figures randomly pulled from the allegorical repertoire, and you have the Congressional Library in 1897, rising from the base of its stunning staircase to the Main Reading Room.278 As leading art critic, William Coffin was no fool, too shrewd to be overwhelmed by lavish settings that proclaimed the national bliss over recent achievements meant to signify a mighty economic and political force. He generally liked what he saw, yet was careful to point out the problems that beset the decoration of large official spaces meant to be both “beautiful and convenient.” He recognized the limitations that confront artists forced to work within specific architectural spaces, noticed the tedium that attends the repetition of achingly familiar themes, and suggested that “abstract subjects” work better when alternated with “such historical ones as Columbus, Shakespeare, and Fulton.”279 The library’s fulsome use of mythology, Roman references, and Venetian styles did not inflict Coffin with the embarrassment that had plagued members of Congress earlier in the century. He singled out the typology of government pictorialized by Elihu Vedder on five tympana in the vestibule at the entrance of the grand rotunda: Good Administration, Peace, and Prosperity facing off against Corrupt Legislation and Anarchy. These referents were quietly echoed elsewhere by the figures of Concordia and Justice in George Maynard’s panels around the staircase, and in the mosaics by Frederick Dielman for the Representatives’ Reading Room that featured Law sternly separating Peace, Truth, and Industry from Fraud, Discord, and Violence. Having praised the Boston Public Library in 1895 as “the first and most splendid achievement of American art working under the conditions of our civic life,” Royal Cortissoz, his generation’s dean of American art critics, was eager to see what the Library of Congress had to offer. In his view, the nation at large had a poor record of architectural accomplishment. Past construction of public buildings had been under the command of “official bunglers” who “disfigured the United States from Maine to Texas with indescribable horrors of buildingstone and brick.” Now might be the time for “the redemption of government buildings from the baleful influences under which they have been erected these many years.” Cortissoz believed “there is being evolved in the city of Washington itself a sufficiently convincing illustration of what should be done by the government when a building of importance (or the contrary) is to be erected.” With the Library of Congress—“the largest on record in the history of the nation”— Washington, D.C. offered something “not merely monumental, but fine” that gave “an impression of stateliness and force.” Where past buildings were known



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“for vulgarity, or, at best, mediocrity,” the decorations in “the luxurious and yet fastidious style of the Italian Renaissance” are “in the best sense architectural.”280 At the time, the collar painted by Edwin Howland Blashfield, one of America’s preeminent muralists, that surrounds the Reading Room’s rotunda (itself likened to Rome’s Pantheon) received the most attention then, and still does.281 Despite Thorstein Veblen’s continued attack upon a rote belief in cultural progress of the kind championed (and cheapened) by social Darwinists, Blashfield’s The Evolution of Civilization is very much a creation of an era of transition between pre- and post-Darwinism. It relates a historical narrative that reaches from Egypt through Judea, Greece, Rome, and Islam to Italy (the fine arts), Germany (printing), Spain (discovery), England (literature), and France (emancipation). America—placed at the pinnacle of human achievement—represents science. Choked with female figures that are blandly virginal and lacking in the magisterial authority of the Virgin claimed by Venice at the height of its domination, Blashfield’s mural points heavenward. Viewers are urged to recall America’s sacred right to command the fortunes of the globe and to dispense eternal justice. But had anything been added to the American public art by this self-congratulating display? In the plastic arts of the last decades of the nineteenth century, advances were evident in deftness of touch, ease with color harmonies, mastery of perspectives that embellish ceilings and curving spaces, soundness of training by accomplished teachers, diminishing pressure to catch up with the perceived eminence of European art centers, and growing recognition given Americans by clients, critics, and the public. The artists’ self-confidence grew in their creation of intricate, if not daring, designs. Belief grew in how well they could execute, but what of belief in what they produced? Was it ever going to be created by the people, for the people, and of the people—including the farmer’s daughter and her city sisters? We are not speaking here of the general art scene, but rather of the artistic embellishments commissioned by agents of civic institutions at both the state and national level. Nor have the careers of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins been addressed, since they stand outside the demands placed upon official art.282 The works of Thomas Dewing and James McNeil Whistler would arrive in Washington, D.C., taking their place along the rim of the Mall, but it was the Freer Collection that housed them, not any of the government buildings. That majestic gallery later labeled as “National,” which houses a diversity of personal responses and art forms—landscapes, portraits, and genre paintings—added no direct resonance to the political scene.

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In and out of Washington, D.C. the art of the mural continued to command official space and attention. It was valued as being new, fresh, and impressive in ways that the old mixtures of pseudo-realism and allegorical types were not. Certain conventions were discarded. Fading into the recesses of the Old Capitol Building were history paintings in the manner of John Trumball, records of military forts on the western frontier, stilted full-length portraits, rigid marble statuary, and the “topographical illustrations” of Thomas Moran. All had fallen short in the task of expressing a confident nationalist aesthetic. The murals covering the vast spaces of the new Library of Congress might still be marked by jejune compilations of literal detail and ideal types, but at least they were not of the Italianate kind that once decorated the Capitol to the distaste of John Quincy Adams in particular and William Stillman in general.283 There was a change in the public’s attitude toward the mural that made it seem different from its outmoded predecessors. End-of-the-century socioeconomic/cultural arguments began to enter into the discussion, variations on themes Stillman alluded to in his Century essay of 1888 “The Popularization of Art.”284 Old Masters brought into the baronial homes of Americans were undemocratic. Easel paintings (Italian or otherwise) were “aristocratic”—intended for “fetish worship” in a “surfeited world.” In contrast, murals were appropriate for a “busy and practical people,” easy to understand and to enjoy. Placed on view in public buildings and commercial establishments, they educated the young and inspired the mature. They were perfect mountings for matters of patriotism, religion, and citizenship, whether featuring local events or “universal” history. They rejected non-American myths and symbols—those touches of “sensuous delight” and “demoralizing aesthetic effect” that had signaled the aftermath of Raphael’s career. Nonetheless, many things stayed the same. Bits and pieces were dropped and other elements revived, resulting in minute shifts in nuance and modulations of tone. Tone was all important. The murals we tend to recall are the brilliantly angry splashes by José Orozco, David Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, which attack the twentieth-century institutions whose walls allow them space. The murals sanctioned for official showing in Washington, D.C., as well as in state capitols and public libraries, preferred complacency. Take Edwin Howland Blashfield again. Westward, the mural Blashfield supplied for the Iowa State Capital in 1905, is a near replica of Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, mounted on the west staircase of the House wing of the Capitol. The theme of a westward-expanding nation is identical in the two men’s work. Marching across their murals is a profusion of frontier types locked into the scenery by naturalistic details. One noticeable difference between Leutze and Blashfield is



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the presence of angels in flowing white drapery who lead Blashfield’s sanctified procession through history. Calm and controlled in its composition, Blashfield’s painting is steadied by multiple representations of his constant muse, “the young goddess of the nation”—“a fair and grave goddess, ineffably young and with a stern innocence of feature.”285 Angels in America were rendered with the same painterly realism as the sturdy American types in their van. Marble Columbias, Victories, and Americas were replaced by images closer in physical type and nervous sensibility to turnof-the-century versions of Botticelli Venuses and Madonnas, but Blashfield was no less an “American” artist of the old school for all this in his celebration of the patriot and the man of the soil. As his appraiser noted, “In general, Mr. Blashfield respects the rather solemn temper of the American public toward art. . . . he meets the moral lessons involved with the seriousness of a dedicated teacher. He argues vigorously in his writings for the importance of significant story telling.” In celebration of “law and order, the making of nations, the heroes of progress and civilization,” his types are of “deeply enlisted men and women intent upon duty.”286 Formalist advances, thematic stasis: this overview of official mural art concludes with new variations on the Progress of Civilization and the Discovery Group, in which the key elements of the nation’s history continue to remain essentially printless.287 In 1856 Henry Kirke Brown sent Captain Montgomery Meigs his proposal for a series of sculpted figures (a marble mural, as it were) to place within a pediment of the House of Representatives. It would honor those who placed their belief in progress, ranging from “the brave and athletic hunter” at one side to “the Indian trapper” at the other. What stands out in Brown’s crisp listing of design elements is a single emotional phrase. “You will see that my country is no myth to my eyes and that I have recourse to no unfamiliar symbols to express my idea of it, but have sought the America of today surrounded with the material interests which stimulate her children to action.”288 From the earliest inception of the “idea” of America—“no myth to my eyes”—a disparate group of Americans attempted to define a workable theory for an American aesthetic. Stillman and his like strove for a “national” theory, while congressmen, engineers, architects, and artists under official patronage debated the nature of a “nationalist” project. When tested against Emerson’s stern agenda, few of the terms dictated by his all-inclusive “one true theory” received even partial attention. In reaching back to the invented nomenclature of Alexander Baumgarten’s “science of the beautiful,” Stillman struggled to find a “language” that could express the scope of his concerns, but he was unable to find a workable grammar at the service of

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the “idea of creation.” By the necessity of the terrain covered by government politics, theories of “races” and of “function” inevitably crept into the making of the U.S. Capitol. Indeed, the rudiments of one area of Emerson’s challenge fell into place in Washington, D.C. whenever “sleep and dreams” touched personal responses to the great white city. But missing still in America’s civic art, in and out of Washington, were matters a nationalistic aesthetic was unlikely to control—the sex and the madness that New England’s Emerson had insisted upon. When Henry Van Brunt gazed upon the murals painted by William Morris Hunt for New York State’s Capitol in 1879, he distinguished between the “different set of critical faculties” that go beyond the consideration of decorative qualities. Hunt’s commission was to image “the revival of letters” in America. The literary “Renaissance” of the 1830s would be grasped by means of the “Renaissance” of the arts in the 1880s. Hunt’s mural relied on vague figures hastened onward by a flying cloud. “The visionary character of the composition is unencumbered by any material appliance; there are no reins, no harness, no chariot, no wheels.” Modern technology, the white hope of America’s progress, the avatar of scientific inquiry, was not needed for this sublime quest. “It is a precipitous movement of vapor poetically set forth with a superb flight of horses, and enough of human interest in the figure to suggest a meaning which each can interpret in his own way. It is a very fine point in the sentiment of the picture that the allegory is not forced upon the spectator by the insistence of vulgar accessories. The horses are drawn with magnificent spirit and with the confidence and élan of a master. The human figures are little more than suggestive; they are fleeting visions,—a part of a cloudy pageant.”289 It cannot be denied that in America’s late-nineteenth-century love affair with the mural, a pact was made with that most suspect of artistic modes, the allegory. We have seen that the allegorical tradition was rarely welcomed by Congress, particularly if it arrived in the United States by way of the Italian Renaissance without being tempered by the finer passions of American romanticism. The merits of the allegory as a paraphrase of the Ideal were acceptable only as long as its symbols could be translated into a visual language readable by the general public. Still, it often degenerated into paraphrases of the original paraphrase. The time had not yet come in American art that made it possible for an aesthetic rendering of an allegorical object to be an is—not merely a like or a likeness of a like-something-else at second remove. Significantly, this is was later accomplished by Jasper Johns’s American Flag of 1954—in contrast to the sacred objects paraphrased past recognition by the nation’s official aesthetics.290 Never an active advocate of the populist position, the Crayon was cautious about granting preferential status to the allegory, whether sullied by vague refer-



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ences to mythical figures from a discarded past or by speaking too directly to the didactic impulse. In its June 1857 issue, J. G. B. Brown’s “The Purity of Imagination” made a clear distinction between allegories that work and those that do not. Gods and goddesses were not fables to the ancients, but to us they are mere fanciful lies. Depicting pretty girls as vacuous sibyls is pretentious, and “Pretension is not Allegory.” Attempts at impersonations of Justice, of Liberty, of Sin are failures, as much as those of Resignation, or Liberty, or Morning, for “you learn nothing of Resignation, or Liberty, or Morning by the study of it.” “Allegory in Art,” an unsigned piece of April 1856, had no good to say about Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life, whose popularity was based on the public’s “half-religious, half-poetical feeling.” Art should stand “sovereign in its own sphere” and resist becoming “the servant either of ethics or theology.” Art has a higher morality since it does not exist “as a teacher in a sphere where words can act far more economically and effectively.” Art’s realm is the visual world in eternal obedience to “the glory of God,” not to dogmas that come and go. For the Crayon, Art serves the Ideal, whereas pleasing fancies and ingratiating lies are all that the tricks of the allegory mode have to offer. In the post−Civil War period, the Apple of Knowledge had already been eaten. The doubts Henry James expressed about the value of the allegory had nothing to do with his desire to defend the Ideal or the Real. But the allegorical impulse could not be stifled in the breasts of would-be realists or closeted romantics, whatever their nationality. Using words, not painted images, they drew upon visible signs of meaning. How could they not, when the characters they portrayed were artists? James’s Roderick Hudson displays Roderick displaying his sculptured image of Youth to visitors at his studio. In Rowland Mallet’s eyes, it is Roderick who takes on the attributes of the allegorical, assuming “the beau role” of “the beautiful image of a genius,” while Gloriani stands nearby “like a genial Mephistophles,” and Singleton is “an embodiment of aspiring candour afflicted with feebleness of wing” (1:123). Zola’s His Masterpiece pits Sandoz’s denunciation of “fanciful things” against Claude’s “longing for some secret symbolism.” A “recrudescence of romanticism” leads Claude to paint “an incarnation of Paris” as a “Venus emerging triumphantly from the froth of the Seine amidst all the omnibuses on the quays and the lightermen working at the Port of St. Nicholas” (223). Woolf ’s To The Lighthouse also discovers how imaginatively useful the allegorical moment can be. “So this is marriage, Lilly thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball. . . . And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking,

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the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches.”291 It is dangerous to call up brief moments of epiphany in the face of commitment to the Real in a world where Mr. Ramsay’s kitchen table takes command together with the demands of Veblenism. Nowhere more dangerous than in devising a nationalist art that all too readily drifts toward ephemeral dogmas of its own. Part Three, Aesthetic Lives: The Literary Approach, examines the literary imagination that exists outside the official needs of Washington, D.C. It asks whether imagination is permitted for those occasions when a valid aesthetic edges forward from rawness into a ripeness safe from quick rot. One must leave the long corridors of Washington, D.C. and the nervous pages of the Crayon, to witness the plunges made into sleep and dreams, madness and sex—acts of creation that place Emerson’s sharp demands upon those writings that aspire to achieve a more inclusive American aesthetic. As we do this, keep in mind what Veronese had to say in 1573 when called before the Holy Tribunal in Venice to defend his seemingly indecorous Last Supper, now known as Feast in the House of Levi. He added an inscription to Luke 5:30 along the bottom of the painting that cites the validity of the presence of publicans and sinners, but Veronese’s verbal testimony to the tribunal proposed no particular set of aesthetic principles. Rather, he spoke to the importance for all artists to be allowed full liberty to do whatever they believe in. After all, he stated, “We painters take the same license as poets and madmen.”292

Part Three

Aesthetic Lives: The Literary Approach

Beyond the Terrace

The Civil War had come and gone, leaving behind seismic alterations in the economic, legal, and social structures of the battered nation. As for Emerson’s call of 1836, had its force been decimated like the men mown down in Picket’s charge across the wheat fields at Gettysburg? Committed to coming into contact with the source of “the act of creation,” Emerson claimed that his generation had failed to find “the road to truth” that “religious teachers” and “speculative men” once promised to deliver. He placed his trust in the practicality of “the most abstract truth,” which, once discovered, would be “its own evidence”— a theory that would “explain all phenomena.” The years that followed did indeed offer a number of nervous theories about “the idea of creation,” but what of the other essentials that stirred Emerson’s need to know—namely, “language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex,” which evoked the futility of Blake’s Urizen (a.k.a. Newton), whose calipers attempt to order the universe in ways that blot out the terrifying sight of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar crawling across the ground of his madness.1 The steps of the U.S. Capitol had been a site for dreaming, but deeper explanations were needed for strange events that lay beyond the tidy terraces of the nation’s great white building, itself an ambiguity with secrets to be divulged. In 1901 William James described the mental terrain that extends beyond the “clean pure lines and noble simplicity” of the “sunlit terrace” that is a “construction” of “the classical academic” imagination, “intolerant of either nondescript facts or clumsy formulas.” If this is where “the mind stopped,” nothing was “left to tell . . . but the brain and the other physical facts of nature on the one hand and

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the absolute metaphysical ground of the universe on the other.” The smug, snug prospect from the terrace ignored the arduous quest for a greater understanding of “all phenomena” caught within the dual impulses of a William Stillman and a Thorstein Veblen. Now was the time, William James noted, to take into account the work done by the “romantic improvers” of the structural landscape. Moving “from classic to gothic architecture” in their stylistic innovations, new designs were installed by which “few outlines are pure and where uncouth forms lurk in the shadows.” The result was not a scene spiritualized by the once-admired Ruskinian Gothic. It was rather more like Bernini’s suspect baroque, where the “menagerie and the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their material.”2 Before we track the “uncouth forms [that] lurk in the shadows” throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century, check the status of the “scientific aesthetic” a century further on. In 1990 a symposium at Princeton University devoted to Raphael’s paintings convened to discuss “Science in the Service of Art History.” Presentations were made on “Current Techniques in the Scientific Examination of Paintings,” “Technical Aspects of Some Paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery, London,” “The Restoration and Scientific Examination of Raphael’s Madonna in the Meadow,” and “Analyses of Wood from Italian Paintings with Special Reference to Raphael.”3 This particular Princeton (the site of the Institute for Advanced Study, which hospitably housed Albert Einstein from 1933 until his death) hardly resembled the venue for William Stillman’s painfully “classic-academic” essay of 1886 in the New Princeton Review. It might seem at times that the stern attention given to orderly scientific inquiry in the arts by the 1990s resembles the old-time view from the terrace called into question by William James. Not so. After the 1880s the path toward a “scientific aesthetic” joined with the emotive theories of the new psychologies. They existed dangerously beyond recognizable facts, out in the underbrush where the great Emersonian question sported itself, blithely uncommitted to the stricter demands of Veblenian norms of evidence. Math and Emotion

It is difficult to serve two masters at one and the same time. Nonetheless, math (rational precision) paired with emotion (responses outside reason’s full control) took the lead by 1900. Previous authorities directing the course of aesthetics had been reduced, if not displaced, together with the pantheistic Soul of the American transcendentalists. The One in Charge was now either the agnostic Mind, which methodically responds to the Brain’s direct sensory stimulation,



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or the agnostic Imagination, which stores up a tangle of vivid impressions within the Consciousness. In 1884 Vernon Lee, English novelist and friend of Bernard Berenson, wrote Euphorion, a little treatise that expressed her weariness over the stale metaphysical categories that limited the reach of the Real and the Ideal. For Lee, the former impulse devotes itself to formulas of light, texture, and likeness, while the latter is decorative and quite unconcerned over abstract truths. In Essay on Art and Life of 1896, Lee followed up on the notion that the Real and the Ideal are equally engaged in bringing us emotional pleasure. So did the study by Geoffrey Scott, yet another member of the Berenson circle. The Architecture of Humanism (first published in 1914, revised in 1924) pledged itself to an aesthetic approached by the emotions, not the intellect.4 Charles Henry, a Frenchman who might have taken pride in being more intellectually rigorous than the Englishmen or -women wandering about Italy, belonged to the French avantgarde, which rejected the mere imitation of things in the world. Its members turned to organizing forms with scientific rigor, while casting over them a bit of mystical math.5 In 1885 Henry positioned himself as both mathematician and psychologist with his “Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetic.” He offered a meticulous (often tedious) analysis of the effects on our emotions once certain combinations of line and color are brought into play, embraced by the mind, which requires both the abstract facts of “pure math” and the emotional textures exposed by the new psychology. Then there were critics coming out of Great Britain after World War I. They included Roger Fry, author of influential critiques based on the merger of math and emotion. Fry’s “The Art of Florence” of 1919 and “Some Questions of Esthetics” of 1926 maintained that “the question of art begins where the question of fact ends.” Through his studies in form, Fry disputed the imposition of the heavy hand of Veblenian scientific inquiry but valued the purity of the mathematical approach. In Fry’s commitment to “experimental method,” to forming a “methodical basis,” and to adhering to the “underlying principles of appearance,” the emotive was given more weight than the scientific. In 1926 he took on the coolly abstract theories of I. A. Richards (godfather of the future New Criticism). Fry agreed that both he and Richards rejected outmoded metaphysics and absolutes, but he found it impossible to merge matters of aesthetic response to art limited to “ordinary sensation,” as did Richards. But Fry was not only an astute looker at painting and sculpture; he was deeply interested in making distinctions between how we react to literature and to the plastic arts.6 What are those distinctions exactly? Parts One and Two gave themselves over to sculpture, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts. Now it is the turn of

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literature to find an aesthetic of its own—a proper “American” aesthetic, if possible. It is time to leave the conflicts taking place within the House of the Plastic Arts, the House of Science—and the U.S. House of Representatives—and to enter the House of Fiction. “The Native Elements in American Fiction,” a two-part article by James Herbert Morse, appeared in the Century in 1883. Morse had a pair of major points to make: that the Civil War had caused a profound break in the American mentality, and that “the analytic author” had come to the fore. Henry James had made a similar observation about the war in 1879. It is arresting that Morse singles out James to demonstrate one of the consequences of the war experience: the turn toward analytical literature by which the creative force of reason (the code of the North) defeated that of emotion (the code of the South). War “scattered all forces in fiction to center them in action,” while the “intellectual life of the nation . . . flashed at the point of the bayonet.” All “literary energy seemed spent,” and the “old writers were silenced, struck down. . . . The war had disturbed the old monotony of healthy and regular growth in the nation, forcing the old blood into new channels; and out of the change and ferment was to come a more vigorous and much more original novelistic growth.”7 Authors “felt the sneer which pervades a certain small corner—far from the best corner, as it seems to me—of science and were fain to suppress the highest idealizing faculty, rightfully due to the best imaginations.” Once “the disposition of the intellectual forces of America” was altered, there was “a new toughness of intellectual fiber that meant the possibility of hard work and exasperation with foreign indifference.” These conditions “forced the romancer out of the field and pushed the novelist in.” There was now “a mania for facts—the open, outward, visible facts; facts in science, facts in religion, facts in history. What we could not get at with the five senses, we doubted. It is not extravagant to say that Michael Angelo with his angels would have been asked to ‘explain,’ that Raphael would have been held to a strict accountability for any seraphic expression in the ‘Madonna’ that survived the friction of the nursery. Hamlet, the Dane, would have been subjected to scrutiny from the club widow, and the ghost would most certainly have been pinned upon the dissection table.”8 The “analytic method” took over since a “rigid art is, after all, as much needed in fiction as in other branches of work”—the method Morse found most apparent in the writings of William Dean Howells and Henry James (371). With the advantages that accrue to such “painters of events” also come “their limitations in all directions.” Both Howells and James “feel the effect of the scientific spirit. Both seem inclined to deny the existence of what cannot meet the five senses.



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They are capable of passions only in a restricted way—grown-up passions, modified by culture, or business, or club gossip” (372). James is to be praised for his “intensity,” but he replaces humor with the wit “that grew up among the acids,” thus is “half a foreigner” and likely “to pare” down his work until “we recognize it, at last, only as an intellectual, not a heart passion” (372–73). Howells’s limitations derive from the way in which his fictive characters are “almost wholly the creatures of his note-book.” They are “constructions, and in no large sense creations. They do not come from the heart, but through the senses” (373). Other writers of the “reportorial method” who strive to emulate scientists are also known for “accuracy,” for concern with “externals,” and for interest in making life “seem less attractive than it is” (374). What concerns Morse most is the resulting “dyspeptic” mood that places too great “a value in morbid analysis.” “Science has its reverential, as well as its dyspeptic devotees, and the former show us the beauty of order and law; they teach us the inspiration of the universe, and let us live without the constant presence of the thought that the golden orbs eventually resolve themselves into gases” (375). Morse concludes with the hope that American writers will stop short of denying “some promise of higher ends,” yet he has little doubt but that the newly formed “analytic school” of literature is on the quest to be more scientific than the sciences (375). The School of Hawthorne, Richard Brodhead’s important critical study of 1986, includes a footnote that remarks on the “mass veneration” accorded to paintings by the Old Masters. These works were part of the public’s “move to fix the rank of authoritative practitioners that also produced, in the department of literature, the American literary canon.” Brodhead points to the frontispiece engraved of Nathaniel Hawthorne for the Century by Timothy Cole, the same man responsible for the series of engraved reproductions of the Old Master paintings that began appearing in 1888. In Brodhead’s view, the fact that pictorial attention was given to Hawthorne by the same means used to confirm the prestige of Renaissance Italian art “deserves fuller exploration.”9 So it shall be in the pages to come, through examples taken from novels and literary criticism of the post-Hawthornian period, once an intense promotional campaign began to prove the cultural worth of the literary discipline. Battles to gain public recognition at home and abroad had been going on within the American literary world for generations. Prior to the Civil War, Poe, Hawthorne, and the feisty members of the New York literary group like Herman Melville tried to overcome the influence of the British—as crippling to American authorship as the Italian Renaissance had been to American painters.

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America’s female authors were given scant respect by the professionals, although their output was prodigious and hugely popular with the general public. The self-heralded rise of the “masculine” vernacular commanded postwar attention. The roster of newcomers such as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and William Dean Howells was further expanded by the names of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser. Meanwhile, the belletrists whom Veblen singled out for belittlement in his essay of 1906, “The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation”—were added to the casualty list of the dead and dying.10 The Great Genre Debates added confusion to the scene. Others might keep asking, “Which God?”—“Which Science?”—“Which Rome?” but new battles centered on the crucial question, “Which one?” in regard to literary traditions jockeying for placement as the best truth sayer. There were simply too many romanticisms, realisms, and naturalisms to deal with, as well as a usurper like modernism that had started to crowd its way into the pack. I choose to cut through this critical muck in order to treat the particular late-century anxiety that underlay all such genre debates: Is it Art to which we give ourselves, or Life?—the question that led to asking, Does Art serve the Ideal and Life the Real? It would be difficult to decide since the Ideal and the Real were no longer defined by the traditional theological attributes that had ruled entry into each category for centuries. Bifurcated Minds

As the anointed Dean of American Letters, William Dean Howells did as well as he could to fill the role once taken by Emerson. In contrast to the manner of Emerson, a former occupant of the pulpit, Howells used his somewhat schoolmasterish way to lay down the issues he expected the bright ones of his age to study before ranking the quality of their performance. By the 1900s Americans within the arts circle no longer felt the fear and trembling that had kept them on the defensive before the wit and wisdom of the Old World. Howells felt free to single out Emile Zola for praise. Here was a writer who had chosen to “live as a question, a dispute, an affair of inextinguishable debate; for the two principles of the human mind, the love of the natural and the love of the unnatural [the Ideal], the real and the unreal, the truthful and the fanciful, are inalienable and indestructible.”11 Sensing the conflict between two opposing responses to art and to life, Howells recognized it was unlikely that Zola could reconcile what was still commonly viewed as the standoff between romanticism and realism. By birth and tradition, Zola was too much the romanticist to practice literary realism. He was that unhappy man, “a prophet who cannot practice what



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he preaches, who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith.” Zola tried to honor two kinds of beauty: the one symmetrical like a temple, the other asymmetrical like a tree. The beauty of the temple is that of art, while the beauty of a tree is like that of life, which cannot bear the effort of art to give it “balance and proportion.” As a Veblenian of literature, Zola bound the novels of his Rougon-Macquart series to a thesis, “but reality is bound to no thesis.” The flawed result: “What Zola did was less to import science and its methods into the region of fiction, than journalism and its methods, but in this he had his will only so far as his nature of artist would allow. He was no more a journalist than he was a scientist by nature and in spite of his intentions and in spite of his methods, he was essentially imaginative and involuntarily creative.”12 The “lesson of Zola” was frequently on view in the critical essays of Henry James. In August 1903, the year after Zola’s death, James wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly that addressed the same point as Howells’s essay of November 1902. James speaks of “the circumstances that thirty years ago a young man of extraordinary brain and indomitable purpose, wishing to give the measure of these endowments to a piece of work supremely solid, conceived and sat down to Les Rougon-Macquart rather than to an equal task in physics, mathematics, politics or economics. He saw his undertaking, thanks to his patience and courage, practically to a close; so that it is exactly neither of the so-called constructive sciences that happen to have had the benefit, intellectually speaking, of one of the most constructive achievements of our time.”13 Zola’s strengths are given full credit: “his character, his will, his passion, his fighting temper, his aggressive lips, his squared shoulders . . . and his overweening confidence.” Nevertheless, “his weakness was in that inexperience of life from which he proposed not to suffer, from which he in fact suffered on the surface remarkably little, and from which he was never to suspect, I judge, that he had suffered at all.” The result? “Machine-minted and made good by an immense expertness,” Zola’s project “yet makes us ask how, for disinterested observation and perception, the writer had used so much time and so much acquisition, and how he can all along have handled so much material without some large subjective consequence.” Zola is judged as “at last almost completely a prey to the danger that had for a long time more and more dogged his steps, the danger of the mechanical.”14 James was more sympathetic to Balzac’s attempts to encompass both the data of life and the impulse of art. In “Honoré de Balzac” of 1875, James noted that the French author is “all of a piece and he hangs perfectly together” (92). In 1902 James returned to the same theme. Balzac’s impressive social reach came from the pleasure he took in the richness of details he gained through the freedom

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with which he plundered the assets of diverse genres, unrestricted by the moral goals Zola set for himself. Balzac’s all-of-a-pieceness did not disguise the fact that he, too, was caught between dual impulses. In his case, however, this was an advantage, not a curse. In 1875 James noted that Balzac’s gift came from possessing two minds—one that was spontaneous, the other reflective. In his 1902 appraisal, James reconfirmed the happy results. “The principle of composition that his free imagination would have, or certainly might have, handsomely imposed on him is perpetually dislocated by the quite opposite principles of the earnest seeker, the inquirer to a useful end.” It was Balzac’s genius that he willingly dealt with “the irreconcilability of two kinds of law . . . the irreconcilability of two different ways of composing one’s effect” (353; emphasis added). Pride of Knowledge

While immersed in his angrily anti-Veblenian mode, John Ruskin deplored those who chose to attire themselves in the Pride of Knowledge. Although they believed themselves the masters of their fate, in actuality they were encased within a system of mechanistic knowledge that held them within an allrestrictive chainmail garment. Scientific thought was the danger that led toward the death that came through yielding to the temptation to believe that one could know all one needed to know to obtain and to keep power. Through these distinctions, Ruskin separated the Gothic romantic from Roman realism. They not only could never be reconciled but should never be wished into a working union. Despite Ruskin’s warnings, forms of knowledge became the primary test of an effective aestheticism, into whoever’s hands it fell.15 In 1907, while writing his prefaces for the New York Edition, James faced down the criticism laid against his handling of The American in self-rebukes bedded more in his recollection of the novel’s weaknesses than prompted from the chastisement of outsiders. In 1876 he had thought he was writing within the range of what was coming to be called “realism.” Thirty years later he realized he had capitulated to a “romantic” view of the situation facing Christopher Newman, his American in Paris. Nevertheless, he did not wish to give in to charges that his work had been tainted by a feeble romantic aesthetic that revealed his “inexperience of life.” In a clear-headed attempt to show how a narrative can, in all honesty, go in two different directions, he set down his explanation of what the true romance involves. James dismissed the tired and troublesome labels of “romanticism” and “realism,” which cause more confusion than clarity. “The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one of the accidents of our hampered



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state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way.”16 “The real,” of course, delineates the territory laid out for dedicated pursuers of Veblenian scientific inquiry. Answers are out there. Time, effort, and lucid thought will bring into our grasp all we ought to know. “The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought, and our desire.”17 Those who work with mathematics and theoretical physics like to speak of the “elegance” of their methods even when projected onto “the hard facts” of the applied sciences. The Jamesian method is to honor the “beautiful” nature of the “soft” processes by which the mind follows its desires in searching for an elusive knowledge no one dares count on finding. It is the same method James advances during his visit to Mount Vernon when he speaks of the “great soft fact, as opposed to the little hard ones,” arising from “the beauty of the site itself.” Skepticism is not dismissed; the Real is still present. But the “communicated importance” of the relation between desire and knowledge holds firm.18 Back when Emerson set down his impossible challenge in the introduction to Nature, he was honest enough (though never as straightforward as we like our prophets to be) when he implied that no single theory could include everything. Tossed away in his next paragraph is a sharp little jab that reminds us that our worlds of experience are made up of the Me and the Not Me. Science aspires to study the latter—the contingencies and circumstances of Nature and the laws that direct it and those events that flow into the experience we call Life. The Me stands outside the Not Me, forced to dedicate itself to the creative acts we name Art. If one credits Emerson’s dualism with the postlapsarian reading it calls for, the Me is that which has been cast out of the perfect place, eternally kept at a distance from the elegant facts of the Original Creation. So what is the Me to do? It gives itself over to its own acts of creation—the clutter Emerson’s hoped-fortheory is meant to explain. The Me first constructs itself and all that lies around it by means of the tales it tells in the circuit and subterfuge (both beautiful and ugly) of its thought and desire. Life (the Not Me) and Art (the Me) seem fated to exist through distinct forms of knowing. The Zola/Balzac examples keep reappearing as cautionary tales in the years when James as critic and practitioner pondered which matters most: Knowledge in one of its many guises (scientific, theological, economic) or Knowing of the human kind—those modes of expression that are different from, yet in the service of, life. In “The Art of Fiction” James again sized up Zola as the

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author who lacked completeness because he started from a predetermined position that limited him to knowing only certain things. “Do not think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of life itself. In France to-day we see the prodigious effort (that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant.”19 As for those who follow the opposite path, that of “the aberrations of a shallow optimism, the ground (of English fiction especially) is strewn with their brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must indulge in conclusions, let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember your first duty is to be as complete as possible.”20 James raps Zola’s knuckles once again in “The Lesson of Balzac.” This time James mounts a withering appraisal (unjust, in the view of the Zola lover) of the fate of an author who has two paths to follow but chooses to explore only one. Zola “had had inordinately to simplify” when he focused on “the life of the instincts.” Thus he left out “the life of the soul.” “He met and solved, in this manner, his difficulty—the difficulty of knowing, and of showing, of life, only what his ‘notes’ would account for.” In contrast, Balzac was willing to expend “the waste of time, of passion, or curiosity, of contact” wherein “true initiation resides.” Balzac’s hubristic need to write La comédie humaine might seem on the surface a like project to the Rougon-Macquart series by Zola, but his efforts triumph through the “mystic process of the crucible, the transformation of the material under aesthetic heat.” Balzac succeeds because he is one of those “who have bought their information. . . . his spirit has somehow paid for its knowledge.”21 Costs of Knowing

It is a pleasure to catch Pierre Sandoz, Zola’s alter ego in His Masterpiece, stating a position that stands only slightly a kilter to James’s prefatory remarks to The American.22 Sandoz believes that there is all that we do not know but it is still what we ought to know. The humbleness of Sandoz’s insistence stands opposed to the arrogance James finds in H. G. Wells in a biting indictment that was one of the reasons the two men’s former friendship cooled considerably. “[W]hat are we to say of Mr. Wells, who, a novelist very much as Lord Bacon was a philosopher, affects us as taking all knowledge for his province and as inspiring in us to the very highest degree the confidence enjoyed by himself—enjoyed, we



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feel, with a breath with which it has been given no one of his fellow-craftsmen to enjoy anything. If confidence alone could lead utterly captive we should all be huddled in a bunch at Mr. Well’s heels.”23 Confidence alone is not enough. Men who followed the lead of Veblen’s principles of scientific inquiry “knew” that proof is the only guarantee for confirming one’s knowledge of something. Albert Einstein realized this as well. Think of his pleasure when his belief that the sun’s gravity would bend light rays was confirmed by an expedition of astronomers who sought out the eclipse that validated his theory. Proof was also required by pursuers of the Art Idea. As we shall see, Rowland Mallet has several reasons to put his money on Roderick Hudson’s future fame, but he is shrewd enough to respond to Roderick’s mother when she asks, “Do you really know?” Has her son “exceptional—what you would call remarkable—powers?” Rowland answers with a necessary equivocation. “One can’t know such a matter save after proof, and proof takes time.” (James’s preface admits he had actually hastened the process of Roderick’s development, yet our need to wait for “proof ” is one reason James’s novel is a very long one.) Then Rowland adds, as must those who negotiate with the unknowns of the future, “But one can believe.”24 Scientists—whether in the applied or the theoretical sciences—have tools of measurement and methods of experimentation capable of moving them past the lures of subjective hope. How does the man or woman of imagination temper the bitter taste of Jake Barnes’s admission “It’s pretty to think so,” while aware that that prettiness is a fraud and that moonlit dreams do not make one’s wants come to pass? In James’s The Portrait of a Lady an even more painful piece of proof reveals itself over the course of the narrative. Isabel Archer begins her adventures abroad entrancing others with the charmingly romantic ideals she cherishes. She tells Ralph Touchett that she is eager to see the picturesque ghost said to roam through Gardencourt, despite Ralph’s warning not to ask for this special knowledge since only suffering gains one access to what lies beyond the complacency of ignorance. We trace Isabel’s slow path toward the discovery of the Real. Vexed by Isabel’s resistance to certain truths, her sister-in-law asks how Isabel can be so stupid as not to know what she ought to know. In the end, just after Ralph’s death, his gentle ghostly figure appears to Isabel as final proof that she has indeed suffered. What is very Jamesian about this treatment of the process of “scientific inquiry” (one he uses over and over, whether with Nanda Brookenham, Maisie Farrange, Milly Theale, or Maggie Verver) is that knowing comes from experiments in pain most frequently expressed by his female protagonists (since theirs is the subjectivity most attuned to the workings of the arts of life).

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Also Jamesian is the demand placed on his readers to take their own greatest pleasure from following these sad events as proof that his narrative is capable of projecting “great powers.” Payment in kind is an essential element of any of the One True Theories on which James and other authors staked their success. But does an aesthetic exchange rate resolve the Arts versus Life conundrum while avoiding the cliché of the suffering artist whose wound gives him but one arrow to his bow—the crafting of plaintive tales of pain? And is there anything particularly useful about the high costs of knowing for an American society that counts on being an exception to the crueler rules of the world’s game? When Washington, D.C. was constructed by the many Me’s throughout the nineteenth century, the nationalist aesthetic paid hard cash to hire artists and architects to record histories of heroic acts in the name of the republican cause. The era’s politicized aesthetic concerns prompted talk of Nobility and Soul. The traces it left upon the capital’s surface were not intended to bring discomfiture to its observers. Indeed, the monuments and memorials to the nation’s war dead were raised as marble barriers against the suffering that is exacted by facing the historical events that led to their erection. Only the Vietnam Memorial slips through the crack in the impenetrable void meant to shield visitors from the brute meaning of death. Utilitarians hold to a most reasonable position. Many recognized the point made by Uncle Joe Cannon when he decried the expenditure of money to trick up the nation’s capital, a city’s whose layout in simple truth is little more than an extensive spread of business offices. Cannon admitted he felt a surge of patriotic emotion when looking at Leutze’s Crossing the Delaware. It may have been feeling without direct cash value, but it had value in that it caused no discomforting thoughts about the human costs undergone by Washington’s men during the ice-bound days at Valley Forge. Senator Cannon stands for all the people of common sense who do not see the point of Art-as-Pain. Compare the opposite response to art addressed by the Rand Report of 2005. The report said that advocates of increased government funding for the arts have it wrong when they concentrate on practical social gains. Arguments based solely on art’s usefulness play into the hands of those who ask why Joe Six-Pack should be taxed to subsidize a new production of Mozart’s Idomeneo or to give grants to artists so they can take a year off to paint things of no value. As long as Art fights against Life in such debates, the distance between the two gapes even wider. William Dean Howells’s little editorial of September 1886 in Harper’s Magazine inadvertently gave readers permission to reject the notion that America’s House of Fiction might be the House of Pain. This from an author who spoke out,



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as few did, against the injustices of the Haymarket convictions, who supported the radical principle of socialism, whose novels include many of the darker literary moments of his generation—a man more worthy to have his statue placed in the Capitol’s rotunda than many of the effigies of hollow men on view. Still, Howells stated that Dostoievsky’s stark fictions were not a true model for American writers. Rather, “the large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life” was more “peculiarly American.” Tragedy happens in this country, but (as Howells treats it here), it is just another commonplace, part of “the very nature of things.”25 Howells’s fictions are filled with dysfunctional families, social unrest, and outright madness, yet he was correct, when in his mellow mood as the nation’s Dean of American Letters, to praise ordinary democratic pleasures. As well as the menagerie and the madhouse that lay outside the terrace, Howells’s House of Fiction was ample enough to assimilate the placid statute of George Washington that prompted one viewer to say it looked like a “domestic Jupiter.” It was not through ordinariness that young cubs like Frank Norris found knowledge. Norris clung to the term romanticism while (like James) dissociating it from tales of adventures in faraway places. In his own essay on Zola, Norris pointed out the harm done to the Frenchman by those who called him a realist. That Zola was so cited, “as a realist or as a realist of realists, is a strange perversion.” Zola was unfortunate in having lived between Victor Hugo (the unblushing romantic) and Howells (the committed realist). It left Zola torn between his duty to the imagination and to a transcript of life reduced to the ordinary. In his “Plea for Romantic Fiction” of 1901 Norris urged aspiring authors to join with the muse of romanticism in “prying, peeping, peering into the closets of the bedroom, into the nursery, into the sitting-room,” as she gathers together “the bags and packages” of our secrets (however nasty), handing them over with the words, “That is Life!”26 Many authors stand at the windows of the House of Fiction famously described by James in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady. Their collaborative acts of prying, peeping, and peering create a literature grounded in the voyeuristic impulse, but no more so than the reports emanating from the new psychologists, whether Janet, Freud, Jung, or William James. They suggested a new Reality gained by literary stratagems of tricks and illusions. In his preface to The American James called up a vivid metaphor that admits without apology how ably Art lies. The “balloon of experience” is “tied to the earth.” It is “by the rope we know where we are.” Using “romance” in its original sense of the product of the storyteller, James confesses that “for the fun of it,” the “art of the romancer” manages “to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.” The tale that results leaves us free, “uncontrolled by our general sense of the ‘way things hap-

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pen.’” Still, “the way things don’t happen may be artfully made to pass for the way things do.”27 As did Plato in planning his perfect Republic, the Uncle Joe Cannons of the American republic had the right to cry foul over the tricks of the artist’s trade (though the senator was willing to go along with the artfulness of Leutze’s painting). In the opinion of many (whose views are not to be dismissed as coarsely grained philistinism), it is bad business to support an aesthetic (American or not) that has no use, is not cost-effective, gives pleasure only to the few, and prevaricates with the cheekiness of a born charlatan. But this is what Art does within the territory where artists live their lives. Theories Incarnate/Forms Divine

In full candor several of the novels-in-residence soon to be put on show are unintentionally risible to one degree or another. This admitted, all claim their rightful place in the space they are accorded. They expose what happens when an author chooses to write as an artist about characters engaged in the aesthetic life. They are, as it were, the means to test an author’s favorite theories when put into practice—theories absorbed by plots that elaborate on the stakes involved once one takes up the theme of artists’ lives in the years spanning the close of the Civil War and the decade prior to World War I, whether American-bred or proposed by Frenchmen or Englishmen. One catches these narratives serving as commentaries on the essays that had appeared in the Crayon of the 1850s and in Century Magazine and like journals throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In addition, the novels display the consequences of complicity in one or the other of the fallacies (ethical, romantic, mechanical, or biological) that weighed upon early attempts to craft a workable set of aesthetic principles. The guilty presence of the intentional fallacy also appears, whether stemming from an author’s projections of what he wished to achieve or in the hopes expressed by the narratives’ protagonists. There are, in addition, similarities between these text samples and the procedures furthered by Veblenian scientific inquiries. This is not to say that the testing processes deployed within the scientist’s workplace match the ways by which the reading of a novel yields convincing information. It is not simply that the scientific process prefers to prove its case through reliance on quantifiable facts (hard numbers), while the fictive experience depends on gestures (soft symbols) that are often reluctant to state precisely what has taken place. Engagement with an author’s narrative usually entails a headon confrontation with an emotive force—one that precedes an awareness of the novelistic “math” that went into its workings.



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We ourselves are guided by authorial claims (intentional fallacy or not) handed out as a kind of laboratory checklist prior to the start of the actual reading experience.28 It helps if there is a seemingly comfortable fit between original intention (theory) and final result (theory incarnated in practice), but the prefaces James wrote for the New York Edition reverse the logic of this line of proof. When James calls up what he remembers he meant to say, his conclusions are both prompted by shrewd confrontations with the results and pulled back toward the vagaries of hindsight. He feels awkward when he is unable to recall fully the intentions that first carried him into a new literary project. It is difficult for him, and for us, to judge his success in the pursuit of costly knowledge.29 But in any case, the need to make corrective analyses after the fact remains central to the literary experiment and the scientific project. One arresting difference, however, is the way that the author of novels about the artist’s life must test his own competency as “artist,” while leaving it open whether the artists who inhabit those novels succeed over the course of their narrative lives to create art of interest. (On occasion, scientific procedures test the concept of “the scientist,” but that is not their primary goal.) Crosscurrents between author/artist and artist/character are particularly powerful in James’s Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse and act in their own special manner in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Whereas Zola’s His Masterpiece, Norris’s Vandover and the Brute, Kipling’s The Light That Failed, and Dreiser’s The “Genius” are not interfaced by authorial self-assessments, all feature artistpractitioners as direct evidence that test the value of the particular aesthetic enterprise upon which they (authors and protagonists) are engaged. The more thoughtful members of the writing profession at the turn of the nineteenth century examined the genres that shaped their narratives. No enduring aesthetic principles were forthcoming, however, from the rules laid down by romanticism, realism, naturalism, or their many hybrids. No agreement was reached as to what accountings were actually entered by Zola, Norris, or James into standardized genre ledgers. Yet when heated arguments centered around the forms believed to advance either Art or Life or Art and Life, one question that stood in the path of consensus never went away: What are the relations that bind Art, Life, and Science? In the 1850s the Crayonites thought they knew the answer. If the sensitive soul would only open up to Nature’s God-given, ever-evolving organic truths, all would be united in one great theory. By the century’s end followers of the literary arts began to commit themselves to the realities of narratives structured by harshly predetermined and mechanistic forms. More often than not, Veblenism rather than Emersonianism led the way. Thoreau had met the world

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both through his imagination and his surveying tools, but walks in the woods by later authors detected forces that were hardly benign—such as the corpse Henry Fleming comes across as he flees the machinery of battle. Once the literary imagination fed upon semiscientific nomenclature, the newer “aesthetics” replaced the semireligious language that had blended Darwin’s entangled world with God’s ordered realm. Theories advanced by Schopenhauer and Spencer prompted London’s Wolf Larsen, Dreiser’s Eugene Witla, and Norris’s Vandover to view the universe as ruled by the primitive energies of yeasty piggishness, volatile chemisms, or iron-wheeled engines. Conflicts and contradictions remained. Philosophies of science might ponder the effect of the world’s enigmas on individual desires; the practical sciences did not.30 Willing obedience between one’s mental yearnings and the stubborn facts of the material world appeared impossible, so Eugene Witla finally takes solace in the oxymoron of “Christian Science.” In 1922 Einstein set down the first of his papers devising a unified field theory, but by the time of his death in 1955 he wrote, “In my opinion, the theory presented here is the logically relativistic field theory which is at all possible.” Then he added, “But this does not mean that nature might not obey a more complex field theory.”31 Which was the master and which the indentured servant seemed all too evident. By century’s end the older literary forms were on a collision course with modernism. Even as it poached elements from their practices, modernism began to supersede romanticism, realism, and naturalism as the aesthetic principle taken up by the bright young things. Soon the label “modernism” was clapped upon Henry James. This man, consumed by matters of “form,” would become trapped within the pejorative embrace of the accompanying term formalism. By the 1960s modernist aesthetics were identified as an enemy of the Real because modernism’s techniques emptied out subject matter, denied history, and became a creature of the simulacra’s tricks of shadows and mirrors. Prior meanings of modernism were leeched out, leaving behind an acrid taste of cold aesthetic practices touched by the chill of scientific technology. Why this happened, and why to Henry James, is a long story that would need all the nights of Scheherazade to relate. It is easy enough, however, to target either side of any argument as being antipathetic to life. Take science and list its supposed crimes against the humanities (if not humanity), such as genetic engineering, actuarial charts that turn people into statistics, or management practices that convert workers into machines. Or take the arts: shallow means of escape from the world’s messes, prey fallen before the forces of commodification, supplier of aura-less reproductions that flood the mass markets. Both the sciences and the arts can stand accused as liars. Science pretends to control chaos



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through the atomic theories of Lucretius; Aristotle’s natural history, paired with his rules of the Unities, which shoves death off-stage; the classification charts of Linnaeus, which pin specimens onto the page; Newton’s Urizen-like grip on the vegetable universe; or Einstein’s E = mc2, which explodes into sheets of flame. As for the arts, who will honor the faltering attempts of their forms to represent the world’s incoherence with candor? In the spirit of full disclosure I must relate that I was trained under the dark shadow of Lubbock and Edel and the coolly stringent principles of the New Critics, although I distanced myself from the former pair and filched techniques of close reading from the latter. “My” James (as were my other authors) was simultaneously an analyst of social practices and a foe of the reductive “laboratory brain.” Still it amazes me, as I look back over the succeeding decades, to see how aggressively James has been said to have divorced himself from life, history, and the chaos of modern times. In the minds of the misinformed, the following description suits the type identified with the Jamesian aesthetic. “He was so accustomed to living upon irony and the interpretation of things that it was new for him to be himself interpreted, and—as a gentleman who sits for his portrait is always liable to be—interpreted all ironically. From being outside of the universe he was suddenly brought into it, and from the position of a free commentator and critic, an easy amateurish editor of the whole affair, reduced to that of humble ingredient and contributor.”32 This is the description of Gabriel Nash, consummate aesthete and antiartist, taken from The Tragic Muse. Henry James is not Nash, yet how interesting that he makes Nash a far more interesting character than Nick Dormer, the practicing artist. Still, as David McWhirter demonstrates in his seminal essay “Henry James: (Post) Modernist?” James was a man who constantly struggled with, as well as resided within, the modernism of his generation. McWhirter makes cogent use of Georg Simmel’s 1918 essay “The Conflict in Modern Culture” in order to retrieve James and the best of his generation from the emptiness of cultures limply given over to the aesthete. Employing his own use of the Emersonian notion of tensions between the Not Me (uncurbed life) and the Me (human embellishments), Simmel described “a new phase of the old struggle” that pits life against the forms that furnish life with “content and form, freedom and order.” Modern existence fostered “the deep contradiction between life’s eternal flux and the objective validity and authenticity of the forms through which it proceeds.” Nor was this the mere clash of “a contemporary form, filled with life, against an old, lifeless one”; it was “a struggle of life against the form as such, against the principle of form.”33 In the 1950s and 1960s the Parisian literary world found a still newer means to

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match the new aesthete sensibility. The engagé narratives of Albert Camus were replaced by the New Novel proposed by Nathalie Sarraute and Alain RobbeGrillet. It rejected three-dimensional forms for its characters. Subjectivity of psychological probings was replaced by strict objectivity given over to an aesthetic of things. A question remained, however, the question asked in James’s essay of 1914, “The New Novel.” As James looked hard at the writings of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, authors of stories stocked with tangible “things,” he did not like what he found (and might have seen later in the French “New Novel”). What came over him was “the dawning unrest that suggests to us fairly our first critical comment: ‘Yes, yes—but is this all?’ ”34 In literary exercises like this, the only “all” was form “as such”—life reduced to “the principle of form”— a literature that threatened his own generation with a mode of modernism that, however much it supplied a “history” of objects, was bereft of the histories of human experience. Problems beset any aesthetic that tries to be true to modern life, whatever genre term is laid upon it: whether “modernism,” made to play the role of the villain that insists on totalitarian control, or “postmodernism,” elected as the tragic hero of life, doomed to remain mired in the muck of life-denying forms. This is McWhirter’s response: “James never stopped probing the contingency, and tyranny, of the forms—social as well as literary; marriage; art; culture itself—he so richly appreciated, aspired to muster, and ceaselessly worked to revise. Recovering James as a modernist within modernity, we also arrive at a vantage from which we can more honestly appreciate his remarkable ‘experiments in form,’ in the process, it may be, preparing the ground for a broader, but also a more rigorous and detailed and enabling, account of the cultural politics of the modernist aesthetic.”35 McWhirter’s ardent argument rightly cautions us not to believe that we are home free. Let us say that James is rescued from the myth that associates modernism with formalism, the ultimate life-denier. Of what help is it to be named as a man of modernity who anticipates postmodernism? To see James’s aesthetics as an exemplification, not of modernism, but of postmodernism appears to bring him into line with Veblen’s contemporaneous crusade to replace preDarwinism with the realities of post-Darwinism. Yet both postmodernism and post-Darwinism risk falling within “the ‘new depthlessness’ of a culture in which historicity itself seems at times to vanish and where art and the artist [together with the scientist] are absorbed along with just about everything else, into the perpetual present of commodity, product and consumption.”36 We seem to be back with gloom, keeping company with George Steiner, John Guillory, and Terry Eagleton. To pull ourselves out of the Slough of Despond suffered by the



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humanities, it is necessary to inquire whether the pursuit of “forms” is the same as capitulation to a world of “things.” In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe put the concept of “things” to social use. In her attack against the slavery system, she dramatized the ways in which the accepted forms of a “peculiar” system relied on an inhuman economics that turned a human being into a “thing,” an object of profit. In the 1850s Horatio Greenough, champion of the fine functions of forms correctly employed for all manner of humanistic purposes, also spoke out against the misuse of “thingness.” In this instance, his concern was directed against quasi-scientific procedures that led to sterile theories in architectural aesthetics, encircled by the profit motive. “There has been in England, since 1815, more discussion of aesthetical doctrine, more analysis, experiment, and dogged determination to effect somewhat in art, than attended the birth of the Florentine school; but always in the main impotent, because the governing intellect of England has held art to be a thing; a plant growing by human knowledge, with gold for its nutriment. Art is not a thing, but a form, a development of man.”37 One hundred and fifty years later, Angus Fletcher speaks as an advocate for potent poetic forms. He locates “thingness” in nature and rejects the all too human manipulation of forms that forces a culture of “things” upon society. He is cheerful about the possibility that “the future of the imagination” can fill “the gap between the opaque thingness of nature lying ‘out there,’ and the philosophical and scientific access we gain by developing terms, formulas, explanations, and theories of the order and meaning hidden within that opaque nature.” He plans to do this by replacing “the cold empty spaces of real literary theory” (the dank cells within which modernism, structuralism, and postmodernism lurk) with negotiations that bring about a happy reconciliation between poetry and science. This, for him, will establish a true “American” aesthetic. To Fletcher, “The whole question of the passage between inward and outward forms, between genre and attitude, must languish.” Since “theory” per se (the creator of forms) is guilty of “sweeping good things away forever,” he makes a crafty move of his own in order to rediscover the “artistic aim and manner, as defined by the endless variety, each artist in principle makes possible.” He admits he will take up “theory as I try to practice it” that succeeds in “imitating the sciences”— drawing upon “various scientific analogies and approaches” that allow humanmade forms to respond with vigor to nature’s “opaque thingness.”38 “Piercing the Wall,” the final section of Part Three, demonstrates the means taken by the architects of the Florentine school (favored by Greenough), the painters of Venice (favored by James), and two of James’s late novels to substantiate the claim that a carefully considered program that utilizes potentially potent

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aesthetic forms will counter the world’s bent toward “thingness.” Just now, however, it is time to take a look at the narrative forms within which our authors presented the lives of the artist. Les Objets d’Art

A common thread runs through the following novels as they take up the task of defining the artist’s life. The nature of the artworks produced (or not) by the protagonists is obviously an intrinsic part of the story, as well as the judgment given by the artist’s companions and the general public. But the novels also act as the medium that discloses what an artist looks like and the ways by which he costumes his habitat to fit his notion of what the artistic life requires. Indeed, certain novels present an aesthetic incarnate—individuals who demonstrate that “being” Art may be more arresting than “doing” art. Roderick Hudson is the beautiful young man who puts off doing for being yet gains success as a handsome work of art for the private pleasure of Rowland Mallet. Rowland’s initial sighting of Roderick places before his admiring eye a “tall slim youth with a singularly mobile and intelligent face.” Roderick would make an excellent piece of statuary—a faun, perhaps—to center a garden vista. “The features were admirably chiselled and finished and a frank smile played over them as gracefully as a breeze among flowers.” True, Roderick’s “forehead, though high and brave, was narrow; the jaw and the shoulders were narrow, and the result was an air of insufficient physical presence,” but his appearance is no less charming than that of one of Donatello’s sculpted young men. It is Roderick’s eyes that matter most to Rowland. They contain “a fund of nervous force” and there is “life enough in his eye to furnish an immortality” (1:23). On the spot, Rowland sees his protégé as the very image of the true artist. To his infatuated vision, it is not only Roderick’s physical beauty that gives promise to the young man’s ability to create art, it is also the way he dresses. Even while buried in the cultural wastes of rural Massachusetts (where Rowland exists as a rare object, unlike anything New England is used to), Roderick appears costumed in “a white linen suit,” “a bright red cravat, passed through a ring altogether too splendid to be valuable,” “a pair of yellow kid gloves,” “a silvertipped walking stick,” and “one of those slouched sombreros which are the traditional property of the Virginian or Carolinian of romance” (1:23–24). Add to the splendor of Roderick’s physical presence and his clothing the aesthetic quality “visible in his talk, which abounded in the superlative and the sweeping.” In conversation his “plastic sense took . . . altogether the turn of color” (1:24).



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Upon Roderick’s arrival in Europe, he intuitively realizes what a work of art like himself needs to wear. Sensing “that he was dressed provincially,” he “immediately reformed his toilet with the most unerring tact.” “His appetite for novelty was insatiable, and for everything characteristically foreign, as it presented itself, he had an extravagant greeting; but in half an hour the novelty had faded, he had guessed the secret, he had plucked out the heart of the mystery and was clamouring for a keener sensation. . . . He had caught instinctively the key-note of the general, the contrasted European order” (1:89). Roderick’s reactions to the aesthetics of European dress further convince Rowland that his friend will prove to be an artist of note. “Surely youth and genius hand in hand were the most beautiful sight in the world” (1:90). To gaze upon the living portrait of Roderick is to take delight in the presence of a work of art. Rowland perceives no need to be concerned at this stage in their relationship as to whether Roderick will ever produce something of beauty that exists outside himself. Gabriel Nash would think not, and would care little about producing art. Nash, the Pateresque figure in James’s The Tragic Muse, cannot claim Roderick’s physical beauty, although his voice—like Roderick’s—is the source of “rich effects,” one that Nash can “modulate and manipulate . . . as he would have done a musical instrument” (7:23).39 Yet Nash “knows” that the creation of material art to which his friend Nick Dormer aspires is of no value. True beauty does not exist in the world, marked as it is by the “ugly.” Rather, Nash looks to his “own spirit. One is one’s self a fine consequence.” He resists being labeled “an aesthete,” which is only “one of the formulas.” He has “no profession” and is a member of “no état civil.” “Merely to be is such a métier; to live is such an art, to feel is such a career!” (7:33). Although Nash initially hovers around Nick, he prefers not to visit Nick’s studio. As Nick puts it, “he doesn’t like to see me begin. He’s afraid I’ll do something.” For Nash, “[t]he only thing he really takes seriously is to speculate and understand, to talk about the reasons and the essence of things; the people who do that are the highest. The applications, the consequences, the vulgar little effects belong to a lower place” (8:395). Critical of “you wretched people who have the incurable superstition of ‘doing,’” Nash is disturbed by Nick’s attempt to paint his portrait. As Nash begins to vanish from the social scene, Nick conjectures, “He was so accustomed to living upon irony and the interpretation of things that it was new for him to be himself interpreted, and—as a gentleman who sits for his portrait is always liable to be—interpreted all ironically” (8:410). To disappear as Nash does from the artist’s studio is a kind of self-murder. For the

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artist figures in Roderick Hudson, His Masterpiece, Vandover and the Brute, and The “Genius,” their studios not only define the kind of artistic efforts they most admire but also suggest the fates each will endure. Once he arrives in Rome Hudson chooses a picturesque setting to inspire his creative efforts, “a large empty room with a vaulted ceiling where the vague dark traces of an old fresco” holds his attention. Not an artist-aspirant but the collector of aesthetic sensations, Rowland Mallet takes rooms “in a stately old palace close to the Fountain of Trevi and made himself a home in which books and pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air of leisurely permanence” (1:98). He luxuriates “amid dropped curtains and the scattered flame of firelight upon polished carvings and mellow paintings” (1:98–99). Both men, solidly part of the expatriate colony, are most at ease when memories of Italy’s past glories lessen the more tiresome demands of the present moment. In His Masterpiece, remnants from the previous romantic period linger on throughout the Second Empire in the studio of Bongrand, once the center of the Paris art world. Bongrand still keeps to “the habit of wearing a special costume” with “flowing trousers,” a “dressing-gown secured at the waist by a silken cord,” and a head covering of a “priest’s skull-cap.” His studio “in no wise sacrificed to the tastes of the day, to that magnificence of hangings and nick-knacks with which young painters were then beginning to surround themselves. It was the bare, greyish studio of the old style, exclusively ornamented with sketches by the master, which hung there unframed, and in close array like the votive offerings in a chapel” (165).40 In contrast, the house of Fagerolles, up-and-coming representative of the new Parisian art crowd, is the epitome of the meretricious art life. It is filled with “[o]ld tapestry, old weapons, a heap of old furniture, Chinese and Japanese curios,” a dining room with lacquer wood paneling, and a staircase with banners and tropical plants that “rose up like plumes.” Fagerolles’s studio has walls covered with Oriental hangings, a chimneypiece with a “chimerical monster,” a couch under a tent “with lances upholding the sumptuous drapery,” and “a collection of carpets, furs, and cushions heaped together.” Yet it is a studio “without a picture visible” (250). San Francisco in the 1890s is the home turf of Vandover, Frank Norris’s desultory young man of aesthetic tastes who toys with the pleasant notion of passing his life as an artist. When, at twenty-six, he inherits money from his father’s estate, he resolves to create a perfect setting for himself based on his dream of an environment proper to stir one’s artistic feelings—however vague, however much like a parodic version of Darwin’s “entangled bank.” In Vandover’s bachelor’s apartments, the walls “were hung with dull-blue paper,” forming an admirable background for small plaster casts of Assyrian bas-reliefs and photogravures



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of Renaissance portraits.41 “A dark red carpet covered with rugs and skins lay on the floor.” Hanging on one wall is “a huge rug of sombre colours against which were fixed a fencing trophy, a pair of antlers, a little water colour sketch of a Norwegian fjord, and Vandover’s banjo” (130–31). His rooms include a divan covered with corduroy, bookcases with olive green curtains, and a “multitude of small ornaments, casts of animals by Fremiet and Barye, Donatello’s lovely femme inconnue, beer steins, a little bronze clock, a calendar, and a yellow satin slipper” in which he keeps his Turkish cigarettes (131). Among other objects that express Vandover’s eclectic tastes are “twelve grotesque heads in plaster with a space between each for a pipe,” “a Japanese screen in black and gold,” and “a tea-table of bamboo.” The entrance to his make-believe studio is draped with “curtains of dust-brown plush” (131). Within, he has arranged Assyrian reliefs that depict the “life of the king” and a “wounded lioness,” copies of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and a Velázquez portrait of a young man with hunting spear, “an admirable reproduction of the ‘Mona Lisa,’” a “carbon print of a Vandyke,” and photographs of “actresses in tights, French quadrille dancers, high kickers, and chorus girls.” As for the equipment required for paintings he will never execute, there is a “throne and huge easel” (132). What matters most, however, is the great tiled stove at the center of this temple to art, “the chiefest joy of Vandover’s new life.” It is “the life and soul of the whole room,” with tiles that picture “The Punishment of Caliban and His Associates,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and the “Fall of Phaeton” (134). Vandover’s tale is one of madness and degradation. Piece by piece, he must sell off these prized objets d’art, until all is stripped away, together with his sanity. Near the end, when exhausted by a night of wolflike ravings—naked, howling, running about on all fours—Vandover lies down to sleep “at the foot of the bare white wall beneath two of the little placards, scrawled with ink, that read ‘Stove here,’ ‘Mona Lisa’ here” (229). A generation later in New York City, Eugene Witla, Theodore Dreiser’s “Genius,” goes through a long period when his career as a practicing artist comes to a halt. Able to procure a lucrative job with a large publishing house, Eugene clings to his belief that he is a true artist. He moves into a spacious apartment overlooking the Hudson River and sets about to decorate it with reminders of the Art Thoughts that have always guided his dreams. “Eugene chose green-brown tapestries representing old Rhine Castles for his studio, and blue and brown silks for his wall furnishings elsewhere. He now realized a long cherished dream of having a great wooden cross of brown stained oak, ornamented with the figure of the bleeding Christ, which he set in a dark shaded corner behind two immense wax candles set in tall heavy bronze candlesticks, the size of small bed

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posts. These were lighted in an otherwise darkened room and flickering ruefully, cast a peculiar spell of beauty over the gay throngs which sometimes assembled here.”42 As final touches, Eugene adds a grand piano of old English oak, a music cabinet in French burnt woodwork, a carved easel for one of his best pictures, and a “black marble pedestal bearing a yellow stained marble bust of Nero, with his lascivious, degenerate face scowling grimly at the world, and two gold plated candelabra of eleven branches each hung upon the north wall” (474). Although suggestions of naiveté, vanity, and growing madness shadow the inventories of objets d’art cherished by Rowland and Roderick, Fagerolles and Vandover, they are unaccompanied by commentary from the novels’ authors. But when it comes to the decorations Eugene Witla is able to afford on his salary during an interlude as a business executive (money he lacked during his struggles to create art), Theodore Dreiser steps in to explain without irony the nature of Eugene’s desires. They are, after all, Dreiser’s own desires—as much as when he reveled in the descriptions he gave to the “swell” saloon managed by Hurstwood in Sister Carrie and the lures of “the beautiful life” he shares with Clyde Griffith in An American Tragedy. Dreiser does not speak like a Gabriel Nash (who would show only contempt for the dreams of raw midwesterners like Dreiser and Witla), but his American Dream is as much an escape from ugliness into beauty as any Nash would sanction—despite the fact that the Dream often becomes the Tragedy. Says Dreiser, “It is difficult to indicate to those who have never come out of poverty into luxury, or out of comparative uncouthness into refinement, the veil or spell which the latter comes eventually to cast over the inexperienced mind, to perfect its illusions and to create spells” (488). “To those who have come out of inharmony, harmony is a spell, and to those who have come out of poverty, luxury is a dream of delight.” As a “lover of beauty,” Eugene is entranced by this perfect world of which country houses, city mansions, city and country clubs, expensive hotels and inns, cars, resorts, beautiful women, affected manners, subtlety of appreciation and perfection of appointment generally were the inherent concomitants. This was the true heaven—that material and spiritual perfection on earth, of which the world was dreaming and to which, out of toil, disorder, shabby ideas, mixed opinions, non-understanding and all the ill to which the flesh is heir, it was constantly aspiring. Here was no sickness, no weariness apparently, no ill health or untoward circumstances. All the troubles, disorders and imperfections of existence were here carefully swept aside and one saw only the niceness, the health and strength of being (488–89).43



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These dreams are meant as means to attain order and harmony, but where is there evidence that this welter of things pulled from the attics of the mind will serve that end? They had scant relationship with the transparent absolutes of Nature and Soul expounded by Stillman or the prosaic verifications sought by the Veblenians. Where in these uncoordinated jumbles are the centralizing idea, the stabilizing acts of composition, and the force to create paintings held together by ingrained elements? Would surrounding oneself with such objects lead to a coherent American aesthetic? In the opinion of William Merritt Chase, the highly successful artist, teacher, and leader of New York’s Tenth Street art salon, they would do for the time being. As Chase put it, “Take the best from everything.” His famous studio was visual proof of his belief, as well as evidence that he had achieved the goal he set upon his return to America from studies in Munich. “I intend to have the finest studio in New York.” Chase’s studio is captured in paint in his Interior of the Artist’s Studio of 1880, as well as in the fulsome description included in H. W. Sheldon’s Hours with Art and Artists of 1882. It was embellished by Japanese umbrellas, Egyptian pots, wood carvings of saints, Madonnas, and crucifixes, a Nuremberg chair, the facsimile of “a Puritan high-crowned hat, with enormous buckle, and one or two Italian court-swords,” Venetian tapestries, the “paraphernalia of warfare—guns, both Eastern and Venetian, swords, pistols, bugles, East Indian drums and tom-toms,” a mix of Turkish, German, Renaissance, Laplander items, and a “Japanese ivory idol [that] sits complacently alongside of a carved wooden saint, while a Greek bronze of Apollo stands proudly by.”44 Chase’s studio is a representative compendium of the foreign art influences with which American artists from the 1880s to World War I felt thoroughly at home, employing them as aids to aestheticize their lives. “A natural performer and a great showman,” Chase made certain that he dressed as a fine objet d’art should. “Elegant and debonair, he generally wore a cutaway coat, a scarf threaded through a bejewelled ring, and a carnation in his buttonhole,” while adding the further accessories of several Russian hounds. Chase’s friend James McNeill Whistler could combine all the necessary elements of the aesthetic life—the costume, the studio, the personal demeanor, and the art. So could Chase. Nor was Chase considered an aberrant type for Americans to emulate. “The national style, so far as there can be any American style, is a composite, blending indistinguishably the influence of old and new schools of painting. In a certain sense, Mr. Chase is a typical American artist. . . . moreover, he is sane, unsentimental, truthful, and unpretentious.”45 Just how “sane, unsentimental, truthful, and unpretentious” are the artist figures in the collection of novels by Henry James, Emile Zola, Frank Norris, and

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Theodore Dreiser (with Rudyard Kipling adding his own version) remains in question. Yet they stand as test cases in the literary scene as to the fates that come to those who live the aesthetic life to the utmost. Aesthetics of Fellowship

The novels under review surround their artists with crucial relationships: patrons, comrades, and lovers. For artists who view themselves as outsiders to the larger social scene, a sense of stability is gained through participation in miniature societies made up of likeminded companions. This participation reinforces the wish to be capable of doing without anything or anyone that exists beyond their work—that is, themselves. Rowland Mallet becomes troubled over signs of his young protégé’s intense self-absorption, living out an aesthetic that would have displeased Greenough since it contained no sense of the “whole.” Because of Roderick’s “never thinking of others save as they figured in his own dreams, this extraordinary insensibility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or compassion—things to which he seemed perfectly indifferent and of which he could make no use. The great and characteristic point with him was the perfect separateness of his sensibility. He never saw himself as part of a whole; only as the clear-cut, sharp-edged, isolated individual, rejoicing or raging, as the case might be, but needing in any case absolutely to affirm himself ” (1:429). Contributing to the total focus Roderick places upon his own desires is the fact that (as in most of James’s international novels) the Americans live in isolation within the wider European community. Roderick’s only fellow artists are Miss Blanchard, Glorianni, and Sam Singleton—persons who matter only if they are quick to extend their approval. In New England Roderick had had to make do without any “sustaining atmosphere.” The only sustenance that matters in Rome does not come from other artists, only from the aesthetic atmosphere itself. Zola’s His Masterpiece offers more layers to the situation that shapes the artist and the art community. Claude likes to hide away in his studio. “He lived there like a savage, with an absolute contempt for everything that was not painting. He had fallen out with his relatives, who disgusted him; he had even stopped visiting his aunt . . . because she looked too flourishing and plump” (32). Yet Claude needs the companionship of Sandoz, just as Claude is essential to Sandoz in his work as critic and journalist. “They spurred each other mutually, they went mad with dreams of glory; and there was such a burst of youth, such a passion,



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for work about their plans, that they themselves often smiled afterwards at those great, proud dreams which seemed to endow them with suppleness, strength, and spirit” (37). Claude and Sandoz, together with Mahoudean and Jory, are joined by their “dreams of glory.” They are also united “by huge contempt for everything that was not art—contempt for fortune, contempt for the world at large, and, above all, contempt for politics” (63). “At that moment . . . nothing divided them as yet; neither the profound dissemblance of their various natures, of which they themselves were ignorant, nor their rivalries, which would someday bring them into collision. Was not the success of one the success of all of the others?” (75).46 Then the balance tips. Claude’s companions now “prostrated themselves before him, overwhelmed him with the hopes they set in him.” With the fervor that enthralls those who await a messiah, Claude’s friends believe that “he alone, with his great gifts, his vigorous touch, would become the master, the recognised chief. . . . they were awaiting the necessary man of genius, the one who would incarnate the new formula in masterpieces. What a position to take! to master the multitude, to open up a century, to create a new art!” (183). In the human dynamics that rules Zola’s social vision, it is inevitable that fellowship will be replaced by a “real ferocity in the struggle, a longing to destroy one another” (316). Soon Claude becomes “the great culprit.” In the minds of his former colleagues, he is “that abortive great artist, that impotent fellow” who has “utterly compromised them” (317). One man wonders “why I ever joined his band,” and another claims that he “robbed me of my originality.” Everyone is unnerved by “the violence of the talk” that swirls around Claude. “It was a stampede, the snapping of the last ties, in their stupefaction at suddenly finding that they were strangers and enemies, after a long youth of fraternity together” (318).47 At the “manifest” level of narrative, these novels often negate the hope that mutual striving after great art can withstand the strains of individuals locked into private dreams. But at the “latent” level there is the hot glow of comradeship fed by the presence of beautiful young men on the quest for beauty. James’s Roderick Hudson is the obvious example, what with Rowland Mallet’s infatuation for his protégé’s physical splendor, which reflects the aesthetic pleasures served up to him by the Italian experience.48 At the conclusion, when Rowland finds Roderick’s body at the bottom of the Alpine ravine and gazes upon the “thing that yesterday was his friend,” he is struck by the fact that the body is “singularly little disfigured.” To move the body “would attest some fatal fracture, some horrible physical dishonour,” but—left as it is, face up—“violence, having done her ravages, had stolen away in shame,” for even now that face is

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“all so innocently fair.” Sam Singleton agrees. “He was the most beautiful man!” (1:524). Roderick, that precious objet d’art, the one intended to create great art, is dead. “Now that all was over Rowland understood how up to the brim, for two years, his personal life had been filled” (1:526).49 Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed falls more readily under the category of manly narratives that follow the literary tradition of soldiers, explorers, and engineers—male comrades who adhere to the rules of warrior-comrades. In Kipling’s novel this tradition is imported into the tale of an artist who creates his masterpiece yet is destroyed by a woman’s jealous rage. Dick Heldar and his friend Torpenhow have faced death and adventures together as members of “the New and Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents.”50 Torp supplies the words and Dick the illustrations for the London papers. “Dick followed Torpenhow wherever the latter’s fancy chose to lead him. . . . It was not an easy life in any way, and under its influence the two were drawn very closely together, for they ate from the same dish, they shared the same water-bottle, and most binding tie of all, their mails went off together” (25). Once the blinded artist is betrayed by the loss of his masterpiece at the hands of an angry woman, he elects to go back into the African conflicts, with Torpenhow at his side. He deliberately chooses to ride into “the forefront of the battle,” where he is killed by “a kindly bullet through his head.” Thus the novel’s final sentence reads, “Torpenhow knelt under the lee of the camel, with Dick’s body in his arms” (329).51 Although Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf of 1904 is not a tale of “artists’ lives,” it contains many of the same motifs familiar to the genre. By chance, Humphrey Van Weyden, gentleman of leisure and art critic (known to fellow connoisseurs as the Dean of American Letters, the Second) is taken on board the Ghost, a sealing ship captained by Wolf Larsen. In London’s hands, the result is a strangely commanding version of many of the thematics addressed in the other novels. Among them is the kind of male companionship that a sheltered member of the “ripely” civilized world of the arts will find in the brutal company of men who live at its “rawest” level. Van Weyden is forced to serve as slavey to Mugridge, the ship’s Cockney cook, depicted as a loathsome type who murmurs suggestively over Van Weyden’s “bloomin’ soft skin . . . more like a lydy than any I know of.” Thinks Van Weyden, “There was something repulsive about his touch. I shrank from his hand; my flesh revolted.”52 But if Van Weyden is able to shy away from Mugridge, a coward and a weakling, he cannot do this with Larsen. Van Weyden first describes him as a “gorilla,” but Larsen soon fills him with as much fascination as horror. Wolf Larsen is imaged by London as the manner of man whose figure was wanting in the sculptures introduced into the U.S. Capitol. Larsen is “beauti-



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ful in the masculine sense” and possessed of “the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness in his face.” His is “the face of a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience. . . . He was a magnificent atavism, man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral” (89).53 London emphasizes Larsen’s appeal to Van Weyden in the terms of a splendid work of art. Larsen’s “beautiful face” was “cut as clear and sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added to both his savagery and his beauty.” His mouth, lips, chin, jaw, and nose “might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman” (89). After an injury, Larsen strips down in Van Weyden’s presence, “and the sight of his body quite took my breath away. I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf Larsen’s figure and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it.” He was “the man type, the masculine, and almost a god in his perfectness. As he moved about and raised his arms, the great muscles leapt and moved under the satiny skin. I have forgotten to say that the bronze ended with his face. His body, thanks to his Scandinavian stock, was fair as the fairest woman” (128–29).54 If Larsen could only be converted to the ideals of “republican simplicity,” his likeness would represent the best type of the Caucasian male. Maud Brewster, the delicately formed “civilized” writer who is also brought aboard the Ghost, is similarly fascinated by Larsen’s appearance. But one fateful evening, Larsen’s eyes (first viewed as dark gray, then as clear blue) suddenly turn “golden and masculine, intensely masculine and insistently soft, flashing upon Maud.” She shrinks back in terror. “You are Lucifer,” she cries out before he seizes her in an attempted rape (226). Over the course of London’s narrative, the novel’s true hero evolves from gorilla (raw) to god (ripe) to satanic presence (magnificent rot). By the end of each of these novels, the artist (however much admired or reviled) exists alone. Self-isolation from the pack gives him that clear space where he may create magnificently. A pervasive sense of aloneness also heightens what these narratives take as a primary factor in the making of art and the test of a true aesthetic: costly dedication to suffering and hard work. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of art gained stature both in Europe and the United States. Talent and determination found their rewards. But the circumstances portrayed in the novels by Zola, James, Norris, Dreiser, and Kipling are seldom happy ones. Personal tragedies are the rule, and they are seen as necessary. Some are sloppily conveyed by their authors and more risible than one might wish, but the need to emphasize the cost paid to make art

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has much to say about art life as the reading public viewed it during this period. It also says much about the authors’ own Art Thoughts. Where better to find them spread before us than in a James preface? Nick Dormer, the painter figure from The Tragic Muse, is meant to expend anguish over his choice to leave the political world behind in order to give himself over to a career in portraiture. But as James’s preface looks back, James finds he must gently chide Nick, and therefore himself, for having failed the formula by which Nick, as a character in a novel, would be a success. “It strikes me, alas, that [Nick] is not quite so interesting as he was fondly intended to be and this in spite of the multiplication, within the picture, of his pains and penalties; so that while I turn this slight anomaly over I come upon a reason that affects me as singularly charming and touching. . . . Any presentation of the artist in triumph must be flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subject—it can only smuggle in relief and variety.”55 We can see why James seldom liked to claim success for his own writing. How uninteresting that would be. Better to use the prefaces to ponder the fascinating struggles he undertook in the creative act of self-analyzing his fictions. The artist’s “triumph, decently, is but the triumph of what he produces, and that is another affair. His romance is the romance he himself projects . . . therefore he mayn’t ‘have’ it, in the form of the privilege of the hero. . . . The privilege of the hero—that is of the martyr or of the interesting and appealing and comparatively floundering person—places him in quite a different category, belongs to him only as to the artist deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished.”56 This is not a pretty picture of the artist’s life. The only solution to his plight (a very Stillman-like view) is to be found in Work. As The Tragic Muse concludes, the one proof of success is when the creator vanishes from the page. “You’ll never find the artist—you only find his work, and that’s all you need find” (8:200). Create, Decay, and Destroy

The would-be genius could give careful attention to looking like an artist and surrounding himself with the trappings of the artist’s studio, but might these activities contribute to the fine arts of procrastination rather than the production of fine art? Without production there is no success. To say this is not to slip into overheated arguments as to the extent to which the late-nineteenthcentury art world had become captive to the powers of capitalism and the new technologies of work production. It is indeed useful to apply the strategies of Taylorism, to read deeply in Weber’s theories of the Work Ethic, and to examine Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the growing taint of mass reproduction—a strategy



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elevated into his own aesthetic by Andy Warhol. It also helps to go back through the centuries to see how laws of supply and demand have lent themselves to the careers of the guildsmen, Raphael, Rubens, and Pollock. Judgments regarding artistic merit and market value take place in due time, but first an artwork has to be out there to be seen, responded to, and (if need be) analyzed, but not merely nattered about. It is easy to ridicule grandiose dreams of accomplishments that have yet to come about. Grandiose schemes pegged to how many yards of art the buyer expects to receive from the supplier are just as vulnerable to attack. One does not think about the Pyramids in the same way one reacts to plans by a Donald Trump or a Hong Kong entrepreneur to build the world’s tallest commercial building. It is to our benefit that Michelangelo gave Pope Julius II the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel rather than the forty-figure tomb the pope had asked for. Vast panoramas of the battles of Waterloo or Gettysburg satisfy the tastes of many, and paintings by artists like Veronese, Delacroix, and Picasso with dimensions that gamble with excess have the general approval of art critics. There is, however, a long history of the particular temptation that lies in the path of America’s aesthetic ventures, one that extends beyond the mathematics of capitalist profits. For emotion’s sake, Americans like things that are very big, and, if possible, sheathed in marble surfaces that are very white. However, big things fail if they ignore the laws of proportion and defy the spirit that verifies the truth of all laws. These were faults Horatio Greenough found alike in St. Peter’s Basilica and in the monument to George Washington. The first reduced itself to “a mechanical assertion of spirit—an attempt at arithmetical demonstration that Christ’s kingdom is of this world.” The second was an enormous obelisk relegated to the celebration of “the arithmetical sublime.”57 In each case, the math was all wrong. However “sublime” as numbers, these edifices betrayed the feelings prompted by the spirit of Christianity and of the American republic. Roderick Hudson has the unfortunate habit of confusing bigness in scale with largeness of vision. He first attracts Rowland Mallet’s notice by an exquisitely small statuette he has created, but once in Europe he dreams solely of gigantic figures. “It’s against the taste of the day, I know; we’ve really lost the faculty to understand beauty in the large ideal way.” Striking the same note as the concluding pages of Emerson’s Nature (“A man is a god in ruins. . . . Man is the dwarf of himself ”), Roderick elaborates his dream. “We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted. . . . I mean to go for big things” (1:116).58 So does Claude in His Masterpiece. He plans to place all Paris on a canvas twenty-six feet in length by sixteen in height since he believes that going large means the same as taking in everything. The

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single counter to bigness as the primary source for “the act of creation” is an object that is very small, very fragile. On January 3, 1855, William Stillman’s introductory essay for the first issue of the Crayon offered a parable. “There is a little blue flower . . . springing up at the first instant of breath the earth gets after its winter trance.” Although buried “fathoms deep under the snow-drifts,” it asserts “its existence, simply by force of the beauty which it embodies.” For Stillman, who writes in those first dark days when no native aesthetic had yet appeared, the flower is Art’s promise, “which is Beauty’s gospel.” At the moment it “lies inert under the cold necessities of a national childhood, and the cares and storms of a political first existence,” but the time is near when America’s artistic future will emerge in full bloom.59 James uses similar references throughout Roderick Hudson to trace the results of Rowland’s hope that the “wonderful flowers” of his young hero’s native talent will be “[t]ransplanted to Rome” (1:50). James’s repeated reference to “the little blue-streaked flower” points to the conflicting desires that thwart the “full bloom” of Roderick’s artistic talents. Rowland is witness to Roderick as “all strangely and endlessly mixed—with his abundance and his scarcity, his power to charm and his power to hurt, the possibilities of his egotism, the uncertainties of his temper, the delicacies of his mind.” In his study of the painful complexity of genius, he realizes that Roderick’s “beautiful faculty of production was thus a double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows at its possessor. Genius was priceless, beneficent, divine, but it was also at its hours capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius accordingly were alternately very enviable and very helpless” (1:222). It is with a shiver of pleasure that we realize that novelists are quick to appropriate, and to enliven, Stillman’s trope for the role of the critic in the flowering of a national aesthetic. Authors will not be satisfied with the optimism of ripeness. They prefer frightening narratives that pull their artist-heroes down through stages of ripeness to decay and final destruction.60 Roderick Hudson enjoys moments when he seems ready to grasp the flower of creation, but little time is allotted in Norris’s Vandover and the Brute to its nurture. Norris goes straight to the business of depicting his protagonist’s descent into rot. Vandover has had “a curious experience” that intimates something terrible is happening to him. He is convinced that it was “above all work that he needed to set him right again, regular work, steady, earnest work” (164). But once he stands before his easel he finds that the “forms he made on the canvas were no adequate reflection of those in his brain” (166). Later he returns to his easel with “a little thrill of joy and of relief,” but “the curious experience repeated itself.” His hand would not do his bidding. The figures “born upon his canvas . . . were no longer his own” (169). The “brute in him” steals away “the true off-



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spring of his mind, putting in their place . . . its own hideous spawn. . . . It was gone—his art was gone; the one thing that could save him. That, too, like all the other good things of his life, he had destroyed. At some time during those years of debauchery it had died, that subtle, elusive something, delicate as a flower; he had ruined it” (170; emphasis added). Norris’s parable of rot is wonderfully lurid, almost impossible to fathom, nearly unbearable to read.61 If the rot that overcomes Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is hidden away on a painted canvas, unseen by others until the conclusion, the stages of Vandover’s fall from the grace of art are minutely and monstrously laid across the novel’s pages. The “animal pleasures” that slowly begin to overcome the young man turn into settled habits (135). He lies abed late, overeating, soaking for hours in his tub. The tempo picks up as the “beast” of his hidden life emerges to ravage his “sensuous artist-nature.” The beast’s “abominable famine gorged with the store of that in him which he felt to be the purest, the cleanest, and the best, its hulk fattened upon the rot and the decay of all that was good, growing larger day by day, noisome, swollen, poddy, a filthy inordinate ghoul, gorged and bloated by feeding on the good things that were dead” (159). Three terrible moments lie ahead for Vandover in the days he still has the capacity to sense what is happening. First he realizes he “can get used to almost anything,” thus is stripped of the will to fight back (225). Second, at the onset of Lycanthropy Pathesis, when he begins to bark, howl, and run naked across the floor, he is struck by the fact that he is three beings: “the real Vandover of every day, the same familiar Vandover that looked back at him from his mirror; then there was the wolf, the beast, whatever the creature was that lived in his flesh, and that struggled with him now, striving to gain the ascendancy, to absorb the real Vandover into its own hideous identity; and last of all, there was a third self, formless, very vague, elusive, that stood aside and watched the strife of the other two” (228).62 At the end, there is the dread moment when Vandover cries out, “My God! to think I was a Harvard man once!” (246). Rowland Mallet realized almost from the start that to be an artist is to possess the sensitivity that makes one vulnerable to decline under the world’s onslaught. But although Roderick becomes increasingly agitated and thrashes about in ways that alarm his friends and family, he does not go mad in any picturesque way. Dreiser’s Eugene Witla will suffer through a nervous breakdown that merely types him in “his look and manner” as “decidedly that of the artist—refined, retiring, subtle” (305). It was left to Norris’s Vandover and to Zola’s Claude to go truly mad—Vandover as the wild beast bred on America’s West Coast, and Claude in the histrionically vivid manner expected of the great French romantics.63 When the day comes that Vandover’s eyes and hands do not obey his will,

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we witness his mastery by “the brute,” the breakdown that, in Norris’s imagination, might come upon any one of us. Poor Claude is also doomed from the start since he is one of the tainted descendents of the Rougon-Macquart line. In Zola’s world individuals afflicted by a rotten physical system and a decayed social system are the first to plunge into madness.64 “And thus [Claude] went on winding himself up, agitated by the strange hereditary lesion which sometimes so greatly assisted his creative powers, but at others reduced him to a state of sterile despair” (43). Suicide is Claude’s final fate, the correct way for an artist to end his career.65 Sandoz-as-Zola provides his interpretation of the bleakness that overtakes men of imagination who must suffer and die because betrayed by the world’s rejection of truth. He voices, in an almost Veblenian tone, his credo for the future: “Almost another generation, perhaps two, will be required before people will be able to paint and write logically, with the high pure simplicity of truth. Truth, nature alone, is the right basis, the necessary guide, outside of which madness begins” (340). If Norris and Zola reveal the horror of the erasure of a person’s original identity in madness, this horror is matched by the destruction of the work through which an artist defines his identity—destroyed either by the artist’s own act or by another’s. Time’s passage caused James’s failure to recall the source of his original impulse to set down the story of Roderick Hudson’s fate, not an act of violence stemming from his own artistic nature. Still he wishes he could restore the vanished thoughts. In his preface James uses figures of speech that reflect a painter’s attempt to revive what has been lost by passing “over his old sunk canvas the wet sponge that shows him what may still come out again.” He will apply “a bottle of varnish and a brush” and make use “again and again of the tentative wet sponge. The sunk surface has here and there, beyond doubt, refused to respond; the buried secrets, the intentions, are buried too deep to rise again. Only if he is lucky, what time wiped clean will surface yet again.”66 A different motive for the erasure of art takes place in Kipling’s The Light That Failed. Bessie Broke, Dick Heldar’s model, destroys the painting of “Melancolia” he completed just before going blind. Taking her revenge on Dick—“the man who had come between her and her desire [to be with Torpenhow] and who used to make fun of her”—Bessie “emptied half a bottle of turpentine on a duster, and began to scrub the face of the Melancolia viciously. The paint did not smudge quickly enough. She took a palette-knife and scraped, following each stroke with the wet duster. In five minutes the picture was a formless, scarred muddle of colors” (210–11). Upon learning that his masterpiece no longer exists, the blinded artist goes willingly toward a suicidal death in battle. But if there is



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drama when forces from outside act as the destroyers, the highest drama comes about when artists bring destruction upon their own creations. Crying out, “I’ve driven the money-changers out of the temple!” Roderick Hudson smashes the bust of Lawyer Striker, the man who would strike against Roderick’s desire to develop his talents abroad (1:38). In this gesture and with these words, Roderick believes that his joyous fury has freed him from America’s philistine society. In contrast, the artists in His Masterpiece undertake a desperate series of “killings” as they attempt to wipe out the rot that eats at them and their creations. In front of Mahoudeau’s studio there is an immense plaster statute that has found no buyer. Too large to fit inside his rooms, it was left “rotting out in the open like so much rubbish shot from a cart, a lamentable spectacle, weather-bitten, riddled by the rain’s big, grimy tears” (208). Inside the studio, “a kind of tragic cavern” permeated by a “tomb-like chill,” there are other figures “which had been modelled with passion and exhibited, and which had then come back for want of buyers.” They “seemed to be shivering with their noses turned to the wall, forming a melancholy row of cripples, some already badly damaged, showing mere stumps of arms, and all dust-begrimed and claybespattered. Under the eyes of their artist creator, who had given them his heart’s blood, these wretched nudities dragged out years of agony . . . lapsed into the grotesque horror of all lifeless things, until a day came when, taking up a mallet, he himself finished them off, breaking them into mere lumps of plaster, so as to be rid of them” (209). Claude feels the same frustration as Mahoudeau. “‘Decidedly, I’m a brute. I shall never do anything.’ And in a fit of mad rage he wanted to rush at his picture and dash his fist through it. His friends had to hold him back. . . . Still shaking, he relapsed into silence, and stared at the canvas with an ardent fixed gaze that blazed with all the horrible agony of his powerlessness” (43). For years Claude has struggled to get his painting included in the annual Salon exhibition, “to prove I am not a brute.” Stretching sixteen by ten feet, his canvas of a forest glade is “superb in its violence and ardent vitality of color.” “On the grass, amidst all the summer vegetation, lay a nude woman with one arm supporting her head, and though her eyes were closed she smiled amidst the golden shower that fell around her. In the background, two other women, one fair, and the other dark, wrestled playfully, setting light flesh tints amidst all the green leaves. And, as the painter had wanted something dark by way of contrast in the foreground, he had contented himself with seating there a gentleman, dressed in a black velveteen jacket” (23).67 Claude is unable to finish the face of the nude woman to his satisfaction. Using a series of models, then Christine, the woman who later becomes his common-

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law wife, Claude paints, erases, repaints again and again. As we shall see, Claude will hang himself in a manner true to Zola’s commitment to romantic realism. His end will not be like that of James’s Roderick Hudson, “beautiful in death.” Claude will be found hanging “with his feet bare, looking horrible, with his black tongue protruding, and his bloodshot eyes starting from their orbits” (332). Yet Zola, the closeted idealist, refuses to capitulate to the denial of acts of art. The masterpiece will be destroyed and its creator lost, but as Sandoz stands by Claude’s grave in “the vast bead-flowered field of death,” he delivers the last, alldefinitive sentence of the novel, “Let’s go to work” (346).68 Fatal Muses

What life force drives these novels, which span the years between the 1870s and the first decade of the twentieth century—the force that inspires their artists to pursue acts of creation even if it leads them toward ruin? It is the muse of Beauty, incarnate as person or place. Yet there is little resemblance between the resident muses in these novels and the glowing tributes earlier paid by the Crayon. Nature was Stillman’s muse, the means by which Truth, Goodness, and Beauty come into being once the Actual moves into the realm of the Ideal. The links of the triad beloved by the romantic spirit are frail if nonexistent in the persons of Christina Light, Miriam Rooth, and the too-many-to-name young girls idolized by Eugene Witla. Truth, Goodness, and Beauty cling together tenuously in the person of Roderick Hudson-as-muse but are nowhere to be seen in Bessie, Christine, or Wolf Larsen. The inspiration offered Vandover by his beloved tiled stove betrays him at the last, while Paris-as-Venus does splendid if ravaging duty as the muse of His Masterpiece (as will Venice in The Wings of the Dove, the James novel that lies ahead). The muses that dominate these novels have severed their ties with the moral aesthetics of the Crayon. They are also free of the more exacting requirements of Veblenian scientific inquiry, unless one takes into account intellectual Elegance at the service of reasoned Truth, while skirting questions as to whether either beds down with Goodness. The late-century muse pursues its own whims, whether to aid or to torment the artist in its thrall. James’s preface to Roderick Hudson reviews his commitment to the “art of representation.” He searches out “that veiled face of his Muse, which he is condemned forever and all anxiously to study.” Its practice, with experience, is guided through “widening” circles, which it must “organise” into “some system of observation—for fear, in the admirable immensity, of losing its way.” James’s muse shows that “[e]verything counts, nothing is superfluous in such a survey”



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when entered into his “explorer’s note-book.”69 Muses in the tradition of Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura were meant to stir the literary imagination and to provide the sublime language that images the writers’ deepest thoughts. But in the case of Roderick Hudson, James must ask his muse to show him how to conjure up that other kind of muse—the mortal form embedded within the narrative from whom the artist-protagonist extracts a tangible form as the model for his art. Turn away from the preface to Roderick Hudson to see how well James, as author, was aided by the muse of presentation in his need to provide a muse to meet Roderick’s desires. Not all that well, James decides in the harsh honesty of his hindsight. Besides the authorial weaknesses in his portrayal of the aesthetic adventures of Roderick and Rowland in Rome, James singles out the damage he has done to the incarnate muse the tale requires. In truth, “the determinant function attributed to Christina Light, the character of well-nigh sole agent of [Roderick’s] catastrophe that this unfortunate young woman has forced upon her fails to command itself to our sense of truth and proportion.”70 James takes the full blame upon himself. If he is to make clear Roderick’s capacity for ruin, he, not Christina, is remiss in carrying out this important experiment in “truth and proportion.” It is not that James portrays Christina in too weak a manner. Rather, her portrait is so powerful, so “coloured,” that she upsets the balance of the composition. Christina’s vitality as a created figure “produced even more life than the subject required.” She spills out beyond her given function within the story—an expenditure “somehow to be spent” that James later cashed out in The Princess Casamassima.71 What is it Christina Light “represents” that makes her a muse out of control, both to the author who fails on her behalf and to the fictive artist who lets her aid his “capacity for ruin”? Christina is beauty incarnate, a prophetic vision of transcendent perfection, whether she appears as a “tired princess” (1:95) or is transfixed by a “glow with the white light of a splendid pearl” (1:201). She can also prophesy her own fate. She will become the reluctant princess should Roderick fail her as her muse; should he not be “great” for her sake. Christina Light as muse is no illusion, no chimera that leads artists astray from the path of virtue. Hers is an ideal but human beauty with “the soul of a world-wearied mortal” that had “found its way into the blooming body of a goddess” (1:198). Within her “strangely mixed nature there was circle within circle and depth beneath depth” (1:450). The treasure of her head is claimed by her mother, the woman who has “raised money on that girl’s face” and is ready to sell her to the highest bidder (1:252). Her heart is her own, the means by which she hopes to escape the corruption her seductive beauty inflicts on easily seduced

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young men like Roderick. But with no one able to assist her, she will become the muse who represents all she wishes not to be. With a character this willful and unpredictable, Christina Light is beyond anyone’s control, including that of her author. In a novel that takes its title from Joshua Reynolds’s famous portrait Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, Henry James must determine the role played by Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse. James’s preface declares his intention that Miriam function as the object of desire that links two separate plots.72 But how well can he make her play her two parts: Miriam as the compelling factor that encourages Nick Dormer to give up public service for the artist’s life, and Miriam refusing to forego her stage career to satisfy Peter Sherringham, career diplomat? When Nick paints her splendid “head,” all he asks is that she be “interesting.” Peter demands that Miriam be “interesting” for himself alone, pulled free from her adoring audience. To be “interesting” is what James wants his novel to be, but everything depends on the kind of muse with whom he himself must deal. Miriam Rooth is a cheerful muse, so good-natured she lacks the ominous sense of doom that hangs over Christina Light and others that follow in the tradition of fatal muses. Nonetheless, to Peter Sherringham, by the fact of “the artistic character” she represents, she is “unscrupulous, nervous, capricious, wanton.” Peter tells her, “You must forage and savage and leave a track behind you; you must live upon the country you traverse” (7:359–60). Miriam is no fool. When Peter later accuses her of being “a devouring demon,” she turns his words back on him, speaking up for all muses who are blamed for the fatal acts laid upon them by their interpreters. “It’s you who make trouble, who are sore and suspicious and super subtle, not taking things as they come and for what they are, but twisting them into misery and falsity” (8:250).73 Miriam is worrisome to James as well as to those who gaze upon her within the narrative. But the puzzle Miriam offers is different from that prompted by Christina Light’s presence. Christina harbors two complex natures, while Miriam seems to have no nature at all. When James asks whether Miriam is “real” or only a fluent series of assumed stage roles, she becomes the center of our own debates over representation. She is the problem that agitates theorists of philosophy, theology, psychology, and the arts whenever they try to locate the source of a thing’s reality. William James gave over many pages to considerations of “the hidden self ” and the contending factors of Mind and Brain. Henry James repeatedly returned to issues of personal identity and public pretense, as in “The Private Life” and “The Real Thing,” but in The Tragic Muse he takes the question to its deepest



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level, asking what it means to be a muse when one has no “canvas” to offer—“no nature” to replicate. The void that may lie beneath Miriam’s surface does not disturb Nick, but Peter is wild to know what that her consists of.74 Obsessed by conventions of transparency, Peter demands that she reveal the “fond or background” that fills the “intervals” between the roles she so magnificently feigns in public (7:210–11). Poor Christina Light struggles to know who she is (creature of “head” or “heart”). Miriam Rooth feels no such anxieties. She is her own best muse, confident that her voice, her head, her plasticity allow her to express the myriad of roles that brings her huge public success. “I know what I am,” she states, secure in what she produces through her work. All she need care about is how well she refines the coarse material of her talents through the exertion of strong nerves and indomitable will (7:211). It may be taken as a tragic loss that Nick Dormer is left behind at the novel’s end to paint a “noble portrait” of Julia Dallow, the woman who may yet lead him back into politics. This is not the fault of Miriam, who is forever “interesting.” What James found unfortunate was his own failure to make Nick “interesting” in his own right. The muses that pass through The Light That Failed and The “Genius” do little more than move the plots along. True, Bessie Broke is an active force in the short, not very happy, artistic career of Dick Heldar. Bessie is the sole muse-aspaid-model in this group of narratives, since muses and models are not one and the same. Dick pays for Bessie’s “eyes” to inspire his portrayal of “Melancolia” since they express the wild laughter that defines melancholia’s true meaning. But Kipling takes no interest in what makes a woman a muse, either for others or for her own ends. Her function for Kipling and for Dick is to appear in Dick’s studio until the painting is completed, then disappear after demolishing the canvas out of pique, leaving the narrative free to move forward to the hero’s tragically heroic and “interesting” death in battle. If Bessie serves Kipling as a onetime muse-for-hire, the young women who act as Eugene Witla’s harem of muses are many, offering Dreiser little canvas to work upon. After the narrator of The “Genius” explains that “beauty” is the sole motivation for Eugene’s life, Dreiser has no need to analyze the aesthetics of the muse. All we are told is that Eugene has always been inspired by “ideal womanhood, physical beauty,” qualities he seeks in a range of women who exist only as names. Readers pass by Stella, Miriam, Christine, Ruby, Frieda, an unnamed model at life-drawing classes who is a “little flower of the streets,” and Suzanne. The person fetchingly named Angela Blue is the woman Eugene marries, but even she proves a disappointment once she turns into a thoroughly domesticated, completely banal “wife.” We never see Eugene’s muses. We are simply told that they are young, pretty, and available.

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The Bourguereau painting of Venus seen at an exhibition excites Eugene more than that of any pretty woman who passes his line of vision. One of that artist’s “great, full-blown women,” her sensuality and fecundity are “painted with a sense of the bridal bed in the background; of motherhood and of fat, growing babies, joyously nursed” (51).75 In contrast, Mrs. Ramsay is on display in To the Lighthouse to represent the perfect “beauty of the world.” Questions linger, as they did for Miriam Rooth, as to whether there is anything “behind it,” but it cannot be doubted that Mrs. Ramsay is “a creative force.” She vanishes like vapor from the scene once she dies, yet leaves her “mark.” She will be interpreted in any manner of ways by those in whose memory she still exists. This is what true muses do.76 Not to be overlooked is the destructive force represented by Wolf Larsen, who serves as Jack London’s muse in The Sea-Wolf. Maud Brewster may have been London’s notion of what muses are like. She fits the type elevated by the Crayon to inspire men to new heights: fragile of body, tender of spirit, feminine, ethereal, good. She is, however, embarrassingly outmoded, a tepid footnote to the annals of America’s female representations of the Soul. The person who matters in London’s novel is Wolf Larsen—the muse who inspires Humphrey Van Weyden to become more a man than he was.77 Van Weyden is saved from his meager life as literary critic and aesthete by Larsen’s beauty, the force of his personality, his overpowering will, and his intellectual questioning that pries open the truth of the world’s indifferent cruelty. With Larsen as his muse, Van Weyden becomes a Real Man. Yes, he worries that he may become as ruthless, as brutal, as primitive a force as the man he emulates. He believes he needs Maud, “My Woman,” as his muse. Maud was herself desired by Larsen (a Caliban who seeks a Miranda) on that rare occasion when he was “quite out of himself ” (517). But Van Weyden’s manly chest to which she clings, has, like the rest of his body, been toughened by living in Larsen’s world of work. London’s Maud can only remind Van Weyden what civilized behavior once looked like back in San Francisco—the city, by the way, where Norris’s Vandover is rapidly degenerating into his own “wolfness.” Rivals to the Death

Of this lot of fictional narratives devoted to questions of Art and Life as embodied literally in the figure of the muse, Emile Zola’s His Masterpiece furnishes the most terrifying tale of all in that it brings issues raised by the other narratives to a head. His novel confirms the fact that these authors’ literary imaginations were not preoccupied by an aesthetics governed solely by national or national-



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istic motives. Beauty is their theme, as well as death. The beauty of the muses at their center has no need to gain approval in the terms laid down in congressional hearings or by art critics in the local media. The artists’ studios and their Art Thoughts exuberantly if somewhat crudely absorb all kinds of beauty, whatever geographical boundaries they cross. Italy no longer defines what good art is. Locales such as Paris come into play but so do London, New York, and San Francisco. Western-centric as they are, the artists unabashedly commit the sins of Orientalism by appropriating the arts of Japan, India, and North Africa for their own use. Muses like Christina Light and Miriam Rooth are a mélange of races and national backgrounds. As far as we can tell, Dreiser’s pretty women are “American.” Kipling’s Bessie is undeniably Cockney, but Dick Heldar’s sexual tastes are shown to be almost brutally nonexclusive. The sole example of a muse that lives up to an author’s specific ethnic demands is Wolf Larsen, who stands out as the true type of the Anglo-Saxon race. By and large, what matters are the stories told about the essentially nationless aesthetics by which the artist lives. That Zola’s His Masterpiece brings these matters to a head is quite literally so. Christina Light’s glory and curse is her head. In metaphorical terms, she must make a crucial distinction between following her heart (finding her soul in being “good”) or her head (accepting the fate a materialistic society exacts of one possessed of such a face). Miriam Rooth’s dramatic talents are enhanced by her bodily movements and her extraordinary voice, but it is the configuration of her head that makes her a muse for Nick and Peter. Dick Heldar has no use for Bessie other than that her head expresses what he needs for his masterpiece. But it is Zola’s parable of the artist’s life of desire and failure that follows through on this trope to its tragic end. Governed by his bifurcated mind, Zola has two stories to relate. The primary one (marked as realism) concerns the travails of Claude, the genius who encounters all the obstacles that Paris under the Second Empire can throw at him: the politics of official art that control the annual exhibitions; the counterpolitics launched by the young rebels who back the salons of those rejected by the state; the failure to acquire an influential patron or an honest art dealer; the mockery of a fickle and ignorant public; the abandonment by former comrades; the creeping ravages of insanity inherited from the Rougon-Macquart bloodline. The other, the most intense, of Zola’s stories (that one told by the romantic) is of Claude’s battle with his muse. Rather, the battle against Claude by his two muses—the woman who poses for the central figure in his masterpiece and that figure who is the Muse itself. The story of “the head” complements the realistic, almost journalistic account of Paris during the upheavals in the art world of the Second Empire. It

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is joined with the high romantic, often melodramatic intensity of the story of the “heart,” which tells of the life and death of Claude. Thus it is on a dark and stormy night that Claude comes across a young woman collapsed at the corner of the Rue de la Femme sans Tête. Although Claude distrusts all womankind, he gives her shelter in his studio. As she lies asleep, he is astonished by what he sees. “There in every point, was the figure he had vainly sought for his picture.” In the morning he tells her, “I’ve got a figure in my picture yonder which doesn’t make head-way at all.” He pleads for her to let him sketch her. “I only want the head—nothing but the head” (9, 11). The young woman, later named as Christine, disappears from the story for a long interval until she returns to pose and to stay. At first it is only Christine’s head that Claude believes he needs to complete the nude figure he has drawn from a hired model. He wonders, however, if it is “possible to stick one woman’s head on another’s shoulders?” He comes to understand that he needs all of Christine if he wishes to “realize his dream” (103). Several years pass. The two are joined in common-law union, but it becomes increasingly apparent to Christine that Claude’s studio and his imagination are not inhabited by “she alone.” As Zola’s long and tortuous narrative progresses inches forward, Claude’s life is wracked by despair over the fact that he seems unable to complete his masterpiece. He cannot get the woman “right”—the image demanded by his muse—as he paints, scrubs out, repaints over and over the head and body of Christine. An unhappy artist is bad enough. Worse still is the anger rising within Christine that will lead to an ending that makes contemporary analyses of “the male gaze” seem not only feeble but wide of the mark. In Zola’s novel, it is the woman/ women whose penetrating eyes destroy the male. From Christine’s first sight of Claude’s painting she feels “a hatred against it, the instinctive hatred of an enemy.” She “at once recognized herself ” in the wildness and brutality of his method (83). For a while, however, the two exist in a period of happiness. “She understood well enough that art robbed her more and more of her lover each day,” but despite her sense of “the partial abdication of self,” which causes her moments of “a sadness, a dread of what might be in store for her later on,” the “real struggle between her self and art had not yet begun” (195). As time passes, with Claude’s growing obsession to create the perfect painting, Christine’s “vindictiveness grew in proportion to her admiration; she revolted at having to stand by and witness, as it were, a diminution of herself, the blow of another love beneath her own roof ” (225). It is her arm up here, her body, her head. She has been transformed into an image, not treasured as a beloved wife. “It was as if Claude had introduced a mistress into [the studio]—that woman he was painting. . . . The duplication of herself well nigh drove Christine



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wild with jealousy. . . . she fully realized that he preferred her counterfeit to herself, that her image was the worshipped one, the sole thought, the affection of his every hour” (229). Two more years go by. Although the picture is almost finished, Claude scratches it out and begins to paint it “entirely over again.” “Ever battling with reality, and ever beaten, it was a struggle with the Angel. He was wearing himself out with his impossible task of making a canvas hold all nature” (299; emphasis added). Give or take another hundred or so Zolaesque pages, the tragedy nears its conclusion. One night Christine enters the studio to find Claude struggling with the rendering of “the central figure, the nude woman which remained the dread and the desire of his hours of toil.” “He was painting her like a visionary, whom a wild craving for truth had brought to the madness of the unreal.” Christine stares in horror at the figure, “gilded like the columns of a tabernacle . . . shimmering with yellow and red, splendid and unnatural . . . like unto a monstrance gleaming with precious stones and intended for religious adoration.” At this moment she realizes she “had suffered too much, she would not tolerate it” (328). Christine confronts Claude. She identifies “what has been killing me ever since I have known you. Ah! that painting, yes, your painting, she’s the murderess who has poisoned my life!” She pleads with Claude to give up what has defeated him and is killing her. “If you can’t be a great painter, life, at least, remains to us. Ah! life, life!” (330). Claude cries back in words that express the terrible credo of the Artist: “I won’t go away with you, I won’t be happy, I will paint!” (331). But then he turns and faces the painted image as for the first time. “He was at length awakening from his dream, and the woman thus seen from below, at a distance of a few paces, filled him with stupefaction. Who had just painted that idol of some unknown religion? . . . Was it he who had unconsciously created that symbol of insatiable passion, that unhuman presentment of flesh, which had become transformed into gold and diamonds under his fingers, in his vain effort to make it live?” (332). Christine takes him in her arms, leeching away his will: “she was softening him and conquering him.” She feels him yield and raises “a cry of victory: ‘At last you are mine! There is only I left, the other is quite dead’” (333). (Shades of the governess and Miles at the conclusion of James’s The Turn of the Screw!) Exhausted, Claude and Christine lie down together but in the night “he heard a loud voice calling to him from the far end of the studio.” Claude goes to the painting, saying, “Yes, yes, I’m coming” (333–34). When the morning light awakens Christine she discovers that Claude has hanged himself in front of the canvas. His face is “turned toward the picture, close to the nude woman, as if he had wished to infuse his soul into her with his last gasp, and as if he were

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still looking at her with his expressionless eyes” (334). Christine, too, “dies” into physical collapse and idiocy. As for the painting, Sandoz “demolished and burnt [it] with my own hands, and right gladly, I assure you, even as one avenges oneself ” (337). All along Christine had been unaware that Claude had yet another, even more powerful muse to worship, one which she could never have annihilated. It was the city of Paris itself, which he envisioned as “Venus emerging triumphantly from the froth of the Seine amidst all the omnibuses on the quays and the lightermen working at the Port of St. Nicholas” (223). Claude lived in the wrong century for his desires to have been answered, as they had been for the artists of Venice on friendly terms with the city’s resident goddess, and for Botticelli, who lifted his Venus from the foam. Death is the sole muse left to Claude, the only means to “go beyond” the dreary realities of Paris. Sandoz tells Claude the stern requirements exacted of the artist of modern times who wishes to join reality with truth: “To be in the right, he must begin by dying.” On hearing these words, “Claude’s eyes abruptly turned towards a corner of the drawing-room as if to pierce the wall and go far away yonder, whither something had summoned him” (309). In the old days, when goddesses and mortal muses lived among men, it seemed possible to pierce walls without the cost of death. Those were the days when the sciences and the arts could, together, bring the transcendent order of art into the abyss of life’s actualities. How might that union be achieved in present times? Piercing the Wall

In 1905 Albert Einstein was about to reveal the laws of relativity, which upended commonplace notions of time and space. In 1902 and 1903 Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were published. In these novels James interweaves “effable” scenes (visible on the page through detailed descriptions) with intimations of the “ineffable” (that which lies hidden within the consciousness that creates the tale)—“ineffable” in the way that James, happy agnostic that he was, inserts a powerful sense of the transcendent that lies outside the control of conventional framing devices. In the practice of their arts, mathematicians, painters, and writers bargain with the assumption that one cannot “make lines beyond [the picture’s edges] without encountering the frame.”78 Consider the solution to this problem offered by Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl as Adam Verver comments, “You must have had things to be beyond them. It’s a kind of law of perspective.”79 Perhaps the fail-



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ure of Claude to achieve his greatest wish—to pierce the wall—came because he lacked the wall-piercing techniques of an inward perspectival vision. Projecting perspectives is the technique whereby one grasps a sense of deep space once two-dimensional surfaces create an illusion of figures placed along a three-dimensional plane. From the ancients onward, the history of the plastic arts shares in the history of geometry. In turn, as Leon Battista Alberti declared in his seminal treatise “On Painting” in 1435, this technique feeds into the history of literary narratives. These three elements instructed James in the making of narrative worlds centered on the staircase—that material structure that facilitates (or hinders) ascent and descent and whose geometrics guide triumphal movements upward or invite the dangers of “coming down.” Although the ancient Greeks commanded the sophisticated geometries needed to represent naturalistic illusions of three-dimensional space, there was a long hiatus before Euclidean solids and Arabic mathematics were picked up again in fourteenth-century Italy, but not through lack of awareness of earlier geometric theories.80 Rather, they had been set aside in the name of fostering sacred truths through the use of hieratic symbols placed along a flattened plane. In Jacobello de Fiore’s Coronation of the Virgin (c. 1438), the figures of Christ and the Virgin are large, whereas the others gathered in adoration, stacked as though on tiers of a wedding cake, are small—thus making clear their lesser ranking in the divine scale. (Rankings within the angelic orders were colorcoded: seraphim with red wings, cherubim with blue.) But the time came when science acquired authority over theology, and terms such as “central projection,” “vanishing point,” and “linear perspective” took hold, enfolding creatures of the quotidian within “naturalistic space.”81 Vistas beyond the immediate foreground were opened to polished techniques of piercing. Once again the debate was set in motion, with imagination pitted against observation. Cennino Cennini’s “Book of Painting” of 1400 insisted the artist intends to “discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadows of natural objects.” In 1435 Alberti’s “On Painting” countered that “the painter has nothing to do with the things that are not visible.” Of course, students of optical geometry realize “the perception of representational paintings” is a “very different process from the perception of actual scenes in depth.” Subjects placed upon wall or canvas, sacred or secular, are “to be regarded as an arrangement of symbols for reality,” not as final testimony for the truth of the Absolute.82 Perspectival art rose out of applied geometry, not from theoretical geometrics.83 By means of brilliant innovations in surveying and measuring, Brunelleschi strove to erect a dome for the Baptistery in Florence that would not topple.

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Similarly, Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl learns how to “pile up blocks, skillfully and dizzily.” Her hope is that the elements of her marital situation would rise “so high that the structure would have to be noticed and admired.” Even so, she faces the fact that ‘[w]hen the blocks tumbled down they but acted after the nature of blocks” (24:102). Alberti’s “how-to” manual gave detailed instructions for visualizing checkerboard floors since pavimento perspectives assure a painting’s stability. Gentilli Bellini’s Procession in Piazza San Marco (1496) serenely depicts Venice’s dignitaries in that public space later described by James as a “gallery paced with squares of red marble,” “the whole place, in its huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail,” rendering it “the drawing-room of Europe.”84 Yet the “naturalness” of this supremely quotidian scene becomes eerily “supernatural” once we glimpse God gazing down from his ineffable realm in Bonifazio de Pitati’s God Above the Piazza San Marco (c. 1540). The mystical is further made visible in the ghostly figures that sweep through the piazza in The Stealing of Saint Mark’s Corpse (c. 1562–65), Tintoretto’s bravura rendition of Venice’s most precious legend.85 Although vanishing-point perspective continued to hold sway, the 1600s introduced new attitudes toward spatial depth. Shallowness pressed human figures against the front of the picture frame, placing them in peril of falling over the edge. The figures tumbling down the staircase in Rosso Fiorentino’s Moses Defends the Daughters of Jethro (c. 1523) question whether anyone could defend anything within spaces so distorted. These radical experiments in chaos, to which the label of mannerism is attached, can be praised as bella maniera but are often damned as the decadence that defies reasoned stability. Now take the following description of the mannerist mode and match it to views (markedly Stillmanesque and/or Veblenian) often held toward the late novels of Henry James, including The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. This was the period when “greater emphasis was placed on the ideal beauty in the mind of the artist than on the reproduction of beauties discovered in nature and the ever more frenzied pursuit of aesthetic effects put a premium on originality and imagination which often passed over into exaggeration, morbidity, and the bizarre. Surprise, novelty, recondite allusions, and in general a priority for invention characterized an art which appealed to a public of connoisseurs and a narrow intellectual elite.”86 Indeed, once “the classical balance of the Renaissance and the sense of harmony between nature and reason” disintegrated and “splendid lessons brilliantly learnt were applied in the service of ever more phrenetic idiosyncrasy,” naturalistic forms were translated “into an unreal space with no firm perspective struc-



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ture.” Technique “developed into self-conscious virtuosity and a delight in complication for its own sake; and the juxtaposition of contrasts became an end in itself.”87 As Western science and aesthetics “advanced” beyond the seventeenth century, earlier principles became “forgotten lore.” Among them was the belief that earthly spatial structures should try to replicate the “architecture” of the cosmos, wherein both earth and planets are “embedded in translucent spheres” of crystal, “shapes that were invisible and unpalatable, but nonetheless real.”88 Keep this bit of “forgotten lore” in mind once we come to consider the significance to “human geometrics” of crystalline shapes, whether whole or shattered, in the narrative architecture of James’s The Golden Bowl. Interest continued over the centuries in regard to the relation of viewer to picture plane. Aided by Alberti’s theory, those who stand before a painting look in upon the narrative scene through the illusion of a window that pierces the wall standing between them and it. Now listen to what James says about the House of Fiction, the aesthetic axiom set down in one of his most famous prefaces. The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows, not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. . . . They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a fieldglass, which forms, again and again, of observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other.89

The experience of mounting a long staircase is as central to keen observation as is peering through windows onto the world. Mannerism in the 1600s was rich with images of twisted stairways mounting up and tumbling down, as in Vasari’s Vulcan’s Forge (c. 1564). The 1700s yielded contrasting examples: Canaletto’s Perspective (c. 1763)—a charming vista of gracefully ordered Venetian steps, and Piranesi’s Carceri (c. 1744, 1761)—with its ominous scenes of erratic stairways filleting Rome’s ruins. Take the Canaletto to represent the position of fabulous wealth attained by the American tycoon, Adam Verver, in The Golden Bowl: “The tall sharp spiral round which he had begun to wind his ascent at the age of twenty, and the apex of which was a platform looking down . . . on the kingdoms of the earth and with standing-room for but half a dozen others” (23:131). Next take the Vasari and the Piranesi to represent the American “moral sense” as described by Prince Amerigo, Verver’s son-in-law (husband of Maggie Verver and

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lover of Charlotte Stant). The morality followed by the Old Romans, the ancient barbarians who were his ancestors, is “no more like yours [an American’s] than the tortuous stone staircase—half ruined into the bargain!—in some castle of our quattrocento is like the ‘lightning elevator’ in one of Mr. Verver’s fifteenstorey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam—it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that— well, that it’s as short in almost any case to turn around and come down again” (23:31). The baffling stone staircases of Piranesi’s Roman Carceri illustrate the disorienting geometrics of the spiral, the helix, and rotational symmetry. They are fascinating, yes, but guaranteed to unsettle one’s balance.90 At the top of the Scala dei Giganti of the Palazzo Ducale, the white marble staircase flanked by colossal statues of Neptune and Mars, the doges of Venice took the oath of office in full view of the citizenry. For those adverse to public displays of wealth and power, it is preferable to mount the steep but gentle stairway to the Palazzo Leporelli in James’s The Wings of the Dove. But what if Merton Densher, reluctant betrayer of the hopes for love of Milly Theale (fabulously wealthy, sublimely ailing American), is denied access to its ineffable realms by Eugenio, the palazzo’s gatekeeper, who blocks “the massive ascent, the great feature of the court, to Milly’s piano mobile” (30:251)?91 And what of Milly once she reaches the top of the staircase? In the two famous Presentations at the Temple by Titian (1539) and Tintoretto (1552–53), the Virgin as the holy child mounts staircases in glory. When Mary ascends into the crystalline empyrean (as in Botticelli’s Coronation of the Virgin [c. 1490]), she reigns as Queen of Heaven under the dovelike wings of the Holy Spirit, without the quiver of anxiety felt by Milly. Milly’s was “a vision of clinging to” the realm at the top of the stairs. “She was in it, as in the ark of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it. . . . She would never, never leave it” (20:143). “The romance for her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine dustless air . . . ‘Ah, not to go down—never, never to go down!’” (20:147) There comes the evening when Milly does “go down” to take command over “the Veronese picture,” the Feast in the House of Levi (1573), which James forcefully draws into his narrative (20:206).92 During this brilliant interlude, Milly floats through the scene in priceless lace and an extravagance of pearls, but she chooses to return to the upper chambers of the palazzo. Does Milly’s retreat to “the ark of her deluge” promise the healing grace of the kind depicted by Giovanni Manuseti’s The Miraculous Healing of the Daughter of Ser Nicolo Be-



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vegnudo of San Polo (1502–6), in which Venetians crowd to the top of the staircase? Once, Milly sought risks. “Don’t tell me,” she says to Susan Stringham, “there are not abysses. I want abysses” (19:186). Once, Milly perched on the edge of an Alpine precipice that “appeared to fall precipitously and to become . . . a view of great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous” (19:123).93 Once, Milly had no wish for “any sharp or single release from the human predicament.” Rather, she looked “down on the kingdoms of the earth,” either to choose among them or to take them all (19:124). So where does James’s narrative finally place Milly in terms of life’s spatial possibilities and deceits? Does she remain fixed as a portrait to the wall at Matcham, the English country house possessed of Bronzino’s Lucrezia Panciatichi (c. 1541), to which Milly has a startling likeness? Bronzino’s painting is an Old Master’s memorial to what was once life but that is now, as Milly realizes, “dead, dead, dead”—a memento mori that foretells her own early death (19:221). Is she trapped in a one-dimensional maze, that strange walled-in architectural conceit, the “labyrinth,” in which her friend Susan says we are all enclosed, forever denied the beatific vistas offered by vanishing-point perspectives laid out in serene patterns of pavimento geometrics (19:186)? Or is Milly in that nonspace between life and death into which one’s self vanishes? “Since I’ve lived all these years,” she tells Susan, “as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive. . . . So, you see, you’ll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I’m gone; and then you’ll only know where I’m not” (19:199–200).94 As for The Golden Bowl, what spatial relations enclose its main characters in a story where everyone exists on the edge of an abyss? What hidden geometries sustain or unsettle “the very form of the equilibrium they were, in different ways, equally trying to save” (24:268)? Let us look first at Charlotte Stant, then Maggie Verver (the former the wife of Maggie’s father, Adam, and the lover of Maggie’s husband, Amerigo). Charlotte viewed by Amerigo, her once and future lover: “a charming young woman with a life of her own. She would take it high—up, up, up, ever so high. Well then he would do the same; no height would be too great for them, not even the dizziest conceivable to a young person so subtle” (23:51–52). Not that Charlotte shares Amerigo’s fears over “cracks” in crystalline objects, like the gilded bowl that represents the tenuous relationships that bind Charlotte, Amerigo, Maggie, and Adam. “I risk the cracks” (23:359). Charlotte standing halfway up the “monumental staircase,” poised as if she were the central figure in Veronese’s Esther Led Before Assueros (c. 1555). Charlotte is at “a great official party” in London, where she is about to choreograph

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her ascents and descents under “the quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase” (23:245). Charlotte and the prince paired like dancers midst “the double stream of the coming and the going” of the “ordered revelers” (23:246–47). It has been said in regard to George Balanchine that “[t]he technique of the classical ballet is based on geometry.” Dancers on stage enact a “pattern of suggestion [that] like the secret geometry of nature, is there for the looking, hidden in plain sight.”95 What horrifies Fanny Assingham is precisely this public exposure of the occult nature of two marriages (that of Maggie and the prince and of Charlotte and Maggie’s father) through the choreographed movements of unholy partners. However splendidly they present themselves, Charlotte and the prince reject “the beautiful symmetry” for which Fanny longs (23:389)—the holy order sanctified in Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni D’Algemagna’s Madonna and Child Enthroned (c. 1446) in the company of angels and assorted saints, all locked within the tightly controlled space conventionalized by the painterly trope of the sacred conversazione.96 Maggie Verver performing her own balletic moves upon sensing the situation between Charlotte and the prince, in her effort to save “equilibrium, the precious condition.” Despite the marital “rearrangements” and “a fresh distribution of different weights, . . . the balance persisted and triumphed” (24:73). Maggie poised at the window of the house of her fiction, upon “knowing” the situation forced upon her after the imperfect crystal of the bowl is shattered. Her perspective now reflects “as great a difference of view as the shift of an inch of the position of a telescope” (24:207). Maggie at the Ververs’ country house, coerced to choose which painterly representation of her own feelings to place on display. Is it to be Botticelli’s Calumny (c. 1495), which features an enigmatic, seductive beauty attended by Treachery, Deceit, and Envy, while Repentance and Truth hang back—an allegory of emotional discord framed by classic arches in perfect harmony? Or will it be Giotto’s Judas’s Kiss (c. 1305–8), which records Christ’s calm acceptance of his betrayer’s embrace, a sacred moment pictorialized by Giotto against a background imaged by Maggie filled with “high spears against the sky” (24:236–37)? Maggie’s choice depends on her response to the temptation to blurt forth “the rights of resentment, the rages of jealousy, the protests of passion” against her betrayers (24:235–37). Maggie’s vertiginous moments on the terrace where she must decide whether to reveal all or to conceal everything. “Spacious and splendid, like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was a scene she might people, by the press of her spring,



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either with serenities and dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames and ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of the golden bowl she was trying so hard to pick up” (24:236). Maggie will elect the Giotto, not the Botticelli, as “her cheek received the prodigious kiss” from Charlotte in the “high publicity” they perform before gathered spectators, each of whom possesses a personal perspective on what is placed before them (24:251–52). Near the end of the narrative, Fanny tells Maggie that she thinks “so abysmally and yet so quietly. But that’s what will have saved you” (24:333). Which, then, of all the painterly scenes cited here best image the late-Jamesian world wherein characters ascend or descend “quietly—abysmally”? I myself place Prince Amerigo within Piranesi’s Carceri, doomed to dimness as he gropes up and down the dark staircases, limited to saying to Maggie, “I see nothing but you” (24:369). I might also locate Milly Theale within the obscurity of Piranesi’s spatial limbo, unable to move freely up or down the splendid staircases of Titian, Veronese, or Tintoretto, although I cannot be certain this is the destiny for a woman who claims that no one will ever know just “where” she is. As for Maggie, I have more confidence in the psychological structures she inhabits within the narrative space constructed by James. Oddly enough (which is the point), Maggie’s perspective seems very like that projected by M. C. Escher’s lithograph Relativity of 1953. Avid students of the beauties of distortion, seventeenth-century scientists and artists acknowledged that nothing in the universe is totally symmetrical, since the eye beholds forms “stretched, squeezed, swollen, and pinched”—an impression Piranesi made much of. Yet it was proposed that if “[a]ny compound form may seem ‘broken’ when in the middle of being one shape it stops that and starts being another shape”; this sort of “‘breakage’ can be repaired if the whole scenario—starting, stopping, and then starting something else—. . . is mended, or amended into a large piece of perfect symmetry.”97 Piranesi’s “broken symmetries” may resist repair. James’s and Escher’s twentieth-century geometries do not. One of the best analysts of Escher’s work suggests the ways by which the geometrics that ruled his lithographs coincide with the spatial tensions of James’s The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Escher, like James, knew that “the suggested unity is due solely to the artist’s ingenuity,” even as it must rely on only “one facet of a much greater space comprising different angles of view and continuing into infinity.” Like James, Escher acknowledged the world’s plurality but did not panic. This condition “signifies neither absurdity nor chaos but a challenge to look for new logical relationships between phenomena.” Artist and author alike agreed there are different kinds of reality: the one we observe and the

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one we imagine. Both men seized the opportunity to contain within a single representational space “conjunctions of [these] disparate spatial perceptions.” Most important, Escher’s Relativity, like James’s late novels, pursues the “grafting of a narrative onto an abstract structure itself never visible” that goes on unseen as part of the creative process. In lithograph and novel, we see figures “walking on the same stairs in the same direction but one ascending and the other descending,” whereby “the composition as a whole is constructed using traditional perspective and the relativization of this perspective occurs only within it.”98 Escher speaks for himself. “If we create a universe, let it not be abstract or vague but rather let it concretely represent recognizable things.”99 We may not aspire to the infinity, the wholeness, imaged by the Italian masters; nevertheless, we receive “a fragment” of the infinitesimal whole—figures that, although confronted by seemingly broken symmetries, will “continue without interruption to interlock.” By similar means James’s The Golden Bowl holds shattered pieces of impure crystal within both realms of reality, and The Wings of the Dove traverses up and down the Venetian staircases of its protagonists’ consciousnesses, leading to conclusions that are simultaneously effable and ineffable. The meanings of these novels extend far beyond their final pages, leaving behind the same emotional impact as does a Bellini painting, whose vanishing points disappear with such grace into illusions of infinity. Speaking for all creators in 1907, James said that if “the root of the matter” lies within your vision, you “are not really helpless, not without your resource, even before mysteries abysmal.”100 In 1927 Arthur Eddington observed, “We cannot assimilate laws of thought to natural laws; they are laws which ought to be obeyed, not laws which must be obeyed.” He caught the paradox of the fact that the scientist is forced to accept the ought-laws of thought “before he accepts natural law.” “‘Ought’ takes us outside chemistry and physics” to places where we creatures of subjectivity “esteem . . . sense, not nonsense.” On the other hand, the must-laws of science are not concerned with the creative mind’s need for “esteem.” They just might drop us into abysses, to “perhaps encounter nonsense.” But not—Eddington vows— “damned nonsense.”101 Whether the multitude of conjectures introduced by the jarring cultures of the times into this book’s ongoing debate between the “oughts” of art’s desires and the “musts” of science’s rule have mainly been about truth, reality, or nonsense, few have lent themselves to damned nonsense.

Notes

Introduction









1. Robert Scholes, “The Humanities in a Posthumanist World,” PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005): 724, 726; George Steiner, “The Muses’ Farewell,” Salamagundi 135–36 (2002): 150; John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago, 1993), x; Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York, 2003). In his role as president of the Modern Language Association, Scholes cited all three as confirmations of the present “dire” situation. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York, 1983), 7. Emerson’s position has been tied to the worst of Carlyle, while the Emerson/Carlyle duo is linked to Nietzsche, and the Emerson/Carlyle/Nietzsche trio to Hitler. Tit-for-tat charges later relocated Thorstein Veblen’s views in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s system of Scientific Management and the rise of the military-corporate domain. For defenses of the camp of Emerson et al. from the taint of social callousness, see Paul Gilmore’s “Mechanical Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology,” MLQ 65, no. 2 (2004): 245–68; and “American Jeremiad,” Christopher Benfey’s review of Denis Donoghue’s The American Classics: A Personal Essay, in New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, 65–67. 3. Scholes, “The Humanities in a Posthumanist World.” On May 22, 2005, Scott Timberg’s article for the Los Angeles Times “Critical Condition. The Critic Vanishes” surveyed the demise of the once-powerful cadre of America’s literary and art critics. 4. Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York, 2005), 163. Feingold’s book traces the crescendo of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury systems making on the Continent and in England. It argues that Thomas Jefferson was an ardent Newtonian who formulated the Declaration of Independence as “The Best Model of Government” (160–61). 5. In “Remarks on American Art” Horatio Greenough suggested that in “framing an institution” to train the country’s youth in the arts, “it must be for warning rather than for example” that “we look to countries grown old in European systems.” Form and Function, ed. Harold A. Small (Berkeley, 1957), 43. Benfey’s review of The American Classics makes the case that members of the “Young America” literary group in the 1840s “aspired more to youthful vigor than to the ‘clas-

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sic’ status of ancient Greece or Rome, so dear to the generation of the Founding Fathers” (65). Arguments in favor of supporting the plastic arts continued to refer to classic Italian precedents, whether to emulate or to reject. 6. The use of “festoons” to display intimate knowledge of the past required a grasp of culture impossible for the rank and file. “Festoons” as an authorial strategy were discussed in “Tracing the Venetian Masters in Henry James,” a paper delivered at the International Conference of the Henry James Society in Venice, July 2005, by Nelly Valtat-Comet of the University of Tours. She cites James’s remarks in Italian Hours on the ease of adding “festoons of the names of the masters.” James asked, “[W]hen we have covered our page with such festoons what more is left to say?” yet this did not stop their use by mid-nineteenth-century Americans when devising an aesthetic appropriate for a “festoonless” society. 7. Anthony T. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 72. 8. Emerson, Nature, 7. 9. Horatio Greenough, “Aesthetics at Washington,” in Form and Function, 6. In “Remarks on American Art” of 1843 Greenough praised painters of previous generations. “So far were the citizens of the Republic from showing a want of capacity for art that we may safely affirm the bent of their genius was rather peculiarly in that direction”(42). But aspiring artists were still forced to go to England to learn their craft, later to Rome and Florence, and still later to Düsseldorf and Paris. 10. Theodore Roosevelt, True Americanism, vol. 15 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt: Memorial Edition (New York, 1925). WASP once specifically designated the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” Now it hardly bears notice that Emily Rafferty, current president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is referred to as an “old money, old family WASP,” although she is (if the original terms are called into play) “Irish Catholic.” 11. Thorstein Veblen, “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View,” in The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation (New York, 1932), 39–40. 12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “An Address to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, 92. The Crayon declared its own faith in the idea that “[t]he Art influence is properly all joy.” Links between joy and the stringencies of “ought” and “duty” are replaced by the promise that if one lends oneself to “a pure and passive reception,” the Infinite is attained in “a kind of swoon.” “Science” as such is dismissed as the mere matter of “[m]ethods and materials, and details”—a view unacceptable to true Veblenians. See “The End of Art,” Crayon, February 1857, 42–43. 13. See John W. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 14. The Newtonian Moment witnessed the creation of a “modern” culture of the sciences, but one that was complicated by memories of the clash between the Galilean Moment and Culture 1. Throughout the seventeenth century the Roman Catholic Inquisition had a strong negative effect upon Italian sciences; in particular efforts of the Jesuits to bring together theology with physics and metaphysics. See Feingold, The Newtonian Moment, 76–79. Nineteenth-century America largely avoided this clash as long as church and state were kept separate and while nativist antipathy toward Italian papal powers remained at an ugly level. 15. Scholes, “The Humanities in a Posthumanist World,” offers a running account of the honors given, then stripped away, from the humanistic project over the years of the early Renaissance,













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the Enlightenment, and the romantic era. To Scholes it appears that the humanities have gone full circle back to Culture 1. In The Newtonian Moment Feingold provides another trajectory— one that traces science as natural philosophy in its movement through Newton’s marriage of mathematics with physics to Lockean epistemology, passing through Jonathan Edward’s demolishment of a Puritan theology based on innate ideas and revelation to his conviction that learned experience is the basis for all knowledge. 16. Greenough, “Aesthetics at Washington,” 3, 5. 17. See “Perspective,” in The Oxford Companion to Art, ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford, 1970), 858. 18. See Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, with Jason Gaiger (Oxford, 1998), 402–10, 413–15. 19. William R. Handley suggests how little the Ramseys are able to take full account of everyday life. Mrs. Ramsey is beholden to the vagaries of beauty; her husband to the hard facts of rationality. See “The Housemaid and the Kitchen Table: Incorporating the Frame in To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 1 (1994): 15–41. Woolf ’s novel was published in 1927, the year singled out by Arthur S. Eddington, professor of astronomy at Cambridge, as marking “one of the greatest epochs in the development of scientific philosophy.” A consequence of “the overthrow of strict causality by Heisenberg, Bohr, Born and others” led to the unsettling notion that now “religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man.” The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1929), 350. When Einstein presented his paper on the unified field theory in 1922, he—unlike Mr. Ramsay—hoped he could arrive at “Z”: “able to understand the plan of the entire universe—the whole thing, from the largest galaxy to the smallest quark” by formulating “a single overarching set of principles that would cover everything . . . by theorizing in the best Platonic-heavenly tradition.” See Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study (New York, 1987), 20. 20. See Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, 2nd ed. (New York, 1924). Twentieth-century advocates who impose biological Darwinism upon social structures are only the latest examples of the wish, in Feingold’s words, “to transplant the Newtonian model [i.e., the sciences of mathematics and physics] to other realms.” Once the search by seventeenth-century philosophers, political theorists, and moralists for the “regularity” promised by the natural sciences got under way, intellectual poaching was sanctioned. Through lax use of “metaphors and analogies,” the structure of the universe was applied to man and society. See chap. 6 of The Newtonian Moment, 157. 21. William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago, 1977), 587–610. The occasion for and dating of James’s lecture bear uncanny echoes. Delivered to students of the Harvard Divinity School forty-six years after Emerson’s address set them free to experience “Science, Beauty, and Joy,” it was published in the Unitarian Review of September 1884. Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” (the seminal “aesthetic” statement of the century) appeared the same month, the same year. 22. Remarks by Henry Van Blunt, Atlantic Monthly, May 1879, 640. 23. Henry James, “Is There a Life After Death?” In Henry James, W. D. Howells, et al., In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life (New York, 1910), from The James Family, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York, 1961), 602–14. 24. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (London, 1987), 187–88.

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25. Frank Norris, “An American School of Fiction?—A Denial,” in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin, 1964), 108–10. Norris rejects what we term “American exceptionalism,” but he makes it clear that only an American of “Anglo-Saxon” heritage can become “the Great Novelist.” 26. See Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 350, and The Philosophy of Physical Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1939), 4. If 1927 marked for Eddington “the overthrow of strict causality” by Heisenberg, Bohr, and Born, the changes Einstein proposed in 1915 also left him agog. 27. Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of the Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 243. 28. Horatio Greenough, “Criticism in Search of Beauty,” in Form and Function, 107. 29. Part Two introduces a series of set pieces under the label “Italian Palimpsests” that refers to the shadowy but still visible “writings” left over time that mark America’s view of its own role in history. They serve as a guide to the powerful models for political aesthetics that Washington, D.C. either emulated or rejected. In similar ways, Part One provides set pieces labeled “Fictive Interjections”—brief passages from selected novels that illustrate central issues in contemporary aesthetic criticism.

Part One. An American Aesthetic and Its Travails







1. The primary documents that set the terms for this debate are, first, Veblen’s “Kant’s Critique of Judgment” (1884), “The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor” (1898), The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization” (1906), “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View” (1908) and, second, essays on art matters published in the Crayon (1855–1861), Scribner’s Monthly (1870–1881), and Century Magazine (1881–1910), in which the voice of William James Stillman prevails. 2. Here are my working terms at their simplest: (1) pre- or post-Veblen—the years that come before or after Veblen’s active presence as analyst; (2) proto-Veblen—individuals of whatever era who forcefully represent Veblen’s key beliefs; (3) anti-Veblen—individuals whose views are directly antithetical to what Veblen stands for; (4) Veblenism—positions, none of which mandate that science is the foe of art, that reflect the central tenets of Veblen’s own writings, such as “idle curiosity,” disinterested but “purposeful” ideas and acts, the importance of process over progress, facts gleaned from experiment unbound by a priori dictates. 3. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809−1882, ed. Nora Barlow (London, 1958), 120. 4. John Michael Montias, with Albert Blankert and Gilles Aillard, Vermeer (New York, 1986); Montias, Art and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1982); Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera (Oxford, 2002). 5. The evolution of art forms shared in the smart ways by which artists adapted the scientific methods of their times to their needs. Recent studies of Renaissance painting and architecture that relied on applied mathematics include Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991); J. V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (New York, 1997); Anthony T. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 2000);









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George L. Hershey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (Chicago, 2000). Part Three draws directly upon their work. 6. Thorstein Veblen, “Arts and Crafts,” reprinted from Journal of Political Economy 11 (December 1902), in Essays in Our Changing Order (New York, 1934), 194–99. 7. It is more accurate to use the term “American Renaissance” than the misleading “Gilded Age” when speaking of Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York and London, 1899). The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day, cowritten by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1872, begins in the frontier territories after the Civil War, then shifts to the corrupting forces of Washington, D.C. during the Reconstruction era. It follows the havoc, both moral and economic, done to those driven by the delusion of achieving great wealth through stock speculations. Although The Gilded Age has insights in regard to the later pecuniary culture, the “American Renaissance” is more to the point in depicting the leisure-class society analyzed by Veblen, as shown in the catalogue for the exhibition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (Brooklyn, 1979). For entirely different purposes, F. O. Matthiessen’s seminal study of 1941, American Renaissance (New York), seized the notion of “renaissance” to argue for the “rebirth” of American literature during the antebellum years. His title has come in for some ridicule since how could a nascent national literature be reborn when it had yet to come to life? The Brooklyn Museum exhibit more appropriately makes use of this loaded word to refer to the high value placed by nineteenth-century Americans on Italian Renaissance art and the demands it placed upon America’s aesthetic aspirations. Any attention paid to “renaissance” arts and sciences needs to consider the technological advances made by artisans in the studios of Benvenuto Cellini, of Murano, and of the Tiffany Studios, whose furnaces joined heat and chemical properties to create masterworks of gold, bronze, glass, and ceramics—the superb “alchemy” discussed by Richard Guy Wilson’s essay “Mysticism, Alchemy, and Architecture: Designing Laurelton Hall,” in Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall, ed. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen (New York, 2006). 8. Unsigned [William Stillman], “The Basis of Criticism,” Crayon, March 1855, 177–78. 9. In Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (New York, 1953), David Riesman comments, “The breadth of his social science interests, his concern for what was changing, his use of history as anthropology and anthropology as history—these help provide us with the image of a modern social scientist who is less specialized, less adrift in the merely contemporary, than most prevailing models” (xii). In remarking on Veblen’s 1898 essay “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” Stanley Matthew Daugert points out Veblen’s realization that “Man is an organic agent, a complex of habits of life, and his propensity in one direction is only ‘passably isolable.’ Economic institutions impinge on, and are impinged upon, by such other interests (habits, propensities, tempers) as the sexual, humanitarian, aesthetic, devotional, etc., so that ‘all institutions may be said to be in some measure economic institutions’” (The Philosophy of Thorstein Veblen [New York, 1950], 68). 10. Charles Darwin, Darwin, ed. Philip Appleman (New York, 1970), 174 (emphasis added). 11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, introduction to Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (New York, 1983), 7. 12. Warren J. Samuels, in “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization,” from Veblen’s Century: A Collective Portrait, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 286–87, puts it nicely: “It should be obvious that Veblen’s ideas and theories are subject to criticism. For all his incisive brilliance he may be wrong. Even where he is correct, the Paretian doctrine of the social

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utility of falsity (or the Marxian doctrine of false consciousness viewed in a non-Marxian manner) may pertain.” Samuels adds an important point: “A society may mislead itself, say, through animistic or teleological reasoning, but this may be instrumental to the operation of that society and its transformation into a more modern society” (emphasis added). 13. Thorstein Veblen, “Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” in Essays in Our Changing Order, 180. The same essay (182–83) offers a working definition of the aesthetic concept. Dismissing questions of whether our thoughts are equivalents of our experience of “external reality” or are “pure figment,” Veblen distinguishes between concepts that please or displease. An object “which pleases in its simple apprehension, is said to be beautiful, and the reflective judgment, in so far as it proceeds on the simple adaptation of the data of apprehension to the faculties of cognition, is aesthetic judgment. It is of a purely subjective character, and its action is not based on logical, but wholly on pathological grounds. The decision of the aesthetic judgment is made on the ground of the feeling called forth by the apprehension of the concept, and the feeling is, therefore, in this case, the only authority that has a voice in the matter.” Veblen’s position was shared in large part by mid-nineteenth-century art critics, with the addition of their pre-Darwinian attitudes toward Nature, God, and Art. 14. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3:55, 59, in The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 11, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1904). Ruskin singles out “the conceit” and “the inaccuracy” of “aerial perspective” as leading to “a gross and ridiculous exaggeration.” Pride over advances in the study of anatomy led to the decline of modern art. Through the “vanity” of men so “proud of knowing that retiring lines converge . . . it became nearly impossible for any one to paint a Nativity, but he must turn the stable and manger into a Corinthian arcade, in order to show his knowledge of perspective.” Withhold praise from men who are “learned” and possess “knowledge.” Instead honor “the white emptiness” by which “the educated” person receives “the general nature of the things done and existing in the world” on “the broad, white lucid field of his soul.” In Ruskin’s gloss on the “cultures” emanating from (in O’Malley’s term) “Athens,” the fifteenth century’s “pride of system” is “the exclusive study of Restraints”—these forged “fetters,” “cages and manacles” that threatened the art of Raphael (who “painted best when he knew least”), of Michelangelo (“betrayed, again and again into such vain and offensive exhibition of his anatomical knowledge”) and Leonardo (who “fretted his life away in engineering”). Stones of Venice, 3:52, 55, 59–60, 66, 70–71, 115. 15. William James, “Frederic Myers’ Services to Psychology” (1901), in Memories and Studies (New York, 1911), 143–44. This counters the taste for “Purity of Imagination” by the Crayon, June 1857, which warns against “a hash of saints, angels, beasts, devils and frogs,” comparable to the Jamesian “menagerie within” (173). “Artistic Licenses” (Crayon, April 1855) tested the extent to which an artist may “depart from the strict following of Nature.” This is acceptable if one uses a “degree of apparent falsehood” to arrive at “the fuller and clearer statement of a truth,” but it is wrong “to make a false thing seem true.” If the viewer “loves light more than anything else,” he will appreciate Turner’s landscapes, but not “if the truth of the particular [scene] is of more importance to him” (257). Compare James’s cheerful acknowledgement that he cheated when asked to assist in a scientific experiment on the nature of galvanic energy before a lay audience. The frog wired for the occasion did not move as it was supposed to. Using his finger, James feigned the frog’s twitches. Why not? The science of galvanic energy is true, but the public would have thought it false if James had not “corrected” the situation.



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16. Emile Zola, His Masterpiece, ed. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (New York, 1915), 162, 169. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 17. Jack London, The Sea-Wolf: The World’s Classics, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford, 1992), 2, 179. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. London’s novel first appeared in Century Magazine, January−November, 1904. 18. Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (New York, 1915), 237. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 19. Veblen’s mastery of the memorable phrase, the satiric attack, and the wit that spares no one is succinctly commented upon by Wesley Clair Mitchell in “The Place of Veblen in the History of Ideas,” in Veblen’s Century, ed. I. L. Horowitz (New Brunswick, 2002), 46. Rick Tilman focuses on the zeal with which Veblen destroyed “the language of the past that lay embodied, indeed embedded, in the jargon of neoclassical economics.” Tilman’s observations about the “system of signs based on obsolete assumptions” rejected by Veblen depict the language world inherited by mid-nineteenth-century art criticism appearing in the Crayon, Scribner’s Monthly, and the Century. I replaced Tilman’s “economist’s,” “economists,” and “economic” with the following italicized terms pertaining to art criticism: “The conventional art critic’s vocabulary was the product of another and earlier mode of thought and, as a manifestation of cultural lag, stopped art critics from making more accurate observations of aesthetic activity.” Tilman, The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen: Unresolved Issues (Westport, Conn., 1996), 32. See his chapter “Veblen’s ‘Social Marginality’ and ‘Intellectual Iconoclasm.’” 20. The University of California, Los Angeles, is a material symbol for social spaces that separate the hard and applied sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. The north campus is occupied by the departments of literatures, languages, art, history, film, architecture, history, law, public policy, and the Anderson Graduate School of Management. The south campus houses engineering, molecular biology, the life sciences, and the medical sciences. When the faculty votes on whether to alter the academic calendar to accommodate quarters or semesters, the sciences invariably win to keep the quarter system, which works for laboratory courses, although it is unsuitable for humanities disciplines that require extensive reading lists. 21. Bernard Rosenberg, The Values of Veblen: A Critical Appraisal (Washington, D.C., 1956), 28. 22. Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, with Jason Gaiger (Oxford, 1998), 59–61. 23. Ibid., 60. 24. Comments by a trustee of Carleton College, cited in David Seckler, Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists: A Study in the Social Philosophy of Economics (Boulder, Colo., 1975), 13. In Seckler’s words, “Political economy, resting upon the self-evident formulations found in the popular textbooks, such as Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s Political Economy for Beginners, were used as illustrative material for lectures demonstrating the Infinite Wisdom of the Creator and the Harmony of the Universe” (12–13). During this “phase” the study of economics often matched the aims of American art critics. 25. Roger Fry, “The Art of Florence,” Burlington Catalogue of Exhibition of Florentine Painting Before 1500 (London, 1919), 11. 26. In “The Basis of Criticism,” Crayon, March 1855, 177–78, Stillman distinguishes between the compassionate knowledge of the professional and the “uninstructed love” of the general public and the novice artist. Maleness permeates these discussions. The Masculine is equated with Rea-

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son and the Feminine with Beauty, sign of Divine Love. Reason is the male’s means for possessing the “female” ends he most desires. 27. Ibid., 178. 28. Thorstein Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation (New York, 1932), 25–26. 29. Ibid., 26−27. Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York, 2005) gives examples of the disdain expressed toward Cartesian hypotheses, which were not like Newton’s theories “deduced from the phenomena” by means of experiments. Reading Descartes was to engage with “conjectures and fictions” that presented “a romance, elegant perhaps and charming, but nevertheless a romance.” Newtonianism upended this problem. In Voltaire’s view, “Everybody tries to be a geometer or a physicist; people dabble with reason. Sentiment, the imagination, and grace are banished. The belles-lettres perish from sight” (54–55, 102). 30. Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, 27−28. Literature-as-theory is a strong (some say, strangling) contemporary presence within America’s universities. Abstract critical theory is in competition with literary scholarship, one of “the ancient genial propensities” that carries over from “savage” times. 31. Ibid., 28−29. 32. Veblen would have understood the nature of the warfare taking place during the 1880s in American departments of languages and literatures among philologists, literary historians, and literary critics. See Martha Banta, “Editor’s Column: Primal Needs, Primary Concerns,” Publications of the Modern Language Association (January 1998): 7–18; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, 1987). As an aftermath of the rifts taking place over the centuries between O’Malley’s Cultures 2 and 4, tensions mounted in American universities between advocates of Germanic philology and literary studies, between the teaching of logic and of rhetoric, and between the classics and the moderns. Professors of literature and the modern languages struggled against aspersions that their disciplines existed at the level of lessons in dancing and fencing. In his attack against Walter Besant’s lightweight views on literature, Henry James’s 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” (most likely the first piece of “modern” literary criticism) laid out the principles for systematic inquiry into the nature of narrative practices. In August 1890 William Dean Howells’s editorial for Harper’s Magazine noted “there is yet no name for the literary kind [James] has invented” (Editor’s Study, ed. James W. Simpson [Troy, N.Y., 1983], 274). 33. Dorothy Ross, in Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991) describes the conditions under which sociology, political science, and economics emerged as systematized disciplines. The “New Psychology” was another newcomer whose genesis plays out in the jumbled career of William James. After failing as a painter, James dabbled in chemistry, physiology, and natural history (this involved taking a Darwinian-style expedition to Brazil). He then gained a medical degree before he—in his words—“drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave”—the startling experience that came after he accepted an offer in 1872 from President Charles Eliot of Harvard. The James Family, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York, 1961), 218. Also see The Early Years of Art History in the United States: Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars, ed. Craig Hugh Smyth and Peter M. Lickehart (Princeton, 1993); Sally Anne Duncan, “Harvard’s ‘Museum Course’ and the Making of America’s Museum Profession,” Archives of American Art Journal 42, nos. 1–12 (2002): 2–16. History as a discipline at the college









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level came about by accident, according to Henry Adams’s wry account of having to teach a subject he himself had never been taught (The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography [Boston, 1918]). In 1894, 1909, and 1910, Adams lamented the inability of historical studies to attain the stature of the physical or theoretical sciences (see The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, ed. Brooks Adams [New York, 1919]). 34. S. G. W. Benjamin, Art in America: A Critical and Historical Sketch (New York, 1880), 15, 71, 164. 35. Samuel Isham, The History of American Painting (New York, 1905; rev. ed., 1927), xv. Isham’s view of the irregularities of organic growth applied to art fits the view that Emerson’s literary style was marked by premorse—the term used by botanists about “those roots which end abruptly as if bitten off.” Scribner’s Monthly, April 1876, 891. Chapters added by Royal Cortissez to the 1927 edition of Isham’s History come even closer to Veblen’s beliefs when he describes the current condition of art culture as “the melting of one generation into another, [since] the development of a school, usually involves the substitution of a new set of dominating ideas for an old one, a general re-orientation. But the transition is never made at a stop, its phenomena ‘overlap’” (567). 36. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1933), 78. As she narrates her early years in Paris when she helped to “create” twentieth-century “modern” aesthetics, she argues that a nation’s level of technology defines how advanced it is in human time. She views modernism as scientific primitivism by which mathematics strips away extraneous layers to get at material facts. Cubist experiments expose the geometrical structures of natural objects via a process of reduction that enhances their “reality.” America’s advances in mechanistic technology and its discovery of aesthetic mathematics suggest its “primitive art” is more modern than “classical art.” The Steinian theory by which the twentieth century is introduced by America’s technological advances in the 1860s makes French art a distant runner-up in aesthetic progress. More conventional readings insist on the impact France had upon Americans lured to Paris in the hope of gaining aesthetic maturity. See Americans in Paris: 1860-1900, ed. Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirshler, H. Barbara Weinberg (London, 2006), in particular essays by Kathleen Adler and Rodolphe Raperti and David Park Curry’s survey of the efforts by American artists to enter into the hectic world of Paris’s annual “expositions universelles.” 37. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 64, 79–81, 83. 38. In “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” Stein tells how during premedical studies in 1898 she became “enormously interested” in types—“the bottom nature of people.” The charts she made in her laboratory recorded “habits” and “resemblances” that “describe really describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living. . . . I was sure that in a kind of a way the enigma of the universe could in this way be solved. That after all description is explanation.” In her studies with William James, she learned “that science is continually busy with the complete description of something, with ultimately the complete description of anything, with ultimately the complete description of everything. . . . And so description is really unending. . . . But as it is a possible thing one can stop continuing to describe this everything. That is where philosophy comes in, it begins when one stops continuing describing everything.” Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures, 1909–1945, ed. Patricia Meyorwitz (London, 1971), 86–88, 96. Stein replaced the science of universal types classified by Linnaeus with her own method for pursuing “the theory of everything.” Stein was but one among many who had to decide whether to go with

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types or particulars. Painters like Corot went to nature for “effects,” not “facts,” in order to “complete” nature in a personal way, learning to “choose and arrange particular facts” that reveal “the type, the ideal.” Century, June 1889, 265, 267. In contrast, Howells’s Editor’s Study column for December 1887 (111–12) cites Edmund Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful before launching into his own warning against an idealizing process that gulled “the mass of common men” into relying on “the wretched pedantry” that substitutes a “wire and cardboard” model of a grasshopper for the real insect—an act against both science and literature. 39. See Art and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1947) by Francis D. Klingender. In particular, note paintings by John Martin, W. M. Turner, George Robinson, and Joseph Wright of Derby. 40. Brooks Adams cited the fact that in 1792, with Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, “the whole economic equilibrium of the country had been shifted.” Whitney’s technology “revolutionized cotton planting by making it highly lucrative. . . . The breeding of slaves for the cultivation of this cotton thus became more profitable in Virginia than industry in iron and coal.” Thus, the Civil War. “The Heritage of Henry Adams,” in Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 22. 41. William Dean Howells, “A Sennight of the Centennial,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1876, 96. 42. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876 (New York, 1974), 156. Another crowd favorite was a soda-water fountain designed by Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine. Scribner’s Monthly (November 1876) commented on the interest shown toward the art displays, even though “respectable mediocrity is the rule.” However, Homer SaintGaudens, son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, America’s leading sculptor, believed that the Centennial hurt the art it meant to foster, while helping the cause of manufacturing and industry. Clay Lancaster’s “Taste at the Philadelphia Centennial” argues that the public had no sure way of reconciling the industrial displays with the art displays, especially when confronted with that hybrid, “industrial art.” For these and other reactions to the 1876 Centennial Exposition, see Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in American Culture (New York, 1987), 759nn41–42. 43. Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, 30–31. 44. Clarence Cook, Art and Artists of Our Time (New York, 1888), 145. If self-flagellations regarding America’s dependence upon Europe appeared in midcentury newspapers, magazines, and historical surveys, their onetime masters might forgive its civilisation lente (“cultural lag”). In March 1855, the Crayon (167) reprinted a piece from the London Art Journal that pointed out that America’s early years had been devoted to gaining “the necessities of life,” but “then came war, commerce, and agriculture.” Indeed, “now that their essential end has been attained, and America flourishes as one of the most powerful nations in the world, she too turns to worship at the shrine of Art.” However, Veblen’s view of America in 1899 was of a society rushing toward membership among the barbarians of a pecuniary culture since any “worship at the shrine of Art” translates into what William James named the worship of “the Bitch Goddess Success.” Conversely, an essay in Century (February 1881, 513) addressed the sad fact that “to attain a full-orbed maturity of artistic development in America is almost impossible at the present time, owning to the absence of a sustaining atmosphere.” There is no chance for success “unless a man deliberately sets out to be a European master, and not an American one.” Americans concerned over the dominance of Italy’s past art seemed unaware of efforts by the Macchiaioli in the midnineteenth century to rectify the absence of a “sustaining atmosphere” for their own art by es-















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caping the heavy hand of tradition during the turbulence that marked the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. See The Macchiaioli, ed. Edith Tonelli and Katherine Hart (Los Angeles, 1986); Norma Broude, The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1987). Also see on-the-spot discussions about this rebellious group in Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger, Art in Theory, 1815–1900 by Telemaco Signorini, Guiseppe Regutini, and Vittorio Imbriani (536–45). 45. In his 1879 biography of Hawthorne, Henry James discussed how the author achieved literary worth, despite the material things missing in his native culture. The ire of readers over James’s infamous listing of all the things that Europeans have and Americans do not have fails to catch the ironic tone, as he claims that it is “an English or a French imagination” that would find such deficits “appalling.” James, Hawthorne (Willits, Calif., [1879]), 37–38. 46. William C. Brownell, “The Younger Painters in America,” Scribner’s Monthly, May 1880, 2. As we will see in Zola’s novel, His Masterpiece, the “young” within the Parisian art scene were embroiled in rebellions against the salons supported by official mandates. Commentary in Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger, Art in Theory, 1815–1900 suggests similarities in the struggles taking place in Paris between the 1820s and 1880s to those of the same years in New York when artists set up their own venues for exhibitions in defiance of established art academies. 47. Cited on wall label at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ gallery devoted to early American painting. Note the publication of Benjamin’s and Isham’s historical accounts of American “Art Thoughts” came as Veblen began to analyze developments in economic and social systems. 48. Janice Simon’s dissertation (University of Michigan, 1990), “The Crayon, 1855–1862: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and the Fine Arts (Vols. I and II),” is a thorough appraisal of the Crayon’s mission to bring American landscape painting and a “transcendentalist” culture into the center of midcentury debate. Other sources refer to the Crayon in passing for its attention to landscape art by John Durand, son of Asher Durand, whose important “Letters on Landscape Painting” appeared throughout its issues. Stillman, coeditor with Durand over the journal’s first months, spoke in broader terms of the aims of all art forms. 49. Scribner’s Monthly, August 1879, 630; Century, February 1909, 636–37. Century was one of the most active critics of the government’s art tariffs. The March 1884 issue decried “A Chinese Wall for American Art.” That of March 1887 welcomed “A Breach in the Chinese Wall.” In March 1885 and November 1891 Century was angered that Timothy Cole’s engravings were classified as “merely ‘manufactures of wood’” and that paintings were taxed like “a pound of sugar.” Note was made of the prohibitive taxes charged upon the Gardner Museum’s Woman in Black by Degas ($200,000) and Piero della Francesca’s Hercules ($150,000). See Century, September 1904; Hilliard T. Goldfarb, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (New Haven, 1995), 55. 50. Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, 31. 51. Henry James, Roderick Hudson, in Novels and Tales (New York, 1907–17), 1:192–93. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 52. Henry James, The Tragic Muse, in Novels and Tales, 7:4, 7–8, 12–13, 18. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 53. Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, in The Writings in Prose and Poetry of Rudyard Kipling (New York, 1899), 9:44, 55–56, 58, 76. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 54. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 31. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 55. Century, September 1888, 797. Controversies continued over the authenticity of the “Cesnola

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Collection” (casts of famous European sculptures) as exampled by Century’s “The Metropolitan Museum and Its Directors,” while others questioned their value as taste makers. Century assured subscribers that the home-reading programs of the Chatauqua Library and Scientific Circle aided self-teaching in a society with limited access to advanced training in the arts and sciences. See “The Western Art Movement,” “The Century Club,” and “Home Culture Clubs,” Century, August 1886, August 1888, and March 1891. But worries continued over the ease by which the public was drawn to witless “fads” over the newest big names in science. Ernest Stedman and Clarence Cook chastised “school-girls and spinsters” for judging Victorian poets in light of their love for the writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. Scribner’s Monthly, December 1875, 291; January 1879, 351–52. 56. Educated public taste was not the sole advantage gained through the distribution of engravings. S. G. W. Benjamin noted that since artists are “often dependent upon the genius of the engraver for recognition of their abilities by the public,” status and possible sales were at stake (Art in America, 168). 57. Charles Dudley Warner, “What Is Your Culture to Me?” Scribner’s Monthly, June 1872, 474. (On February 9, 2006, “Whose Culture Is It?” an essay by Kwame Anthony Appiah, ran in the New York Review.) Scribner’s Monthly picked up on the debate in New York’s newspapers as to whether wood engravers are actually artists or only manipulators of a “good mechanism”—a debate begun centuries before over the relation of “artist” to “artisan.” The conclusions taken from “The Engraver—His Function and Status,” Scribner’s Monthly, June 1878, 237–40, were generally negative, but an earlier Scribner’s Monthly article, “Some Heliotype Reproductions” (January 1875, 384), asserted that a nation harmed by “the incomplete and heterogeneous character of our public and private collections” needs all the aid the artisan can provide. It praised engravings of Raphael, Parmigiano, and Correggio furnished in the Harvard “Grey Collection,” published by Osgood & Co. of Boston. The Crayon (October 1856, 325) maintained that taste shapers must employ “The Pen, or the Pencil, or the Chisel” as “the instrument” to “overcome the ignoble, and to develop the nobler instincts of Humanities.” 58. “Turner’s Slave Ship,” Scribner’s Monthly, June 1872, 250. 59. “The Montpensier Pictures in Boston,” Scribner’s Monthly, November 1874, 257. Earlier the Nation (“Another Look at Foreign Pictures in New York,” January 11, 1866, 55–57) rebuked the taste for foreign pictures on view in New York governed by the status of who owned them or where they were placed on display. There were many who wandered “nonchalantly” through exhibitions as if at a social gathering. A society caught up within a pecuniary culture translated aesthetic values into social worth. Gerald Reitlinger’s The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760–1960, vol. 1 (London, 1961) singles out the dismissive indifference and arrogant ignorance of the British public (viewers and collectors alike) throughout much of the nineteenth century. Purchase of paintings lacking solid credentials was heightened by the presence of loot from the Napoleonic era, which dispersed Italian art across the Continent. 60. “Culture and Progress at Home,” Scribner’s Monthly, April 1872, 756; “Art Exhibitions and Sales,” Nation, March 15, 1866, 345–46. Articles by one T. P. that appeared in the Crayon in 1856 warned of the perils of buying Florentine masters in a Twainian tone that seems a parody of dangers facing unwary buyers. See “Revelations of a Picture Dealer” and “On Picture-Buying” (July 1856, 212–14, 217). 61. Even paintings purchased by an educated eye could place American collectors under attack.













Notes to Pages 21–24

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Century (April 1903) cited the outrage expressed in London newspapers over artworks on their way to Boston’s Gardner Museum—“doomed to exile in a savage wilderness.” American illustrators were given no chance to succeed, according to the English instructor who stated that only “men of education and general intelligence—graduates of Oxford and Cambridge”—could make the grade (Crayon, May 1855, 305). As for guidebooks, Stendahl disdained them when visiting the Louvre in 1824: “my eyes should be attracted by genuine merit alone,” not by commercial purveyors of knowledge (Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger, Art in Theory, 1815–1900, 31). The Crayon urged Americans who lacked such self-confidence to consult Franz Kugler’s authoritative Handbook of Painting: The Italian Schools, published in English in 1867, as well as Anna Jameson’s popular guidebook (October 1860, 277, 280). 62. Anna Jameson, preface to Legends of the Madonna, as Represented in the Fine Arts: Forming the Third Series of Sacred and Legendary Art (London, 1852), xvi. As she was more at ease with “legends” than facts, doctrinal or otherwise, Reitlinger describes her as “an amateur artist and self-constituted expert, the bane of living painters, whose opinions were much in demand among the fashionable” (Economics of Taste, 1:112). 63. “Amateur Criticism,” Crayon, May 1855, 273. 64. “What Is Art Criticism?” Nation, April 19, 1866, 504−5. 65. “Individuality of Art,” Crayon, February 1855, 113. 66. Among essential primary studies regarding America’s love-hate relationship with Italy are James Jackson Jarves, Italian Sights and Papal Principles Seen through American Spectacles (New York, 1855) and Art Thoughts: The Experience and Observations of an American Amateur in Europe (New York, 1869); Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books, in The Complete Works (Boston, 1871); William Dean Howells, Italian Journeys (Boston, 1867; rev. ed., 1907) and Venetian Life (New York, 1866; rev. ed. 1901); Henry James, William Wetmore Storey and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston, 1903). Other responses by James to Italy’s cultural and art scene are too numerous to cite. An insightful account of responses to the early Renaissance arts of Florence and Siena by a ten-year-old American girl while living abroad is A Little Girl among the Old Masters: With Introduction and Comment by William Dean Howells (Boston, 1884). Useful secondary studies include Judith Hayward, The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920 (New York, 1989); William L. Vance, America’s Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1989). 67. William C. Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” Scribner’s Monthly, September 1879, 737. 68. William C. Brownell, “The Art-Schools of New York,” Scribner’s Monthly, October 1878, 765. Russell Lynes’s description of art schools in The Art-Makers of Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1970) points to concerns over whether New York’s academies were to be run along autocratic or democratic lines, despite the fact that (unlike the situation in Paris) the U.S. government had no say in designating “official” standards. 69. Brownell, “The Art-Schools of New York,” 761−62. 70. Ibid., 762, 767. 71. Christopher Newman, Henry James’s “American” of his 1876 novel, refuses to pay for copies of copied paintings. He wants only copies of originals; that is, if the Murillos in the Louvre he commissioned are actually that. Professional copyists were an ever-present part of the economics of the contemporary art scene. 72. Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” 749, 750, 781, and “The Art-Schools of New York,”

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781. Eakins was dismissed from the Philadelphia Academy for his practices in 1886, although he continued their use at his own school and at the Art Students League. Eakins Revealed (Oxford, 2005) by Henry Adams, curator at the Cleveland Museum, ignites new controversies by his insistence that Eakins was psychologically disturbed and obsessed with sexual themes. Also see Adams’s “Some ‘New’ Letters by Thomas Eakins’ Brother-in-Law, Frank Stephens,” Archives of American Art Journal 44, nos. 3–4 (2004): 14–20. 73. William Stillman, “Perugino,” Century, October 1891, 897, and Crayon, January 1856, 2. Note that Stillman refers to what Perugino, as pupil, learned from Benedetto Buonfigli, “who though not a great was an able painter.” 74. Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute, in Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin, 1964), 11, 46–47. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 75. Those priding themselves on aesthetic competency are given the critical stick. Dick Heldar, the angry young artist of Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed, denounces the “epicene young pagans” of the local London art crowd who sit about having “tea at five in the afternoon!” while chatting “about Art and the state of their souls. As if their souls mattered. I’ve heard more about Art and seen less of her in the last six months than in the whole of my life”(54). In articles for Harper’s Magazine throughout 1887, 1888, and 1889, William Dean Howells held English critics and authors to account for the arrogance of their outmoded dependence on theories that protected them from the realities of modern life (Editor’s Study, 96, 146, 223, 225–26, 237). 76. In “Aesthetical Study of the Arts,” the Crayon (October 1860, 273) admitted that science is in error if the mathematician admires St. Paul’s Cathedral while ridiculing the notion of God as the motive for its erection. In the next generation, under Veblen’s hand, science moved beyond dealing with motives for creation (whether God’s or those of others). What mattered was structure. A generation later, science began to “correct” Veblen’s views. Once masses of invisible, ineffable elements came under scrutiny, “cosmic motives” might need to be addressed. 77. See Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “Virtue and Good Manners: Toward a History of Art History Instruction,” in Smyth and Lickehart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States, 183–93. 78. Either Pietro Arentino or Lodovico Dolce assigned this motto to Titian in recognition of his role in shaping the natural scene, ruled over by the principle of natura naturans—nature constantly creating itself. See David Rosand, “Venetian Painting of the Cinquecento,” in Venice: Art and Architecture, ed. Giandomenico Romanelli (Konemann, Italy, 2005), 336, 348. The Crayon approved the hard choices laid down by Hegel. The “tough rind of Nature and the every-day world rend it more repulsive and difficult for the spirit to penetrate to the ideal than it is for works of Art,” yet “Art isn’t merely thoughtless and lawless,” as it “first receives from sciences its genuine verification” (“Aesthetics,” August 1859, 229–30). The journal would not have taken exception to Goethe’s “Maxims and Reflections.” “Art is a mediator of the inexpressible,” nature’s most “worthy interpreter,” the idea that cannot be separated from nature “without destroying both life and art alike” (see Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger, Art in Theory, 1815–1900, 75, 78). 79. In tracing “origins,” nineteenth-century American art histories did not glance back to the achievements of the nation’s indigenous people. Those they designated as “primitives” were displaced European settlers cut off from Old World traditions. Samuel Isham put it bluntly. “The fundamental and mastering fact about American painting is that it is in no way native to America, but is European painting imported, or rather transplanted to America. . . . There is no local tradition or influence; no ancient archaic style to be vaguely felt even in the latest and most varied













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achievements. The Indians of the Atlantic seaboard were skilled in war and hunting, some of them were wise in council . . . but in all that touches art, even of the rudimentary savage type, they were far behind their brethren of Mexico and Peru. . . . The immigrants who permanently occupied the country were not in a frame of mind to learn from the savages.” Isham, History of American Painting, 3. Also see William Stillman, “Thoughts on Artistic Education in Relation to Individual Development,” Crayon, May 1857, 129. 80. “The Basis of Criticism,” Crayon, March 1855, 77–78. The God that centers Stillman’s contributions to the Crayon is a nondenominational, deinstitutionalized Divine Being—a point Janice Simon’s dissertation (“The Crayon, 1855–1862”) makes quite clear. This was one of the reasons Emerson served as the priest of America’s transcendental worship of the Not-Me, the God-inNature, which denies the acquisitiveness that converts nature’s beauty into “Commodity” and “Power.” Stillman went so far as to refuse to define “God” in theological terms or “to demonstrate with mathematical positiveness the theory we hold of the manifestations of God in matter” (“The Nature and Use of Beauty,” Crayon, March 1856, 65). Stillman was concerned only that readers “recognize in Him an intelligent, sentient Influence—the Soul of the universe” (“The Nature and Use of Beauty,” Crayon, June 1856, 161). Notwithstanding the American transcendentalist deinstitutionalizing of the Divine Soul, this pantheistic Entity was Protestant to the core. This left true believers without the capacity to appropriate the vital iconographic materials guiding the religious art of the Roman Catholic tradition American art lovers both admired and feared. 81. Henry James’s 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne notes (117) that the Civil War formed the break between the prior generation’s debilitating innocence and the constructive awareness that comes from eating of the Tree of Knowledge, while James’s own fictive narratives demonstrate that this was an apple not chosen by many of his contemporaries. In 1884 William James’s “The Dilemma of Determinism” also referred to “Life as one long eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago, 1977), 599. 82. G. W. Sheldon, Recent Ideals in American Art (New York, 1888), 82. 83. On the matter of America’s materiality, David Henry Thoreau confronted the brute facts of Maine’s Mount Ktaadn, and Henry Adams discovered that Nature was red in tooth and claw (at least in Italy) when the sun shone into the room as his sister Louisa lay dying in agony from lockjaw. 84. Interview with Inness in G. W. Sheldon, Hours with Art and Artists, 44–45. (Published in New York in 1882, this edition is a Garland reprint, The Art Experience in Late Nineteenth Century America, ed. H. Barbara Weinberg [New York, 1978].) Recent developments in photography led to the camera’s reputation as a mechanism to capture the poetic aura of persons and places. 85. “Hoosiers” is the label (not altogether complimentary) used to characterize the “primitive” libertarianism of Indiana’s frontier population. Muncie is, I confess, my hometown. It is “Middletown,” site of the first modern sociological analysis of an American small city, detailed in Robert and Helen Lind’s Middletown (New York, 1929) and Middletown in Transition (New York, 1937). The economic history of this “typical” community has uncanny affinities with many of the principles of Veblenism. Delaware County, of which Muncie was and is the hub of local governance, was and is agricultural (soybeans, dairy cows, field corn). Yet technology’s impact on industry and business is a central part of the town’s history. Important innovations in automotive design took place in and around Muncie until the independents were bested by Henry Ford’s Model T

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and the industry shifted to Detroit. The making of automotive parts remained one of Muncie’s economic strengths, supplemented by the production of glass jars, aided by the natural-gas boom of the 1890s. Cars and jars brought prosperity and elements of late barbaric culture to that segment of society Veblen delineates in The Theory of the Leisure Class of 1899. A century later, cars and jars are no more. Currently the local economy is led by the two institutions named after the former manufacturers of the famous Mason-Glass Jar: Ball State University and Ball Memorial Hospital, the main employers in a town still surrounded by cows, corn, and soybeans. Another source of income is the “selling” of Muncie’s status as a sociologist’s treasure trove. Created by endowments drawn from the Balls’ early “predatory” wealth are the Center for Middletown Studies, the Center for Natural and Cultural Heritage, the Historic Preservation Program, the Center for Critical Inquiry, and the Art Gallery. See Martha Banta, “The Three Muncies,” in Working Sites: Texts, Territories, and Cultural Capital in American Cultures, ed. John Leo and William Boelhower (Amsterdam, 2004). 86. The preface to the 1842 number extols technological advances that benefit farming (better plows), improved breeds of livestock (such as concerned British breeders, to whom Darwin paid attention), and new varieties of seeds and grains. See George Lyman Kittredge, The Old Farmer and His Almanack (Cambridge, Mass., 1920). 87. Before the American Revolution New England established a six-mile town system, William Penn “squared” Philadelphia, and in 1728 William Byrd II marked the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia. See John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven, 1952); Michael Conzen, The Making of the American Landscape (Boston, 1990); Andro Linklater, Measuring America (London, 2002). 88. America’s size is equal to that of several European countries combined, but the regulation of time zones is hardly limited to this continent. Every nation must attend to the time-space it occupies, else legal, political, and economic issues remain unresolved. (In waging effective wars, how can a country’s military forces be sent across space and time borders without knowing what time it is?) By 1884 Greenwich, England, was proposed as the zero meridian, but it took years until the International Conference of Time met in Paris in 1912 to adopt a uniform method, aided by advances in wireless telegraphy. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983) for details about the difficulties in determining a systematized global time, applicable to local conditions. 89. Benjamin, Art in America, 73. 90. “The Creed of Art,” Crayon, November 1855, 319; “The Nature and Use of Beauty,” January 1856, 3. Such mandates were not so cut and dried. Veblenian Art Thoughts could offset the negativism of statements about the inadequacies of geometry and scientific “rules” by referring to the use of applied mathematics by Italian Old Masters, which supplied an excellent “arrangement of symbols for reality,” confirmed by today’s experimental psychologists, who demonstrate that the painterly eye knowingly disobeys the laws of scientific perspective. See “Perspective,” in The Oxford Companion to Art, ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford, 1970), 861. Sophisticated theorists of art and literature acknowledge that the goal is to create “representation of life.” Although this means making an “illusion,” the act is not one of deceit. 91. Ruskin (1819–1900) was the British art critic throughout most of the nineteenth century. He had command over everything that American aesthetes lacked: a highly trained intellect in full contact with the major art issues of the day, an Oxford’s Slade Professorship of Art that let him











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speak to artists and public, multivolume publications on all aspects of Gothic, Renaissance, and modern art, and his role as avowed enemy of the industrialized production of substandard items for the homes of the newly rich. Part-time anti-Veblen and full-time Veblenian, for several generations Ruskin stood in relation to the science of art systems as Darwin did to the natural sciences and Veblen to the infant social sciences. David H. Dickason’s The Daring Young Men: The Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites (Bloomington, Ind., 1953) details the links that join Ruskin, the British Pre-Raphaelites, and William J. Stillman. 92. John Ruskin, “The Schools of Art of Florence,” in The Works of John Ruskin, 23:263–64 (emphasis added). 93. Ibid., 264. 94. The citations given here are taken from, respectively, “The Nature and Use of Beauty,” Crayon, April 1856, 90, 99; John White, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (New Haven, 1993), 586; Oxford Companion to Art, 858; “Perception,” Crayon, August 1855, 63. 95. “The Nature and Use of Beauty,” Crayon, June 1856, 161. 96. “On Beauty,” Crayon, April 1858, 104. 97. Hayden B. J. Maginnis, “Richard Offner and the Ineffable,” in Smyth and Lickehart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States, 138–39. Maginnis draws from other sections of Offner’s essay that first appeared in Studies in Florentine Painting (1927). A personal note that intertwines pertinent elements of aesthetics, economics, and sociology stems from the fact that I once audited courses offered by Professor Offner during the 1950s. This was the decade Jackson Pollock was “discovered,” Clement Greenberg was the dictator of art criticism, and New York seized the center of the world’s art scene from Paris. I was working on Madison Avenue as an advertising account executive and copywriter—thus, “compromised” in the eyes of some as having pushed conspicuous consumption in a predatory society. Weekly after work, I took the bus up Fifth Avenue to the former Doris Duke mansion (built with the fortune rapaciously gained by the Duke tobacco interests), which housed the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. There, in the darkened ballroom, Professor Offner presented slides of Sienese paintings and altarpieces, analyzing them in his astringently rigorous manner. Later, when I left advertising to go to graduate school, I realized that Offner’s methods were excellent training for the close reading (what my professors called the New Criticism) by which true “idle curiosity” supports legitimate intellectual work. 98. Free from the need to commit his aesthetics to God, Soul, Nature, and Truth, Oscar Wilde had his own take on the process toward rot. In Lady Windermere’s Fan of 1892 he quipped that “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” Still, in the 1850s Horatio Greenough took exception to the perverse pleasure taken in theories of dissolution and decay. “That the sense revolts at the phenomena of disorganization proves only the relation of the body to things; but that relation being a divine datum, the marriage of the sensuous phenomena of life to the action of decay cannot be other than poisonous and suicidal.” “Criticism in Search of Beauty,” in Form and Function, ed. Harold A. Small (Berkeley, 1957), 108. 99. “The Manchester Exhibition,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1837, 36; “Correspondence: Rome,” Crayon, July 1856, 205; “Correspondence: Italy,” December 1856, 372. In June and July 1857, the Crayon’s “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns” and “Histories of Art” tapped into other Gibbonesque histories of decline by Johann Winkelmann and Hippoltye Rigault. David Rosand

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describes the impasse confronting the heirs of Venetian art by the early sixteenth century, when the market and the prevailing culture sought imitations of former greatness. “The results, no matter how proficient, tended to render academic and rigid what had been spontaneous and natural” (“Venetian Painting of the Cinquecento,” 399). The situation was not beneficial for Italian painters committed to the perfection of art (read as decay by later American critics in a sour mood). Carlo Ridolfi’s Marvels of the Painters’ Art (1648) asked rhetorically, Ultra quid faciam? (Who could pretend to go beyond such achievements?). 100. John Burroughs, “Henry D. Thoreau,” Century, July 1882, 369; M. Van Rensselaer, “The American Artist in England,” November 1883, 19; M. Van Rensselaer, “George Fuller,” December 1883, 226. Note the wording in Roderick Hudson when Mr. Striker, a self-made man, states his skepticism about the benefits of Hudson’s going to Rome to nurture his native talents: “He may be the biggest genius of the age: his potatoes won’t come up without his hoeing them. If he takes things so almighty easy . . . his produce will never gain the prize” (1:63). 101. A few examples go a long way: “Culture is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of the age but the seed of the future. The so-called culture, a mere fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower” (Warner, “What Is Your Culture to Me?”). “There is a little blue flower—the liver-leaf—which blossoms at the edge of our forest snows. . . . So Art, which is Beauty’s gospel, lies inert under the cold necessities of a national childhood, and the cares and storms of a first political existence; but when the winter of discontent is made summer, it bursts out to gladden and beautify life” (“Introductory,” Crayon, January 1855, 1). To Americans of this persuasion, history was inscribed in the seasonal verities of The Farmer’s Almanack. To John Ruskin the Bible, not The Farmer’s Almanack, is the source of the laws of God’s Nature, as when he recounts the miraculous dispersal of the mustard seed cited by both Matthew and Mark (Works of John Ruskin, 23:263). 102. Under the heading “Try ‘Lusty’ or ‘Strapping’,” this tart comment appeared in the Los Angeles Times on November 14, 2004: “the nation can agree on just one thing: ‘Robust,’ an adjective once reserved for profits, sales and coffee aroma, has become the most ubiquitous and annoying word of Campaign 2004. Major U.S. news sources used ‘robust’ 1,486 times during this election. . . . In Congress, ‘robust’ 257 times.” The word was applied to tax cuts, Saddam Hussein’s nukes program, Bush’s margin in Florida. “Let’s hope it’s the last use of this virility-bolstering buzzword until 2008.” Nineteenth-century liking for the overt masculinity associated with certain Old Masters has carried over into the recent political scene, as with the pejorative labeling of John Kerry as a “girly man” and with praise for “robust” military actions in Iraq. In Part Two, further evidence of this macho mood affecting politics and art surfaces in congressional debates leading to the commissioning of “robust” art for the U.S. Capitol. 103. “Sketches of the Old Masters: Rembrandt,” Crayon, January 1855; “Home Heroics,” February 1855, 104; “America’s Rembrandts,” Century, October 1910, 881. Many of these standards were applied to American authors, to the detriment of objective critical judgments. If Walt Whitman was a dirty old man whose poetry was kept out of American classrooms via the McGuffey Readers, he was celebrated as the “robust” and “burly” male in an industrialized America whose men were becoming more effeminate and its women more mannish. The later fashion for the Veblenian engineer as manly American hero is no accident. See Martha Banta on Richard Harding Davis’s 1897 romance, Soldiers of Fortune, in Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago, 1993), 68–74.



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104. Brander Matthews, “James Fenimore Cooper,” Century, September 1889, 796. 105. See “Michelangelo Buonarotti,” Century, November 1891, 5, and “Raphael,” Century, December 1891, 171, which notes that Raphael was “one of those extraordinary and precocious natures which ripen quickly and decay rapidly.” In 1905 George Woodberry furnished a more cheerful view of what decay implies: “there is a moment to die, and that time, as history discloses it, is the moment of perfection.” The Torch: Eight Lectures Delivered before the Lowell Institute (New York, 1969), 4. 106. David Alan Brown’s Raphael and America (Washington, D.C., 1983) surveys Raphael’s reputation as the delineator of sweet mothers and children. By the final decades of the nineteenth century attention turned toward how he painted and toward the high quality of his portraiture of patently unsanctified males. 107. Lewis Mumford came to many of the same conclusions in Art and Technics (New York, 1952), his jeremiad against the forces of technology (all too “male”) that seemed to be emasculating the art world. Stillman and his contemporaries gave no recognition to Michelangelo’s homosexuality or the creative impact of his studies in male anatomy. 108. See below for Stillman’s treatment of Cole’s engravings and their importance in his Century essay of 1888. 109. Banta’s Imaging American Women details the gender-driven taste for American examples of the manly and the tender. Americans embraced the motherly “tenderness” of Renaissance Italian Madonnas, although not the doctrines that elevated the Virgin into sacred realms. The “look” of contemporary Italian women enticed as long as no threat was posed to Protestant beliefs or to gender norms. “Women Nationally Considered: The Italian Woman,” from the Crayon (March 1858) establishes “the vigor and fullness” of the Italian female type, which avoids the wraithlike, somewhat neurasthenic look featured in many late-nineteenth-century paintings of American women. Fortunately for males, her robust and earthy body is marked by “gentleness” and the “child-like simplicity” of “her moral and intellectual nature” (67). 110. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 35. 111. That Morse’s message was sent from the U.S. Capitol Building should be kept in mind when reading Part Two. See Charles E. Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol of the United States of America (Washington, D.C., 1927), 106, regarding Morse’s failed attempt to contribute a painting to the Capitol. Also see George C. Hazelton, The National Capitol: Its Architecture, Art, and History (New York, 1897), 191. 112. William M. Chase, “The Two Whistlers,” Century, June 1910, 223, 225. Whistler’s rejection of Ruskinianism asserted that art has “no reason to explain its presence—no mission to fulfill”— and certainly no need to revere the Old Masters. Ezra Pound’s “To Whistler, American” of 1912 praised his courage to “wrench” from America her “impulse into art,” showing that from “that mass of dolts . . . there’s a chance at least of winning through.” 113. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York, 1929), 196. Whistler concurred, dismissing “all claptrap” used to express “emotions entirely foreign to [art], as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.” 114. European aesthetic theory reflects significant changes taking place in the natural sciences once art practices shifted from the Ideal observed by the soul to the Real analyzed by the eye. Of note are Robert Zimmerman, “Towards the Reforms of Aesthetics as an Exact Science” (1861), Jacob Burckhardt, “Reflections on World History” (1868–72), Gustav Fechner, “Aesthetics from Above

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and Below” (1876), and Alois Riegl, “Problems of Style” (1893), all of which indicate dedication to the intellectual “rigor” that Veblenism demands. The turn toward the analysis of optics and color in French impressionism dominates Charles Henry’s “Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetics” (1885). This steely reliance on geometric formula threatened to erase whatever the Crayon, Scribner’s Monthly, or Century had to say on the subject of “seeing” well. For the texts cited above, see Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger, Art in Theory, 1815–1900. 115. William James’s “The Hidden Self,” appearing in Scribner’s Monthly in 1890, reports on the efforts of Pierre Janet, noted French analyst, who treated “hysterics” by giving patients the power to replace the nightmarish narratives of their past with “good endings” of their own creation. 116. Mumford, Art and Technics, 162. 117. Art lovers at home turned to books (printed by the Century Company) like John C. Van Dyke’s Modern French Masters: A Series of Biographical and Critical Reviews by American Artists (New York, 1896) and S. G. W. Benjamin’s Contemporary Art in Europe (New York, 1897). Van Dyke’s readers learned about Monet, Courbet, and Manet. That Manet’s art suffered from its reliance on facts indicated “the superiority of an art emanating from the sensibilities of the mind and heart over those of the eye” (216). Benjamin’s intent was more sweeping. He wished to distinguish between the schools of England, Germany, France, and the United States by testing what it is in “the history or character of the race” that gives “birth” to each nation’s art. “If we in America desire, therefore, to have not only a great but a pure school of national art,” it depends on the public’s demand for “an elevating art” and a “national character . . . of a noble type.” Avoid the moral decadence and the love for material luxury in France, which lavishes technical excellence on the production of “obscene works of art” predicated on pleasure in color and physical beauty alone (59–60). 118. Among recent studies of the “business” of Italian art (the costs, contracts, and often testy relations between artists and patrons) are the following: Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion, 1280–1440, 2 vols., ed. Diana Norman (New Haven, 1995); Michael Baxandall, Paintings and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972); Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1997). 119. Roger Fry told Stein that Picasso’s portrait of her was “equal in value” to any Raphael portrait (Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 122). For details of the cash paid out in the late nineteenth century to meet the rising demand for Old Master paintings, see Esther Singleton, Old World Masters in New World Collections (New York, 1929); Reitlinger, Economics of Taste; Brown, Raphael and America; Goldfarb, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Also note Louis A. Holman, “American Rembrandts: Remarkable Increase in American Purchases of Paintings by the Dutch Masters, with a List of Canvasses Owned in the United States and Canada,” Century, October 1910, 881–87. 120. Lynes’s The Art-Makers of Nineteenth-Century America gives an account of Morse’s career as ardent art student in London, frustrated painter in the States, and successful inventor, together with his energetic championing of the democratic policies of the National Academy of Design. 121. Landscape painters continued to do well on the American art market. Inness, Church, Bierstadt, Moran, and the Luminists (Fitz Hugh Lane, John Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford) did well, while Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins struggled at first to find appreciative audiences for their “native”-style figure painting. See Margaret C. Conrads, Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s (Princeton, 2001).



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122. During the glory years of collecting Old Masters Joseph Duveen received his greatest fame. His tale was told by S. N. Behrman in 1952, amplified by Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (New York, 2004). 123. The signature look in this period, lavished on the studios of successful artists (sites for the entertainment of friends and clients), was an eclectic heap of ornate exotica. William Merritt Chase’s paintings, as well as Zola’s His Masterpiece, Norris’s Vandover and the Brute, and Dreiser’s The “Genius,” are strong evidence for this particular aesthetic. In Hours with Art and Artists, Sheldon devotes eleven pages to studio decor. Further details are given in Part Three. 124. Warner, “What Is Your Culture to Me?” 476–77. 125. The fictional David Levinsky arrives from Russia in 1885 with four cents in his pocket. On his first day in New York’s Lower East Side, he is taunted as a “greenhorn” whose prior study of the Talmud is “no business in America.” Ridiculed for expecting to receive only an offer of bread as his first meal, he is handed a glass of milk with the words, “In America people are not foolish enough to be content with dry bread.” Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York, 1917; repr. 1960), 94. In The Tragic Muse Gabriel Nash gives his acerbic assessment of “the modern audience,” which flocks “out of hideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with food, stultified with buying and selling and with all the other sordid speculations of the day, squeezed together in a sweltering mass, disappointed in their seats, timing the actor, wishing to get their money back on the spot, before eleven o’clock” (7:66–67). Concerning McDougall and Veblen, see Tilman, The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen, 78. Stein’s “What Is English Literature” of 1934 makes perfect sense from the point of view of Veblenism. (Karl Marx would also see her point regarding exchange values.) “If you write the way it has already been written the way writing has already been written then you are serving mammon because you are living by something some one has already been earning or has earned. If you write as you are to be writing then you are serving as a writer god because you are not earning anything.” Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures, 58. From the Calvinist position, Stein’s comments suggest the distinction between merit gained by work or by grace. Norton’s position centers Henry James’s “An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton,” Burlington Magazine, December 12, 1908, 201–4, from Smyth and Lickehart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States, 161–62. 126. William Dean Howells, “Mark Twain,” Century, September 1882, 780; William James, “Percept and Concept—The Impact of Concepts” (1911), in The Writings of William James, 233; Riesman, Thorstein Veblen, 48, 95. 127. Shifts between civilized and barbarous conduct, often triggered by advances in war technology, form one of the central foci of Martha Banta’s Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct (Chicago, 2003). James was shocked when he realized that the years dividing the Civil War and the start of World War I had been barbaric all along, despite his generation’s hope that history had made major advances in civilized behavior. See Banta, “Meditations from the Cliffs: Henry James on War, History, and the English Character,” Rivista di studi Vittoriani (2000): 7–84. 128. The search for calmness began even earlier. In an essay of May 1871, “Living American Artists,” Scribner’s Monthly praised Asher Durand, founder and ex-president of the National Academy of Design: “few of the homes of our cultured people [are] unadorned with some charming bit of forest loveliness or peaceful pastoral from his pencil,” in rejection of the newest French taste for “strong effects of color” that “seize upon our admiration, without preface.” The general mistrust

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American critics had for French paintings of haystacks glimpsed at all hours of the day confirmed their preference for the muted tones of Millet and Corot’s Barbizon School, although they were unable to link images of a French peasantry at hard toil with scenes of free-spirited American farmers. 129. Singleton, Old World Masters in New World Collections, x. 130. Ibid. Singleton need not have waited until after 1914 to attack the arts of modernity. The International Art Exhibition of 1913 led to many such objections, even as it indicated that time’s arrow cannot be reversed. Life, New York’s comic periodical, published “The Ballad of Dead Masters” on April 17, 1913. It asked, “Where are the Masters we used to know?” Noting the death of interest in the Italian, Dutch, and Spanish greats, it concluded that the old king is dead; the new kings deserve to be assassinated. 131. Singleton, Old World Masters in New World Collections, xl. 132. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 23. 133. Gloom was not new. Just before the publication of Darwin’s mind-shattering study, B. A. Morel’s The Degeneracy of the Human Species was published in Paris in 1857. However, the Crayon (“The Degeneracy of the Human Species,” April 1857) found Morel to be overly excited in his fears that modern man had deviated from “the primitive or normal type.” With the aid of “scientific knowledge,” all will be well. 134. Mumford, Art and Technics, 156, 161. This and similar arguments that assumed that humankind has arrived at “civilization” ignored Veblen’s insistence that “civilisation” is an advanced form of barbarism. Late-nineteenth-century anxiety over the depletion of masculine power under the heavy weight of modern life led to efforts to “recapitulate” previous phases of existence. Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1930 (Chicago, 1987), examines Dr. G. Stanley Hall’s theories of adolescent psychology. Between 1903 and 1911, Hall attempted to reverse patterns of civilized behavior by training young boys to become “savages.” His hope was that, as they matured, they would regain the “manliness” it takes to advance civilization’s necessary barbarities. In the coming world of technocrats, Jay M. Gould’s charts measure the “accelerating historical impact of the exponential growth of the scientific and technical work force.” The Technical Elite (New York, 1968), 124. Gould includes a graph that images the logarithmic scale placed on a horizontal time axis deployed by Henry Adams in “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” itself based on Willard Gibbs’s “mathematical treatment” of the stages of thought. See The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 267–311. 135. W. D. Garrett’s “John Adams and the Limited Role of the Fine Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio One (1964): 242–55. 136. Ibid., 255. 137. Brooks Adams, preface to The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 42, 77. 138. The Education of Henry Adams, 265–66, 5, 22, 218. Compare the tone of confidence exuded by Gertrude Stein’s autobiography with the self-deprecating despair (however ironic and playful) of Henry Adams’s autobiography. Both are written in the third person, but the one deemed herself a success and the other elected to present a persona of abject failure. 139. The country’s first college-level art courses were offered in 1831 at Princeton. The program quickly folded, as did abortive attempts in 1832 by New York University under the guidance of Samuel F. B. Morse and Yale in 1899 where the influence of the Germanic traditions of a priori



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idealism still lingered. By the 1880s Princeton’s instructors applied the methods of the natural sciences and philology, which formed the “humanistic laboratory” of the institution’s prized archeological approach. Note that instruction in art history made its initial inroads at America’s women’s colleges, with Matthew Vassar’s academy the primary leader by the 1860s, followed by courses at Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. See Smyth and Lickehart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States, 57−61, 91, 175, 185n11. 140. Ibid., 91, 175, 185n11. Sally Anne Duncan’s “Harvard’s ‘Museum Course’ and the Making of America’s Museum Profession” studies the impact upon curatorship once Paul Joseph Sachs launched the course Museum Work and Museum Problems. In league with Henry Watson Kent of the Metropolitan Museum, and with the Fogg Museum as its center, Sachs’s course, which ran between 1921 and 1948, sought to “combine art history and connoisseurship with a comprehensive overview of the contemporary art world” (3). Today’s revisionists may label Sachs’s “scientific” approach as elevating “elitist devotion to quality, canonical displays, and connoisseurship” (15). Latter-day Veblenians who shrink from signs of unchallenged evolutionist theory might also indict Alfred Barr’s vision for the Museum of Modern Art, used by Sachs as a model for his students. Barr’s was a “uni-directional, teleological approach to modern art history”—the famous “torpedo” design for the museum “moving through time, its nose the ever advancing present, its tail the ever receding past.” See James Hall’s review of MOMA’s current physical layout in TLS, February 25, 2005, 18. 141. Donald Preziosi, “Introduction to Part III: Institutionalizing Art History: The Early Discipline in the United States,” in Smyth and Lickehart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States, 147. 142. William Stillman, “Cole and His Work,” Century, November 1888, 57. 143. If “soul” in the service of poetry and passion is “gone” in 1888, all too present on the critical horizon were views shaking loose the tight grip of spirituality, such as those held by members of the circle around Bernard Berenson, which resulted in Vernon Lee’s Essay on Art and Life (East Aurora, N.Y., 1896) and Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, 2nd ed. (New York, 1924). Scott rejected “the Ethical Fallacy,” which equates good architecture with good morals. Lee’s tone was milder when arguing that “aesthetic pleasure” was the true goal of art. She was willing to consider that truth, goodness, and beauty were “indissolubly woven together” over the course of “their ceaseless growth,” but they were not, however, one and the same (15–16). Part Two looks more closely at Stillman’s essays of the late 1880s and early 1890s that express anger against the “anti-artistic,” rationalistic indifference to the spirit of the “national temper.” 144. Stillman, “Cole and His Work,” 57. 145. Ibid., 57−58. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., 57.

Part Two. Capitol of Best Intentions

1. Brasilia and Chandigarh were mental constructs before receiving material form and a population of government men, but it is Washington, D.C.—also created out of nothingness—that has made the loudest noise on the world’s scene.

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2. William Sewell Jr., “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 6, no. 2 (1967): 209. 3. Max Weber, quoted in Guenther Roth’s introduction to Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, 1978), 1:xxxiii. The following quotations are by Roth in summing up Weber’s position, xxxv, xliii, xxxvii. 4. Sewell, “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” 217–18, 214. Also see Wilfried Nippel, “Introductory Remarks: Max Weber’s ‘The City Revisited,’” in City States in Classical Antiquities and Medieval Italy, ed. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Enlon, 19–20 (Ann Arbor, 1991), for Nippel’s treatment of similar material covered by Roth. 5. Catherine King, “The Trecento: New Ideas, New Evidence,” in Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion, 1280–1440, ed. Diana Norman (New Haven, 1995), 1:227. 6. Giorgio Vasari, “Preface to the Lives,” part 1, The Lives of the Artists, tr. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, 1991), 5–6. Art obeys the processes of Nature modeled on the great event of Creation by which God, “the Divine Architect of Time and Nature, being all perfect,” has led mankind through successive stages of growth: from “simple children, crudely brought up in the woods” to “the first men—being much less further away from the moment of their divine creation, more perfect, and of greater intellect,” and on to the greatness of ancient art. Backsliding occurred when that art was destroyed, first by “barbarous nations” and then by iconoclastic excesses fueled by “the fervent zeal of the new Christian religion” (3–5). At last, a happy ending for Tuscany once art’s seizure of the splendors of God’s Nature (reborn in the quattrocento) reached maturity in the cinquecento. Vasari’s preface to part 2 details the slow, steadfast improvements that led to the third stage, in which “art has achieved everything which could possibly be permitted to an imitator of Nature.” As a result there is “more reason to fear its decline than to expect further advances” (49). 7. C. Edwards Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici and of Our Own Times (New York, 1845), 1:4, 131–32. 8. Washington, D.C. described in a letter of December 6, 1800 by Connecticut Representative Roger Griswold. The only completed structures were the President’s House, the Capitol, and the Treasury stretched along Pennsylvania Avenue, a dusty trail littered with stumps and bushes. Cited in Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C. after the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1995), 15. Rome as viewed by Samuel Eliot in The Liberty of Rome is cited by William L. Vance, America’s Rome (New Haven, 1989), 1:3. 9. T. P. Wiseman, The Myths of Rome (Exeter, 2004) examines the years when Rome’s history (ever intertwined with its myths) began to define itself under Augustus by the past rather than the future (218). 10. Vasari, Lives, 3. As an example of the improbability of ever achieving a single aesthetic theory, note the split introduced by Vasari, which sets principles of line against those of color. Marked by a strong regional bias (Tuscans against Venetians), Vasari praised Florentine designo (as practiced by Michelangelo) and dismissed Venetian colorito (characterizing the work of Titian and Giorgione). Colorito is not, however, the same as colore, since it refers to loosely applied brushwork by which paint is spread upon the surface. See David Rosand, “Venetian Painting of the Cinquecento,” in Venice: Art and Architecture, ed. Giandomenico Romanelli (Konemann, Italy, 2005), 357, 361.



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11. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842), cited by John W. Reps, Washington on View: The Nation’s Capital since 1790 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 92. 12. Horatio Greenough, “Criticism in Search of Beauty,” in Form and Function, ed. Harold A. Small (Berkeley, 1957), 111 (emphasis added); Thomas Matthews, The Clash of the Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1993), 143 (emphasis added). Gertrude Himmelfarb, in The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenment (2004), prefers to believe that with America’s rejection of French-style “enlightenment” and acceptance of the British example, the nation was set on the path to implement its own superior doctrines of liberty and virtue. 13. Charles Moore, Washington, Past and Present (New York, 1929), 14, 21. Moore’s and Glenn Brown’s contributions to the McMillan Plan are detailed in the following pages, with important points drawn from Brown’s 1860–1930, Memories: A Winning Crusade to Revive George Washington’s Vision of a Capital City (Washington, D.C., 1931). 14. “A Winning Crusade . . .” is the subtitle of Brown’s Memories; “truly noble” is from Roth, Economy and Society, li. The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (Princeton, 2002) by Christopher A. Thomas suggests that Washington’s City became Lincoln’s during the first decades of the twentieth century. Many elements of the efforts to honor Lincoln duplicated struggles to memorialize the first president. 15. See Jacob E. Cooke, “Compromise of 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 27 (October 1970): 523–45, for his critique of arguments that, in his view as associate editor of the Hamilton Papers, give too much credence to Jefferson’s account. For further details, see Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1962), chap. 1; John W. Reps, Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center (Princeton, 1967), chap. 1; Frederick Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation: The History of Planning for the National Capital (Washington, D.C., 1977), chap. 1; Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000). For contemporary documents, see The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 17 (6 July to 3 November, 1780), ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, 1965) and The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series, vol. 6 (July−November 1791), ed. Mark A. Mastromarino (Charlottesville, Va., 1996). 16. Prior to The Creation of Washington, D.C. (Fairfax, Va., 1991), Bowling wrote the brief but useful study Creating the Federal City, 1774–1800: Potomac Fever (Washington, D.C., 1988). Each study follows the steps leading to the final decision. Southerners and northerners were divided over what was meant by placing the capital in a “central” site in regard to the emphasis given to geographical location or to population density. 17. Documentary History of the Construction and Development of the United States Capitol Building and Grounds (Washington, D.C., 1904), 5. 18. Bowling, Creation of Washington, D.C., x. 19. Ibid., 171, 173, 202, 207. 20. Bowling’s Creating the Federal City defines the “republicanism” that met the wish of the new government to represent “an institutionally expressed political and social philosophy which rested on the belief that, although people were self-interested and power seeking, they were capable of self-government. People delegated sovereignty to popularly elected legislatures, supreme over executives. Representation was indirect, social distinctions but not aristocracy acceptable, and

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the interests of minority protected. The goal of republicanism was to balance individual liberty with the good of the whole” (11). How nearly the American notion of republicanism matched the versions practiced in Rome, Florence, and Venice remains a vital question—especially in the case of Rome, frequently held up for emulation by the young American republic. See Wiseman, Myths of Rome, regarding John Adams’s interest in the checks and balances tradition found in Polybius’s account of the Roman constitution (165). Also factor in the differences that split the Federalists from the Anti-Federalists as they argued over which ideology supported the republican spirit. As Bowling puts it, the Federalists wished to establish “the American Empire,” since—like all empires—Washington, D.C. would be “measured by the grandeur of [its] capital; in contrast, the Antifederalists scrutinized the role of the president in fear that he would serve as an impetus for a monarchy, backed by an aristocracy, that would lord over a city based on wealth and power drawn from the taxation of the general public” (20). These distinctions played into decisions made by Congress toward creating the “look” of the U.S. Capitol. 21. Green, Washington, 7, 109. 22. Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 313–1308 (Princeton, 1980), 210–11. 23. The South gave little encouragement to the skills in mechanics that could have given it its own “Leonardo.” Eli Whitney (a Massachusetts man) invented the cotton gin in 1793, which enabled southern cotton plantations to reach new economic goals. By 1798 Whitney was also instrumental in devising methods for the manufacture of interchangeable gun parts. When the Civil War came, the North’s leadership in this and other technological innovations played a large part in the Union’s ability to dominate militarily. Demands by British factories for southern cotton to keep their looms going encouraged England’s pro-Confederacy sentiments, but what counted most to the northern war effort were lessons learned from the British Industrial Revolution, not the cotton that passed through the Whitney gins. 24. Lillian Miller, Patrons and Politicians: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1966), 5, 127, 229. 25. Andrew J. Cosetino and Henry H. Glassie, The Capital Image: Painters in Washington, D.C., 1800–1915 (Washington, D.C., 1983), 9, 26, 45, 56–57, 62. 26. Jacob, Capital Elites, 38. Congress hardly lacked major southern political figures. Among them were Senators John Slidell (Louisiana), Robert Toombs (Georgia), and William Gwin (California); Representatives Roger Pryor (Virginia), William Cobb (Alabama); secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson (Mississippi) and secretary of war Jefferson Davis (Mississippi). In his review of Ernest B. Furgurson’s Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York, 2004), James McPherson points out the overwhelming majority of southerners in political power prior to the Civil War: two-thirds of the U.S. presidents, twenty-four of the thirty-six presidents pro tem of the Senate, and twenty-three Speakers of the House, as well as twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices. See “Specimen Days,” New York Review of Books, December 16, 2004, 70. 27. Jacob, Capital Elites, 38, 57. 28. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, 1918), 43–45. 29. Ibid., 47. 30. Ibid., 45. 31. Bowling, Creation of Washington, D.C., 246. 32. Documentary History, 1131. Brooks’s peroration came midst debates on April 12, 1872 over an appropriation of $400,000 to enhance the Capitol grounds and the need for so great an ex-













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penditure after the close of a costly war, but funds were finally approved. Questions were also raised about the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad lines traversing the Mall. Decades later, when confronted by renewed partisan battles over the management of the Mall, the McMillan Plan attempted to face down these issues. 33. Edwin Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), n.p., 65. When telling tales of the founding of cities and the rise to power of great rulers, it was important to craft genealogies that established a dynastic continuum between the gods and their mortal descendents. See Sabine G. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1989), 169. 34. Latecomers like European settlers on the North American continent had ways to commemorate their unique origins. The Old Colony Club of Plymouth initiated festivities in 1769 to commemorate the landing of the Mayflower on December 21, 1620 (although the actual date continues to be disputed). By 1793 Forefathers’ Day became the celebratory date New Englanders claimed as the “beginning” of America. Virginians countered with stories of the Jamestown settlement in 1607, while still others insist the honor belongs to Leif Ericsson’s landing circa a.d. 1000. (Lacking are official celebrations to highlight the origins of the indigenous peoples of the North American continent.) See Udo J. Hebel, “New England Forefathers’ Day Celebrations between the American Revolution and the Civil War,” in Ceremonies and Spectacles: Performing American Culture, ed. Teresa Alves, Teresa Cid, and Heinz Ickstadt, 111–43 (Amsterdam, 2000). The institutionalization of southern pride over Jamestown’s claim to “firstness” is detailed in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991). 35. Muir examines how mid-Renaissance humanism converted the myth of Venice into an ideology of republicanism. Muir, as well as David Rosand (Myths of Venice [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002] and “Venetia Figurata: The Iconography of a Myth,” in Interpretazione veneziane: Studi di storia dell-arte in onore di Michaelangelo Muraro, ed. David Rosand [Venice, 1984]), believes that the Venetian situation was a major influence on government policy in England and the American colonies. One example: William Penn’s interest in the use of the secret ballot. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 54. 36. James Henry, “The Transition from the Un-Beautiful to the Beautiful,” Crayon, May 1855, 322. 37. In comparison with the ancient civilizations circling the Mediterranean, Rome was not that old. Only in the second century a.d., when the city was a mere thousand years old, did its citizens begin to refer to Rome as “the Eternal City.” See Paul Hetherington, Medieval Rome: A Portrait of the City and Its Life (London, 1994). By dating Rome’s foundation as a community at about 880 b.c., Wiseman’s Myths of Rome pushes Rome back to a period earlier than that of the Greeks (15). John Boardman’s The Archeology of Nostalgia: How the Greeks Re-created Their Mythical Past records how the classical Greeks plundered their Homeric past in order to offset their youthfulness as a civilization. 38. Wiseman’s Myths of Rome takes an aggressive line on the crucial interrelation between Rome’s history and myth, but Venice may have the edge. See Rosand, Myths of Venice and “Venetia Figurata.” In his “Venetian Painting of the Cinquecento,” Rosand focuses on qualities shared by Venice, the Virgin, Dea Romana, Venus, and Justice—an “allusive complexity [that] epitomizes the self-presentation of the Serene Republic herself, where religion, history, mythology, and politics were interwoven into a unified social fabric” (381). Also included in Romanelli, Venice: Art and Architecture are other essays that study the Venetians’ mythic self-justification:

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Sandro Sponza, “Painting in Fourteenth-Century Venice” and Deborah Howard, “Jacopo Sansovino and the Romanization of Venetian Architecture.” Even before “Venice” was Venice, the peoples settled on the scattered islets of the “Venetia” region embellished the legend of St. Mark by tying an angelic prophecy (vaticinatio) to the glorious destiny (praedestinatio) that lay ahead. This story contained all the elements (historical, canonical, political) that led to the founding of the Venetian state through the power of myth to impose itself on the writing of history. See Wladimiro Dorigo, “Venetia Before Venice: From Grado to San Marco,” in Venice: Art and Architecture, 40–43; James S. Grubb, “When Myths Lose Their Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 43–94. For two basic “historical” accounts, see John Julius Norwich’s magisterial study, A History of Venice (London, 1977−81; repr., 1983), which relates how Venice became a city around the eighth century, and Dorigo’s “Venetia Before Venice,” 31, which fills out the centuries between the sixth-century cluster of pre-Venetian settlements and “the entry of the archaic little Venices into the new duchy in the age of civic and commercial expansion” established between a.d. 1000 and 1100. 39. A. T. Grafton, “The Renaissance,” in The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal, ed. Richard Jenkyns (Oxford, 1992), 119. 40. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, tr. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, 1972), 4–5. 41. Joannes Temporarius, quoted in Grafton, “The Renaissance,” 120. 42. Yet “behind the fanciful embellishments of the myths, many of them Greek in origin, there lies a basis of truth. There were, indeed, Iron Age settlements on several of the hills, above the Tiber, where Rome was to be built, and a hut of one of them, known as the House of Romulus, was still preserved as a showplace on the slopes of the Palatine in the days of the Empire.” Christopher Hibbert, Rome: The Biography of a City (New York, 1985), 8. Paul Hetherington comments that archeologists confirm that Rome began as a Latin village on the Palatine, settled by shepherds and peasants from the Alban and Sabine hills in the region of the Tiber. What mattered most to the Romans, whatever shifts took place over the centuries from kingdom to republic to empire, was “the simple overwhelming aura cast by the greatness of Rome’s ancient past.” Hetherington, Medieval Rome, 4. Wiseman’s lively account (Myths of Rome) adds further details to the founding myths that blended into later histories of the region. 43. Quoted in the introduction to Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art, ed. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber (New Haven, 2000), 8. The book contains a wealth of contemporary views by Stefano Poracari, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Giovanni Gherardi, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Angelo Polizniano, and Vespasiano di Bisticci. 44. Scholars endlessly debate the nature of the republicanism practiced in Florence, or whether it ever existed. See Gene A. Brucker’s Renaissance Florence: Society, Culture, and Politics (Keips Verlag, 1994), particularly “The Medici in the Fourteenth Century” (1–26) and “The Florentine Popoli Minuto and Its Political Role, 1340–1450” (155–83) and Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378 (Princeton, 1962), as well as Molho, Raaflaub, and Enlon, City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy. 45. According to tradition, Pope Leo I came to the Mincio River in a.d. 452, armed only with a cross, to face down Attila, with the result that the barbarians departed from Italy. See Antonio AlbertiPoja, The House of Peter, tr. Edoardo Cavali (Gerrads Cross, 1987), 26. Emanuel Leutze’s Wash-











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ington Crossing the Delaware (1851) is an American version of just such a crucial confrontation whose Italian antecedent figures in Raphael’s rendition in one of the panels for the Stanza of Heliodorus at the Vatican. 46. L’Enfant’s communication to Washington in 1789 states, “No Nation perhaps had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their Capital City should be fixed, or combining every necessary consideration in the choice of the situation.” It was obvious to L’Enfant “that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for the aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote.” Cited in Bowling, Creating the Federal City, 12. According to Fairman, Jefferson was the “manager or chief superintendent” over the construction of the Capitol. Charles E. Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol of the United States of America (Washington, D.C., 1927), 1. Jefferson backed the founding of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, opened in 1802 as a school of engineering, triggering the essential role played by the army corps, as detailed in Albert E. Cowdrey, A City for the Nation: The Army Engineers and the Building of Washington, D.C., 1790–1967 (Washington, D.C., 1978). 47. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 4. 48. Letters from Washington of January 31, 1793 and March 3, 1793. Documentary History, 24. 49. Documentary History, 178–79. 50. Ibid., 259. 51. Ibid., 259−60. 52. Observations by the Englishman Charles Janson in 1806, quoted in Reps, Washington on View, 64. Morris Birkbeck’s Notes of 1817 commented that the population of the District was scattered into “petty hamlets” along “intended streets” that meandered through “the rugged waste.” The site exposed a most “un-American plan” that, in its “affectation of splendor,” is like unto “the painted face and gaudy head-dress of a half-naked Indian.” “This embryo metropolis, with its foreign decorations, should have set a better example to the young republic,” with “good roads and substantial bridges” (66). In 1836 Tyrone Power, the famous Irish actor, noted a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure. “Nothing, in fact, can be more panoramic than the aspect lying in one of the best-defined and most beautiful of natural amphitheatres, and flanked by the grandest of rivers. At the distance of five or six miles all the meannesses of the city are lost sight of, and the extreme ends, so widely apart and so worthily bounded, by the Capitol on the north and the president’s mansion . . . give to the metropolis of America an aspect no way unworthy of its high destiny” (58). 53. Rumors over the choice of the location of the nation’s capital tarnished Washington’s image. The Anti-Federalists called him a usurper with the “insolence of an Emperor of Rome.” He was viewed as pro-British, avid to become America’s first monarch and eager to benefit financially from “the Potomac fever.” The Junius Americanus essay also damaged his reputation as a man of high moral qualities. Since Rome had a long history of generals who become dictators, it was fortunate that Washington followed the model of Cincinnatus, who laid down his sword. See Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York, 1987), 2. Schwartz’s study of Washington’s image pairs well with Henry Wiencek’s An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York, 2003). 54. See Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Inaugurations (New York, 2001), 6. Boller provides further de-

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tails of the ceremonies (banquets, receptions, balls, parades) at the time of Washington’s coming into office, as well as a review of subsequent presidential inaugurations and the raucous origins of political conventions and campaign rallies during and after the Jacksonian era. 55. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Presidential Nominations and Elections: A History of American Conventions, National Campaigns, Inaugurations and Campaign Caricatures (New York, 1916), 166, 170, 176. Coinage (how presidents were imaged) and manners (how to address them) had to be sorted out during the transition taking place between monarchs, with whom Americans were familiar, and republican leaders, with whom they were not (see 56–58). (Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” captures this confusion when Rip “returns” to find the tavern sign marked George III replaced by the name of George Washington.) Even when the new model of leadership was assured, there were no guarantees about the emotional appeal of the men elected. At John Adams’s gloomy inauguration, when Washington stepped down, many wept (see 177). 56. Loren Partridge and Randolph Starn, “Triumphalism and the Sala Regia in the Vatician,” in “All the World’s A Stage”: Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower, part 1, Triumphal Celebrations and the Rituals of Statecraft: Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University 6 (1990): 23. 57. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity, 3, 9, underscores the importance of the successful performance of adventus. (Consider the unhappy example of the adventus of Abraham Lincoln into Washington, D.C., hustled in after dark by the Pinkertons to avoid possible attempts to assassinate the newly elected president.) This richly documented study also explores the ceremonies of accession, which led to tensions between members of the Rome Senate and the military over who had the power to confirm the next emperor in line. This raised issues over the value of an individual’s personal merits set against the wisdom of selecting a divi filius able to carry on a dynastic line. There was also the matter of consecratio—ceremonies held at the time of the death of emperor that would secure the stable passage of authority. Funeral ceremonies held for Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy have strong affinities with both the “spectacle of theater” and the genuine grief that marked consecratio traditions. 58. Ibid., 88. The period of consolidation, put in place by the time of Justinian and Theodora, fit George Washington once he stopped being a military leader and “became” the citizen-president. It did not, however, suit a figure like Theodore Roosevelt, who was always in the “process” of being, always on the way to arriving somewhere else. 59. Matthews, in The Clash of the Gods, attacks the loose application of the “arrivals” of pagan emperors to the coming of Jesus to Jerusalem. In contrast to “the Emperor Mystic,” whereby emperors function on a worldly plane, the day of Jesus’s arrival announced he would rule on a spiritual plane. Yet attention must be paid to the slippage between the secular and the divine that marks even the most prosaic ceremonies in Washington, D.C. 60. Schwartz, George Washington, 2. George C. Hazelton provides documentation regarding the efforts to bring Washington’s body from Mount Vernon to be laid in a tomb next to his wife, Martha, the objections of the state of Virginia, the approval granted by George Custis, Martha’s grandson, and blockage of the plan by John A. Washington, the president’s grandnephew, who served as the proprietor of Mont Vernon. As a result, the crypt was left empty, eventually used as storage area for Adelaide Johnson’s 1921 busts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott. (See Hazelton’s The National Capitol: Its Architecture, Art, and History [New













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York, 1897] for correspondence on the struggle over who had priority over the sacred relic, 188– 89, 292–95.) 61. Hazelton, The National Capitol, 190. 62. The remains of St. Peter (located midst the debris of ancient Rome) became the literal “rock” upon which the Vatican built its church, the center of the Christian world and the seat of its moral and political eminence. In fulfillment of divine promises, St. Mark’s body was stolen back from Alexandria in 626 b.c. to come to rest within the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. 63. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity, 140. Regarding a proposal in 1852 to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Washington’s birth (a sort of delayed consecratio), Littleton Tazewell, senator from Virginia, objected. “Man worships, how great soever the man, [I] will oppose.” Schwartz, George Washington, 2. 64. This is Muir’s outline of the practices of the Venetian republic, one that suggests ties with the American ideal. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 4–5, 20–21. 65. Hazelton, The National Capitol, 36. Americans chose to ignore the fact that during their invasion of Canada, they burnt the parliament building in York to the ground. According to “Destruction of the Capitol and Other Public Buildings, the War of 1812,” the State Paper issued by Congress, Admiral Cockrane’s orders to burn Washington, D.C. were carried out by Cockburn and General Ross (see Documentary History, 171). There is the anecdote of Cockburn, who “sprang into the Speaker’s chair in his muddy boots, and calling his battle-stained troops to order in mock parliament, shouted derisively, ‘Shall this harbor of Yankee Democracy be burned? All for it will say, Aye!’” The British troops shouted their affirmation and “the whole structure was soon in flames.” This is followed by mention of an unnamed British officer who, when ordered to destroy the Hall of the House of Representatives, said that “it was a pity to burn anything so beautiful” (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 22–23). There was also the tale of “the daring of Thornton, the designer of the Capitol,” who challenged a British officer about to turn his guns upon the Patent Office Building by saying, “Are you Englishmen, or Goths and Vandals?” (Hazelton, The National Capitol, 38). In addition to the State Paper prepared by Congress on the damage suffered by the city, Congress issued Madison’s Proclamation of September 1, 1814 and his sixth annual address of September 20, 1814. Madison cited the destruction of “costly monuments of taste and of the arts” with which “the country has enriched and embellished its infant metropolis” (Documentary History, 171–72). It was not only hostile invaders who did harm to the Capitol’s early art. The Capitol was plagued by a series of fires, including one of December 24, 1851 that destroyed paintings stored in the Capitol’s Library of Congress. But the army corps took action to repair the damage to the Capitol and began new work on the city’s bridges and the canal that replaced Tiber Creek. 66. From a letter of 1814 by Margaret Bayard Smith (society leader and wife of the editor of the city’s leading newspaper, National Intelligencer), quoted in Cosetino and Glassie, The Capital Image, 27. (Hetherington, Medieval Rome, 4−8, lists an inventory of the major sacks of Rome by the Goths and Vandals.) Andrew Jackson’s defiance is represented by Clark Mills’s bronze equestrian erected in Lafayette Square in 1853 to face the White House the British had ravaged. Funding came from the efforts of the Jackson Democratic Society, an early example of special interest groups intent on having their own military heroes receive permanent recognition. 67. In 1803 Benjamin Latrobe had replaced L’Enfant. A proto-Veblenian, he was charged to bring into being this “favorite folly” of George Washington, in whose name “the federal city”—this

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“Gigantic Abortion”—became “one of the offspring of that revolutionary enthusiasm, which elevated the American mind.” After the destruction caused by the British occupation in 1815, he wished to deal with the ruins in the Roman manner by carting away the stones and knocking over mutilated statues in order to build new structures, but he was not given the gunpowder to blow up what was left. (For Latrobe’s request to erase remnants of L’Enfant’s original plan, see Brown, Memories, 328; for his letter to Philip Mazzei in 1806, see Bowling, Creation of Washington, D.C., 245; for his report of November 28, 1816, see Documentary History, 192; for his letter to Jefferson of June 18, 1817, see Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital, ed. Saul K. Padover [Washington, D.C., 1926], 481.) It was never easy to wrench funds from Congress for any renovations. One member on February 23, 1827 charged that further expenditure upon “this Colossal Labyrinth” was a clever scheme to place money in the pockets of certain parties. On January 24, 1856, funds were approved for improved acoustics as long as no money was given to artwork: “Architects sacrifice everything to beauty. They appeal to the eye, and not to the ear.” There should be “nothing but the greatest simplicity and destitution of ornaments, plain walls, no arches, no domes.” A colleague agreed that “architects, rejecting philosophical principles, and the lessons of experience, labor to embellish and ornament rooms designed for public speaking, with the view rather to architectural elegance, than to the laws of acoustics.” On May 26, 1856, Representative Ball made the ever-powerful comparison of American virtue to European decadence in asking the reason for “ridiculous” expenditures “in which our Republican Government is made to play the poor part of a wretched imitator of the broken-down monarchies of the Old World” (see Documentary History, 637). But comfortable references to Old World models were possible. The exterior retained its “American individuality,” and “American history and spirit clung to each Roman arch—to each Grecian column, entablature and pediment.” Certain embellishments were literally “painted” on, a tactic that enabled the Capitol dome “to resemble that of the Pantheon at Rome” (Hazelton, The National Capitol, 86, 219). 68. A visiting Englishman in 1822 expressed his feelings in An Excursion through the United States; cited in Reps, Washington on View, 68. Congressional proceedings in 1826 showed that those “disposed to antagonize the expenditure of money for works of art were in the habit of improving every opportunity for the adverse criticism of such works of art as had been installed.” Nicholas Gevelot’s bas-relief of William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians was condemned by Representatives Ingham (who turned away “in disgust”) and Everett (who was “much mortified” by the look of Penn as “a dwarf ”). The panel representing “those who landed at Plymouth” caused “indignation” over the “female figure” (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 63). Few passed the “nobility” test. 69. For remarks made by Trollope, Martineau, and Dickens, see Reps, Washington on View, 76, 108. 70. Comments by an English journalist in 1862 and by Atlantic Monthly (1861) cited in Reps, Washington on View, 136, 138. 71. Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, iii. 72. “Washington in 1859,” Harper’s, cited by Reps, Washington on View, 132. 73. Alberti-Poja, The House of Peter, 19. 74. Henry James, William Wetmore Storey and His Friends (Boston, 1903), 1: 6, 8. 75. Ibid., 1:11; Vance, America’s Rome. Throughout the 1850s, the Crayon stressed the same challenges made to the American consciousness.



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76. Thomas Moore, “To Thomas Hume, Esq., M.D., from the City of Washington,” cited in Cosetino and Glassie, The Capital Image, 17. 77. Cited in ibid., 19. 78. Cheap skilled labor was not readily available. On January 3, 1793, the commissioners of Public Buildings and Grounds announced, “We have a good many Negro Laborers” (Documentary History, 22), Some ninety slaves did most of the initial construction. See Green, Washington, 15, regarding the city’s slave auctions, and Reps, Monumental Washington, 44. 79. W. D. Garrett, “John Adams and the Limited Role of the Fine Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio One (1964), 255. 80. Frederick Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation (Washington, D.C., 1977), 2–3; Moore, Washington, Past and Present, 5. 81. Untrained as an architect, Thornton won the competition for the design of the Capitol in 1792, but once his plans were seen as structurally impractical, it was redesigned by Etienne Hallet. In turn, Hallet was soon dismissed. Latrobe, Thornton’s replacement, served as surveyor of public buildings between 1803 and 1817, designed the Capitol’s south wing, made changes to the original plans for the White House, remolded the Patent Office, and rebuilt the Capitol after its destruction by the British in 1814. Bulfinch succeeded Latrobe as the Capitol’s architect between 1817 and 1830, followed by Robert Mills (1836–51) and Thomas Walter (1851–65). 82. Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation, 21–2, 29, 33; Green, Washington, 60, 137, 166–67, 169. The transient nature of the men involved in national politics did little to encourage the arts of the members of the permanent community. In 1824 Margaret Bayard Smith lamented that one must “live as it were in a land of strangers.” On visiting the city in the early 1840s Sir Charles Lyell bluntly (and somewhat inaccurately) commented that “here there is no university, no classes of students in science or literature, no philosophical societies, no people who seem to have any leisure.” Cosetino and Glassie, The Capital Image, 37, 71. 83. Any inventory of the issues pressing upon the nation prior to the Civil War include the following: Louisiana Purchase (1803); Congressional prohibition of the slave trade (1807); financial panics and depression (1819–23); Missouri Compromise (1820); the Monroe Doctrine (1823); establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1824); Indian Removal Bill (1830); formation of the Whig Party (1834); financial panics and depressions (1834–44); annexation of Texas (1845); Mexican War (1846); formation of the Free Soil Party (1848); Compromise of 1850; formation of the Republican Party and the Know-Nothing Party (1854), Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), panic of 1857; Dred Scott decision (1857), Harper’s Ferry raid (1859). Chap. 1 of Miller’s Patrons and Politicians, “The Nationalist Apologia,” outlines why America had to separate itself from the contempt of the English; chap. 16, “Art and Nationality,” details how difficult it was for the arts of this period to gain approval in the face of Old World tastes. Vivien Green Fryd’s Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven, 1991) focuses on representations of the conquest by whites of the continent’s native tribes and the erasure of the role of blacks in a slave society—“the politics of power” disguised as matters of aesthetic and moral concern. It should be kept in mind that, by nature, the neoclassical conventions applied to the Capitol displayed the same merger of politics and aesthetics present in the Italian tradition to which the Capital turned as its model. 84. Cosetino and Glassie, The Capital Image, 27, 29. 85. Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 2:118.

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86. Ibid., 2:119, 127−28. 87. See Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, 2nd ed. (New York, 1924), chaps. 4 and 5. Scott takes the quotation cited above from Charles Herbert Moore’s Character of Renaissance Architecture (London, 1905) in order to demonstrate how this confirmed utilitarian employed “ethical” comments long after Ruskinian theories had been dropped (123). Also see Mike Boehm’s coverage of the Rand Report, “Arts Funding Report Sparks Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2005. 88. Miller, Patrons and Politicians, 59. The 1839 guidebook to the Capitol takes issue with Luigi Persico’s carvings. His Mars “wants fire” and “the distended nostril of courage and intrepidy is wanting,” while Peace “cannot be held in high esteem”: since “lacking in spirit and life.” See Public Buildings and Statuary of the Government: Picturesque Work of Washington City, with Diagrams of Both Houses of Congress (Washington, D.C., 1839), 32. 89. Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 3–4, 9, 11. Giuseppe Franzoni’s American eagle was part of the frieze over the Speaker’s chair in the original Hall of Representatives; Liberty with another eagle at her side stood behind. See Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 22. It was imperative that America’s appropriation of this ancient symbol of royal power carry republican significance. In 1825, as John Quincy Adams took the oath of office, the city’s Intelligencer reported, “No less than four eagles were seen, poising themselves over the Capitol for about ten minutes, when one of them . . . began to descend, and after making a number of circles around the centre dome arose in graceful spirals.” Perhaps they were “sent by our guardian spirit with her brood from their mountain eyry to augur continued and increased prosperity to our happy country” (Hazelton, The National Capitol, 81). Hazelton includes a contemporary sketch of the unfinished Capitol in which an enormous eagle hovers overhead with protective wings outstretched (27). Students of Venetian art can think of Bonifazio di Pitati’s painting of God hovering over the Basilica of San Marco. The quality of available stone was also a concern. Latrobe preferred local sandstone over the Italian kind, as well as marble from Baltimore quarries because it lacked the black specks found in Carrara marble and was better suited to the variations in climate (freezing and thawing) of Washington, D.C. Marble was a center of contention for political (i.e., “money”) reasons. Contracts for the reconstruction of the Capitol led to an investigation into irregularities by Thomas Walter. The Lincoln Memorial project was delayed by battles over which region’s marble would be chosen: Colorado (Republican interests) or Alabama or Georgia (Democrats). Ironically, the contract was assigned to Marble, Colorado, whose mill workers were largely recruited from Carrara. See Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 3, 32, 77, 103; repeated references in Documentary History; Thomas, Lincoln Memorial, 103–4; Harold K. Skramstad, “The Engineer as Architect in Washington: The Contributions of Montgomery Meigs,” Records of the Columbus Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 1969–1970, ed. Francis Coleman Rosenberg (Washington, D.C., 1971), 272. The wish to have true “American” motifs on view (eagles but not in the Greek or Roman style) carried over to the decision to use “a capital of leaves and flowers of the tobacco plant” (in the small rotunda north of the Capitol’s main rotunda). Six cornstalk columns were saved from the fire that destroyed most of the original Capitol in 1814. See Latrobe’s letter to Jefferson of 1816 in Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 29, and Hazelton, The National Capitol, 185, 191. 90. This is Hazelton’s view in 1897 (The National Capitol, 192). The first full-fledged attention given to Brumidi’s contributions came in Myrtle Cheney Murdock’s Constantino Brumidi: Michel-









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angelo of the Capitol (Washington, D.C.: Monumental, 1950). “Art and Politics,” a chapter in Barbara A. Wolanin’s study of Brumidi, emphasizes the influence that the Know-Nothing Party (anti-immigrant, anti−Roman Catholic) held after the elections of 1854 upon the Washington Art Association of 1856, which became the National Art Association in 1858 and finally the Art Commission in 1860. See Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capital (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998). If Italians were a threat to the proper recording of American history, so too were French artists such as Horace Vernet. If allowed to paint scenes from the Revolution, he would supply “French valor and French chivalry,” so “where would stand the poor American, with his rough accouterments and his rough arms, and his awkward want of discipline, and his deficiency in all those trappings that go to make up the glitter of war?” As a result “our children would be obliged to confess that it [the painting and the Revolution] was not an American work, but the work of a French master. I would save them this mortification.” Documentary History, 694 (June 7, 1858). 91. Documentary History, 685, 698. “Insignificant tinsel work” is also chastised in 1858 (691). 92. “The Fine Arts in America,” Crayon, October 1855, 229. 93. Documentary History, 637, 671, 691. 94. Ibid., 771, 775. When dislike of brilliant red was voiced, the Speaker was asked by one of his colleagues, “Would they have it all brown or all blue?” (Documentary History, 776). In 1868 a “Special Report of the Commissioner of Education” was entered into the record as the House of Representatives Executive Document No. 315, 41st Congress, 2nd session. It was a scathing assessment of “Art in the District of Columbia.” If the purpose of “the statues of great men” is to illustrate “our greatness as a nation,” subjects must be selected that “interest and instruct” the people. The art in the Capitol failed to give them both “entertainment and improvement” and “what they can readily understand and appreciate” (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 245). Vanderlyn’s Landing of Columbus and Chapman’s Baptism of Pocahontas “violently outrage the truth of history,” and the decorations are in a style “in which Americans were not proficient.” They were “at once bad, expensive, and unsuitable to such a building and a libel on our taste as a people” (246). This style might be suitable for “a theatre, music or banqueting hall,” but “something more subdued and impressive was required for a great national building where a grave and deliberative body of men met to discuss the affairs of the nation.” Men desirous of “study and deep thought” should not be “exposed to such aggression against correct taste” (247). 95. Documentary History, 775. “Taste” never had a chance to trump “theme” since what mattered to the Crayon was of little concern to Congress. One intriguing exchange took place, however, between Jefferson Davis and James Mason during the Senate Proceedings of March 2, 1859. Ideologically alike in their future dedication to the Confederate cause, the senators from Mississippi and Virginia had strikingly different responses to the financial or political value of “taste.” Davis was pro-taste. He had the ability to distinguish between “a painting which is exceedingly beautiful and that which [Mason] denounces as a daub.” Mason bristled that another man could impose his “taste” on him, especially to justify spending money on having his “eye cultivated to a higher task” (Documentary History, 718). 96. Alastair Fowler’s study of changes taking place in England in the pictorialization of historical events leading to the English early modern period is applicable to the paintings and sculpture commissioned for the U.S. Capitol prior to the Civil War: romance was mixed with history, allegorical emblems with naturalistic details, or historical personages with eternal types. If Trum-

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bull’s paintings of key moments of the American Revolution were examples of single-event representation, pediment sculpture such as The Progress of Civilization and The Car of History were polyscenic in cramming the effects of Time within limited space. See Fowler, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford, 2003), 20–22, 49. 97. Documentary History, 729. Extensive references are made to the Parliament Papers from 1841 to 1844, which restricted competition for the decoration of the new building to British subjects or foreigners who had resided in England for ten years. Charles L. Eastlake was also cited in addressing the “development of native genius in historical painting” (731). 98. Ibid., 731, 733. 99. Ibid., 744. Brown (sculptor), Lambdin (portraitist), and Kensett (landscapist) were eminent in their fields, but their professional experiences had no connection with the artworks required at the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Crayon (June and July 1855, and October 1856) continued to speak against the use of foreign artists. In April 1860 the Crayon reprinted without comment the Art Commission report from the New York Tribune. Fairman notes (Art and Artists of the Capitol, 189) that it later expressed dismay over “the coarseness, ignorance and cunning which are always brought into play when Government and protection are sought. They are due both to the craft of the politician and to the impassive state of opinion in relation to art that prevails throughout the country.” Even when Congress authorized a National Commission of the Fine Arts in 1910, following up on President Theodore Roosevelt’s appointment of a Fine Arts Council in 1908, arguments over its role did not end. (See Brown, Memories, 353, and Thomas’s discussion of the council’s debates over the Lincoln Memorial: Lincoln Memorial, chap. 2, “1902−1912: ‘What Shall the Lincoln Memorial Be?’”). 100. Documentary History, 756. On January 24, 1864, one congressman agreed that no more appropriations for Capitol renovations should be allowed. He did not want anything done for the enjoyment of “Jeff Davis” in case the North should lose (358). If dislike of foreign artisans spilled over into ridicule of Americans who followed Italian art traditions, others favored only art by Americans that was executed abroad. C. Edwards Lester lashed out against this bias. “The surest way for American artists to succeed, in getting commissions from their own countrymen, is to go abroad, and be favorably known in a foreign country.” The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 1:118–19. 101. Public Buildings and Statuary of the Government, n.p., 12, 18. Visiting Winnebagos (“wild and savage as those represented” in Causici’s Boone) “understand who was the victor, and they uttered a warlike shout of defiance.” Ibid., 19. Fryd’s Art and Empire focuses on representations of white America’s conquests placed at the center of the Capitol’s art. See chaps. 1 and 2 (“The Rotunda Reliefs” and “The Rotunda Paintings”), chap. 5 (“Thomas Crawford’s ‘Progress of Civilization’”), and chap. 7 (“Ethnographic Exclusions”). Fairman’s reproductions also display Congress’s avidity for narratives of stalwart whites triumphant over cowering savages. Perhaps through his role as curator of the Capitol’s art (a position that perhaps compromised his ability to be frank) and perhaps because his book came in the 1920s, Fairman’s tone is mild, whereas Fryd’s tends to be strident. Congressional proceedings offer other views of the Conquered Indian. On May 26, 1856, Edward Ball of Ohio (the same who attacked “our Republican Government” for allowing itself to be “a wretched imitator of the broken-down monarchies in the Old World”) protested against art that demeans the Indian by portraying him as “a hewer of wood and drawer of water.” “We have broken his heart, but never his spirit; never has he bent his back to be the



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menial of the white man. Is it not enough that we have driven him out before us, and compelled him to wander from wilderness to wilderness? . . . Shall we complete the wrong by handing him down to posterity in imperishable marble, in a form which strips him of that courage which is the only attribute in which he glories? . . . Sir, I protest against this outrage upon truth!” (Documentary History, 637). John Randolph of Virginia called Trumbull’s painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence a “Shin Piece” since its “collection of legs” is all one can remember (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 82). Trumbull, like others of his generation, had not mastered the art of the group portrait, as had Rembrandt in The Night Watch and The Syndic of the Drapers Guild in the past, or Eakins’s The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic. Painters of even earlier times singled out important areas of space according to the hierarchical principles central to ecclesiastic art. Divinities, angels, and saints command the forefront, while other figures drop back into a lesser relationship to the cosmos. Jacobello del Fiori’s Coronation of the Virgin in Paradise relegates its “senators” and “congressmen” to their assigned niches. Lorenzetti’s Maestà in Siena makes clear who (the Virgin) matters most in the rankings that direct the world’s governance. (See Fowler, Renaissance Realism, 1–4, on the “epistemological implications” of perspective for group paintings.) 102. Stanislaus von Moos, “The Palace as a Fortress: Rome and Bologna under Pope Julius II,” in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, ed. Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) 75. The state of “Our National Paintings” was assessed by the Crayon (February 1855). Except for scattered portraits, Congress had funded only eight paintings, at a cost of $72,000, “the entire art possessions of the United States.” 103. Merton M. Sealts Jr., Melville as Lecturer (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 132. Portraiture in the hands of Gilbert Stuart was one of the artistic success stories of the early republic. Stuart’s portraits of Washington (fourteen in all), as well as his renditions of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Adams did well in the commercial market. 104. John Quincy Adams, letter of June 22, 1825 to Bulfinch (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 48). In 1837 an oil painting by John James Audubon transformed the spirit of Washington into that of an eagle. See David Carew Huntington, Art and the Excited Spirit: America in the Romantic Period (Ann Arbor, 1972). 105. Fryd, Art and Empire, 65. 106. Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 2:127–28. The guidebook prepared by Robert Mills, architect of Public Buildings in 1841, mentions that the crypt under the rotunda had a pedestal waiting for Horatio Greenough’s statue by the summer of 1842. Its final placement would be in the rotunda above. 107. In 1802 John James Barralet’s colored engraving Commemoration of Washington was likened to Raphael’s Transfiguration, in which Christ receives his apotheosis. See Huntington, introduction to Art and the Excited Spirit; that also displays Lincoln posthumously clasped in Washington’s embrace as the godlike presidents mount into the heavens. Brumidi’s fresco for the rotunda’s dome was completed in 1865. Washington is “seated in majesty” in a large-scale version of the conceit depicted in Barralet’s 1802 engraving. Attended by the goddesses of Liberty, Victory, and Fame and thirteen maidens representing the original states, he is surrounded by allegorical scenes depicting his nation’s glory in War, the Arts and Sciences, the Navy, Commerce, Mechanics, and Agriculture—each represented by figures from history and mythology. For a contemporary view, see S. D. Wyeth’s gushing Description of Brumidi’s Allegorical Painting within the

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Canopy of the Rotunda (Washington, D.C., 1866). For a more measured account, see comments in Art in the United States Capitol, Prepared by the Architect of the Capitol, under the Direction of the Joint Committee on the Library (Washington, D.C., 1976), 302–3, as well as Wolanin’s Constantino Burmidi: Artist of the Capital. Wolanin is generous with her praise. In her view, Brumidi was a “genius,” “one of the leading artists of Rome,” a “master of the classical tradition,” who (through “sophisticated training” at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome) commanded “a repertoire of visual images and symbols” that allowed him “to integrate the modern with the classical” (1, 3, 6, 12). 108. The question was how long this motif could be seen as appropriate for “American” nationalistic spaces. Brumidi’s Apotheosis was criticized by southern sympathizers for caricaturing their leaders in ways “suggestive of the stamping out of the Rebellion” by Washington’s divine force (Hazelton, The National Capitol, 97). It was customary in the European tradition to place noted national figures in heavenly realms, as when George Bickham’s Apotheosis of 1732 circled Isaac Newton’s head with sun’s rays, angels, muses, and putti (Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture [New York, 2005], 179). “Symbolism in the Rotunda,” an essay by Francis V. O’Connor included in Wolanin’s Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capital, credits Brumidi with solving “the technical problem of multiple vantage points” and with blending visual relationships between the Apotheosis canopy, Brumidi’s historical frieze, earlier historical murals by Trumbull and others, and the relief sculptures by Capellano, Causici, and Gevelot (140–55). Brumidi also placed Pompeian-style frescoes throughout the Capitol’s ceilings and corridors, suggestive of decorations for the Vatican City’s First Loggia (started by Bramante, finished by Raphael) and Raphael’s Second Loggia, executed for Leo X. 109. Huntington, Art and the Excited Spirit, 3. He remarks that the romantic spirit would be replaced by the naturalism introduced by Thomas Eakins. The “decay of art” ushered in by the turn to portraiture-as-naturalism was assailed by W. J. Stillman’s essays of 1886 and 1892, “The Decay of Art” and his preface to Old Italian Masters, discussed below. 110. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books, in The Complete Works (Boston, 1871), 325. Beyond the Muro Torro, Rome’s oldest wall, the landscape looks “scarcely real, to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed absolutely so much, they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream. These, nevertheless, are the solid framework of hills that shut in Rome, and its wide surrounding Campagna; no land of dreams, but the broadest page of history, crowded so full with memorable events that one obliterates another; as if Time had crossed and re-crossed his own records till they grew illegible. But not to meddle with history— with which our narrative is no otherwise concerned.” Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, vol. 4 of Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus, Ohio, 1968), 101. 111. Letter of December 21, 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London, 1948), 72. Leutze’s painting of the battle of Monmouth portrays General Charles Lee confronted by an angry Washington, who lost “for a moment the lofty and habitual composure, which, until then, had never forsaken him.” This show of temper displeased those in Congress whose taste centered on the stoic Washington (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 135–36). 112. The Papers of George Washington, 6:103–4. 113. The Massacre of the Innocents by Matteo de Giovanni, installed in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico,



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gives the other side of the story: this is what happens when wicked men are in power. Siena still distanced itself from visually violent conflicts on view in Florence and Venice. One wall of the Sala dei Mappamondo is covered by Simone Martini’s depiction of Guidoriccio da Fogliano, conqueror of Montemassai in 1328, who rides alone across the emptied landscape. Stefania Mason’s “Venetian Painting in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century” (Romanelli, Venice: Art and Architecture, 456, 459) puts the triumphant ardor of these battle scenes in ironic perspective. Painted after the close of the city’s true “genius,” they reflect the time when Venice was limited to proclaiming its “glory” once its economic resources were depleted by the Pyrrhic victory won against the Turks at Lepanto and the republic was no longer in the business of conquest. Self-celebratory scenes of military victories were now allegories for how peace had been achieved. In contrast, consider the tepid battle scenes from the past introduced into the U.S. Capitol during the years when America aspired to gain ever-greater political and economic powers in the future. 114. S. J. Freeberg’s somewhat turgid analysis of Giulio Romano’s paintings (together with his Vision of Constantine) makes an important point. The paintings are “an accumulation of monumental plastic forms . . . crowded in a rigid outline of no rationalizable geometry.” The human participants lack vitality and agency but are contained within “a force approaching violence” that does not emanate from their humanness but from their “forms.” Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 (New Haven, 1993), 207. 115. Hiram Powers objected to those wishing to scatter Washington’s likenesses throughout the city. “Almost as soon would I think of changing money in a church, or profaning the altar of God with traffic, as to convert Washington’s monument into such a business-place.” Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 1:137. Henry James’s Mr. Leavenworth placed limits on how marble statuary may be used. “Spotless marble” is “false to itself when it represents anything less than Conscious Temperance” (Roderick Hudson, in Novels and Tales [New York, 1907–17], 1:299–300). Although Mary Garland thought otherwise (1:346), sculpture was not only men’s work. See Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, 1990). For Everett’s comment, see Fryd, Art and Empire, 67. She takes particular interest in imperialistic models (Mars, Zeus, Napoleon) and in Washington coupled with Columbus attended by conquered Indians. Thomas (Lincoln Memorial, 119−23) addresses the question besetting the Lincoln Memorial: whether to represent a demigod or the common man? whether to seat him like an emperor or have him stand tall as a hero? 116. Hiram Powers, quoted in Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 1:143. 117. Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 1:151. Story labeled Powers as “too mechanical” and lacking both “poetry” and “creative power” (James, William Wetmore Story, 1:172.) Lester records Powers’s impatience (The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 1:4). Congressman Jarvis was equally impatient. He reminded his colleagues on February 15, 1832 that the idea to honor Washington’s memory in stone had been handed around since 1799. “The United States had done nothing but pass resolutions. When we looked round for the statue, the monument, the mausoleum they had ordered, it was not to be seen.” He added, “Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better” (Documentary History, 317). See the following studies of early American sculptors: Donald Martin Reynolds, Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture (New York, 1977); Jan M. Seidler Ramirez, “A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819–

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1895): American Sculptor and Man of Letters” (Ph.D. diss., BSU, 1985); Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Yankee Stonecutters: The First American School of Sculpture, 1800–1850 (New York, 1945); Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives. 118. Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 1:46, 114. Lester relates Powers’s interest in art innovations based on forms found in the natural world. He urged Congress to establish a secretary or Board of Commerce to advance funds for the purchase of “commercial documents and tables, maps and charts, for surveys of harbors and coasts—new works on the sciences and the arts—models of inventions, samples of manufacturers, improvements in mechanisms” (1:234). Attention given to the natural, the mechanical, and the ideal permeated American art from the start, but Powers being named as an American “Leonardo” did not resolve questions that are still raised about the Italian’s dedication to scientific studies in quasi-aeronautics and the construction of fortresses and armaments. IBM’s display of Leonardo’s notebooks and the purchase of his Codex by Bill Gates of Microsoft spur related debates over whether the Romans did half as well at creating good art as at sturdy engineering projects. 119. Fryd, Art and Empire, 76. Fairman devotes chap. 6 to the Greenough commission, including the sculptor’s defense of a naked Washington and comments pro and con on the use of modern dress, while citing negative reactions to the unclothed Wellington, which roused the ire of London’s Society for Improving Public Morals (Art and Artists of the Capitol, 103–4). Greenough’s statue was first placed in the rotunda in 1841, then moved to the east grounds of the Capitol in 1844, and finally transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 1908, as if to distance this marble embarrassment from the heart of the Capitol. Jacopo Pontormo had no compunctions in rendering the naked flesh of Florence’s ruling power. His painting of Cosimo I as Orpheus is unabashedly erotic. This portrait was, however, not placed on public view; it was for the pleasure of the Medicis’ family and close companions. 120. Fryd, Art and Empire, 76. 121. Miller, Patrons and Politicians, 59, 61, 64–65, 59. In The Marble Faun Kenyon the sculptor (pro) and Miriam the painter (con) argue over whether contemporary statues dishonestly justify nudity by stealing the mode from the ancients. In the view of Hilda, “Now-a-days, people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence” (123–24). As long as George Washington represented the dream of the ideal, housed in a city that “epitomizes the history of the nation,” tangible images were best left unregistered. (See Moore, Washington, Past and Present, 5.) Although a monument based on abstract forms might find more favor, it still took Congress years to decide how to proceed and where to place it. In 1833 a private society began attempts to find funds and an acceptable design, but not until 1848 was a cornerstone laid on an “elevation above the tidal estuary of Tiber Creek.” Forty years passed before the monument’s completion, well after extensions to the Capitol were finished. Some thought the Capitol looked like a factory; at least it was saved the indignity of Dickens’s jibe, which likened the monument to a chopped-off chimney—and a disturbing symbol of severed unity during the Civil War. 122. Charles Bulfinch’s comments concerning John Quincy Adams, quoted in Fryd, Art and Empire, 181. 123. Boller, Presidential Inaugurations, 8, 17. 124. Wiseman, Myths of Rome, 300. Where in Italy was there an art comparable to images of Union victory and counterimages of Confederate defeat that proliferated in the States after the Ameri-



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can Civil War? There was the bland conventionality of the Sala del Risorgimento, completed in 1890 after the death of King Victor Emanuel II, in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, but the Museo del Risorgimento in Rome (“founded” in 1906) did not open until 1970. Revolutionary enthusiasm had fed the Macchiaioli during 1848–49 and 1859–60, but by the 1860s they no longer addressed their art to the collective political struggle. See Dario Durbe, “Painters of Italian Life,” in The Macchiaioli, ed. Edith Tonelli and Katherine Hart (Los Angeles, 1986), 16–27. 125. Marco Pierini’s Art in Siena (Florence, 2000) admits the “absence of outstanding artists and the lack of demand on the part of clients” in the nineteenth century meant the falling off of the sculptural work for which Siena once gained fame through the work of Nicola Pisano, Jacopo della Quercia, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Donatello (185). The happiest note in modern-day Siena is the interest shown by “distinguished representatives of contemporary art” who design banners for the annual Palio. In Pierini’s words, “Today the painted banner for the Palio represents not just the most significant contribution made by Siena to the world of contemporary art but also, perhaps, one of the last possibilities available to the artists to tackle the genre of civic painting, through the execution of a work commissioned, eagerly awaited and judged by an entire city. All this while respecting an iconography, a format and a scale that serve as limit and stimulus at one and the same time” (189). 126. See Vance, America’s Rome, 2: 2, 11–18, for reactions to Mariolatry on the part of American visitors to Rome. James Jackson Jarves, who devoted his life to the study of Italian art, was heatedly critical of Italian Catholicism: see his Italian Sights and Papal Principles Seen through American Spectacles (New York, 1855). Once Rome became the capital of a united Italy, American journals published articles on the decayed spiritual powers of the papacy and debated the extent of the church’s temporal authority. On looking back over earlier stays in Italy, Howells, coolly ironic, noted the cultural vandalism of the modern tourist. “Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the Past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion.” William Dean Howells, Italian Journeys (Boston, 1867; rev. ed., 1907), 135. Also see Luigi Monte, “Italy and the Pope,” Scribner’s Monthly, July 1878, 357–67. 127. The preface Anna Brownell Jameson (also published as Mrs. Jameson) wrote for the first edition of Sacred and Legendary Art (London, 1848) declared, “I hope that it will be clearly understood that I have taken throughout the aesthetic and not the religious view of those productions of art which, in as far as they are informed with a true and earnest feeling, and steeped in that beauty which emanates from genius inspired by faith, may cease to be Religion, but cannot cease to be Poetry, and as poetry only I have considered them.” 128. Declaration by George Stillman Hillard in 1847; see Vance, America’s Rome, 2:69. 129. Hawthorne’s appraisal, voiced by the narrator of The Marble Faun, might have been applied to the governance of the United States in the hands of engineers, not angels. “To do it justice Catholicism is such a miracle of fitness for its own ends, (many of which might seem to be admirable ones,) that it is difficult to imagine it a contrivance of mere man. . . . If there were but angels to work it, (instead of the very different class of engineers, who now manage its cranks and safety-valves), the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its origin” (Marble Faun, 345). 130. Siena had its own proud myth of origin through its association with the sons of Remus, a claim embellished by citywide representations of the suckling she-wolf. By the twelfth century Siena was a free commune linked to the Ghibelline cause, its political power reinforced by the defeat

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of Florence’s Guelph faction at the battle of Montaperti in 1260. By 1269 Siena was back under Florentine power, yet its influence continued because of its exceptional economic importance to Tuscany. Throughout the fourteenth century Siena’s Council of Nine held sway within the newly built Palazzo Pubblico, weakened only by the decimation of the population by the great plague of 1348. 131. Martini’s Maestà is a version of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s elaborate panels commissioned for the chapel of the Council of the Nine in Siena’s Duomo, circa 1308. Besides being unparalleled examples of religious art, they reinforced Siena’s political ideology, doubling its impact in both the city’s cathedral and legislative halls. See Norman’s “‘The Glorious Deeds of the Commune’: Civic Patronage of Art,” in Siena, Florence, and Padua, 1:133–54. 132. Fifteenth-century murals by Vasari, Michelangelo, and Giambologna in the Salone dei Cinquecento of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio record victories against Siena and Pisa. Siena’s Sala del Mappamondo celebrates its military successes with Martini’s Giudociccio da Fogliano at the Siege of Monteimassi (1328), Lippo Vanni’s The Battle of the Val di’Chiano (1365), and Menimo di Filippuccio’s The Submission of the Castle (1314?), while other rooms of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico insist that government succeeds through the righteous examples of its representatives, not through winning military victories. The Consistoro was the meeting room used when Siena was a republic and later when under Medici rule. Over its doorway is The Judgment of Solomon, painted by Luca Giordano. The ceiling is decorated with a cycle known as The Episodes of Civic Virtue (by Domenico Becafumi) in reference to ancient Greece and Rome, where virtuous men upheld patriotism, justice, and harmony. The nearby antechapel contains another cycle, painted by T. de Bartolo, that draws upon legends both of “virtuous men” and of the “virtues”—the good behavior—expected of Siena’s members of government. 133. Art in the United States Capitol, 219. The Library of Congress provides an offhand reference to the Sienese tradition in Elihu Vedder’s contribution to the doorway to the Main Reading Room. Above the entrance is The Government with Corrupt Legislation and Anarchy to the left and Good Administration and Peace and Prosperity to the right. 134. That Florence seems to dote on figures of decapitation is seen in Cellini’s Perseus beheading Medusa in the Piazza dell Signoria, Verocchio’s David in the Bargello, and Michelangelo’s David, which makes its virile point without the need to hold up a bruised head. The movements around Florence of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (1455) provide a running history of the rise and fall of republics and tyrants. It originally centered the garden of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. In 1495 it was moved to the Loggia della Signoria to symbolize the republic’s expulsion of the Medici tyrants. In 1988 it was placed in the Sala dei Gigli of the Palazzo Vecchio to do ideologically free duty as a prize work of art. Donatello was also deft at rendering youthful Davids triumphant over beheaded Goliaths. Symbolic emblems suggestive of Florentine military prowess were supplemented by the Medici shield, which proclaimed the financial power used to secure allegiance from popes and emperors. A few relatively placid battle scenes (largely executed by Italian artisans) were added to the U.S. Senate (the battle of Lexington and the Boston Massacre), and later paintings commemorated the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, but the general taste in the Capitol was for postvictory scenes or of General Washington standing stalwartly at Valley Forge prior to battle. However, frescoed lunettes by Brumidi depicting vigorous military engagements decorate Room S-128 (originally intended for the Senate Committee on Military Affairs and Militias).



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135. During 2004, an exhibition of the “Stanze Segrete” was held at the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in rooms generally off limits to the public. On display were sixteenth-century paintings of Medicis presented as saints grouped around the Virgin’s deathbed. They were not the “saints” praised by American Puritan theologians. 136. Images of a special kind of civic reform fill the Spanish Chapel adjacent to Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Sponsored by Eleanor of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I, the chapel is filled with frescos by Andrea da Bonaiuto on the theme of the overthrow of heresy. In a certain sense we are back at Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico witnessing the Triumph of the Theological and Cardinal Virtues and the Church Militant and Triumphant. But here responsibility for maintaining order is in the hands of the Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas, and Peter Martyr, not the bourgeois members of Siena’s civic body, and violent militancy is highlighted as it is not in the Sala della Pace. 137. Lee, Euphorion, Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance (London, 1884), 15, 47, 54. 138. Reflections upon Rome’s cultural achievements as inferior to those of the Greeks are well put by Richard Jenkyns in The Legacy of Rome (1–2), supported by citations from Virgil’s Aeneid. Wiseman rejects this calumny, which would give all credit to “the imaginative and creative” Greeks while relegating Rome to pedestrian borrowings (Myths of Rome, 279). 139. Frank Sear’s Roman Architecture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982) details the styles of building used in republican Rome, the age of Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian, and the late empire, concluding with Constantine’s reign. 140. The Vatican has its own hall of maps, as does Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, Venice’s Palazzo Ducale, and Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. The arts of rendering global topography receive space in all these buildings since, as noted in Fowler’s Renaissance Realism, maps contain strong “ideological” meaning (70). In his own Sala del Mappamondo, Mussolini laid plans for the takeover of the lands of the ancient Mediterranean empire. 141. Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 2:128. 142. The Education of Henry Adams, 91. Adams discovers the failure of evolutionary progress in Rome. The same shocking fact is confirmed in 1869 by President Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous” (266). 143. Hetherington, Medieval Rome, 49. 144. Ibid, 36. The importance of the pilgrimage tradition to Rome’s physical expansion, its economic growth, and its increasing political force is examined in Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias, Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (New Haven, 2000). The earliest accounts of St. Peter’s Roman ministry appear in the Acts of Peter (c. a.d. 180–190). In Wiseman’s words, Peter’s “martyrdom creates the institution that will inherit the government of Rome” (Myths of Rome, 282). The notion of Washington, D.C. as a place of pilgrimage to match that of Rome was attractive to the American imagination. On May 27, 1870, when the Senate was once more at the business of discussing appropriations for the Capitol’s maintenance, one senator mused, “As the stranger approaches the city of Rome and looks down on her floating in the midst of the Campagna,” he inevitably thinks upon the glories of the ancient city. “And so may the pilgrim from

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the distant West, in approaching this beautiful city, seated on these magnificent hills . . . feel just as proud as if he had been born in the city of Washington” (Documentary History, 1098). Hazelton’s guidebook opens with the words, “In the old days all roads led to Rome; to-day all roads lead to Washington. . . . No matter from which direction the pilgrim approaches the Federal City, whether by land or by water, the white dome of the National Capitol, that shrine of the world’s oppressed, is almost the first sight to gladden his eyes” (The National Capitol, 1). 145. Sophia Hawthorne, Notes in England and Italy (New York, 1875), 543–44. 146. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books, 60. 147. Or rather, leaps like Curitus’s into “the chasm” to assuage “the guilt of Rome” that ended the good of the “commonwealth.” Alas, “all Rome, you see, has been swallowed up in that gulf, in spite of him. . . . All the heroes, the statesmen, and the poets! All piled upon poor Curitus, who thought to have saved them all!” (Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 161–62). Hawthorne’s own nineteenth-century consciousness is lost in this chasm that separates the better Rome from the worse Rome of his own times. “Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters, that we handle or dream of, now-a-days, look evanescent and visionary alike” (6). 148. Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, tr. Richard Howard (New York, 1984), 97. 149. After deploring the Capitol as “a sham”—“an ugly excrescence,” Scribner’s Monthly’s “Art at the Capitol” (September 1873, 493–500) urged relocation of the U.S. capital to the West. “Perhaps there will come no change [for the better] until Washington is no longer the Capital, and we shall begin to erect the building of the new one under the direction of that saving common sense that is at the root of true art” (495). Even when Old Rome was replaced by the New Rome in the east, the original city remained the seat of the bishops of Rome. No new role was suggested for Washington, D.C. as a discarded capital. 150. The atrium style became a distinctive element under the imperial aegis of the Christian polity Constantine chose to support. The key component was the enclosed area through which the people passed, awed by the vast spaces hallowed by sacred references, either to the saints or to the emperor. It was as Vitruvius had written: “For persons of high rank who hold office and magistracies, and those whose duty it is to serve the state, we must provide princely vestibules, lofty halls and spacious peristyles, plantations and broad avenues finished in a majestic manner.” From De re aedicatorio, cited by Richard Stapleford in “Constantinian Politics and the Atrium Church,” in Millon and Nochlin, Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, 13. Vitruvius received Ruskin’s wrath for fostering the Pride of Science, Pride of the System, and Pride of the State (The Stones of Venice, vol. 3, in The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 11, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn [London, 1904]). 151. Von Moos, “The Palace as a Fortress,” 47. 152. Ibid., 56. The Palazzo Senatore now houses the offices of the mayor of Rome. The adjacent buildings (the Palazzo Nuovo and the Palazzo dei Conservatorio) serve as museums. 153. Alberto Mario Banti’s Il Risorgimento italiano (Rome, 2004) lays out the literary and political narratives by which Italian nationalists after the 1780s and into the 1860s tried to hold their country together. During the same time period, the diverse United States were just as tenuously bound. From the start of the new republic Congress understood the necessity to fill the U.S. Capitol with representations of national heroes. Nineteenth-century Italians also needed to cre-



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ate powerful images of unity through painting, literature, and (because this was Italy) music, such as Verdi’s “Nabucco.” 154. S. D. Wyeth’s chatty The Federal City: or, Ins and Abouts of Washington, D.C. (Washington, D.C., 1865) describes the Old Hall of Representatives filled by “the air of majesty pervading the grand deserted rooms,” but the sight of a woman selling oranges confirmed the loss of that greatness. Like his contemporaries wandering the ruins of Rome, Wyeth is “lost in reverie” as he envisions “the great departed,” John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. The newly built House of Representatives is not “mellowed by time.” It lacks “old associations of historical interest about the present halls of Congress.” When he is joined by a veteran of the just-concluded war, Wyeth’s responses are reinforced. Awe comes naturally to the soldier on his first visit to the nation’s Capitol, whose principles he has fought to preserve, but as he observes bickering congressmen he feels disappointment over the absence of the great figures of the past (68, 70). The presence of hucksters in the Old Hall raised senatorial objections to the way that the rotunda was used as “first a great show-shop, for the exhibition of Panoramas,” next “a great exhibition hall for domestic manufacturers . . . carefully marked with prices” (Documentary History, 292 [February 23, 1827]). But the harshest criticism was leveled against empty art and inadequate deeds. “Instead of battle scenes of the past emblazoned upon these panels . . . I care more to see these seats occupied by men of wisdom and sound statesmanship. Instead of illustrations of American and French achievements in the past . . . [let] us seek rather to illustrate the future history of our country by the magnificence of the deeds originated here, and by the prosperity that shall flow from the acts of those who shall fill these Halls” (696 [June 7, 1858]). 155. Ernest Furgurson’s Rising Freedom, his recent study of Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, comes out strongly against Meigs’s role in the planning of the Capitol’s new wings and its dome, choosing to give full credit to Thomas Walter. Previous reports by Glenn Brown and George Hazelton also favored Walter. Fairman’s handling of “the strained relations” between the two men is more useful since it points out the problems sparked by confusion over the different roles taken by “the architect,” “the engineer,” “the superintendent,” and “the constructor”—rivalries that plagued the building and decoration of the Capitol from its inception (Art and Artists of the Capitol). 156. Sear’s Roman Architecture gives full weight to Rome’s far-ranging achievements in engineering. The first aqueduct was constructed in 312 b.c., followed by others over the years of the republic and the empire. Destroyed by the Goths in a.d. 517, the structures did not resume normal functions until the sixteenth century. The road from Rome to Ostia was laid in the fifth century b.c., with later thoroughfares built to link the provinces and territories to the Imperial City. Edith Wharton and Henry James knew whereof they wrote of the “Roman Fever” since from early times the Roman marshes were the source of malarial outbreaks. At the inception of Washington, D.C., Tidewater conditions caused similar concerns. In 1852 Captain Meigs was assigned to construct aqueducts, using the “prevailing classicism for his architectural model.” See Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation, 20, 56, and Skramstad, “The Engineer as Architect in Washington,” 268, 272. On February 27, 1879 (Documentary History, 918–919) Representative Butler spoke out: “In the olden time the reason why the part of Capitol Hill where my house is situated was not built upon was because malaria came up from the low ground. The Tiber Creek was then open and flowing, and full of sewage. . . . But since then the creek called the Tiber has been closed over

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and made a sewer. . . . Fifty years ago there were a great many cases of malarial fever around in this neighborhood” but not “one case of chills and fevers . . . for the last twenty years.” That is, after Meigs’s work was completed. Glenn Brown, career engineer in the field of sanitation and sewers, backed the McMillan project’s reclamation of the Potomac marshes for Rock Creek Park. Fortunately, the Potomac’s history does not match that of Rome’s Tiber, which continued to flood into the nineteenth century. Uncontrolled overflows of Florence’s Arno have been even more devastating. Dating from 1477 over fifty-seven floods have been recorded; the worst, in 1966, destroyed many buildings and works of art. In Venice flooding from the lagoons continues to threaten a city built on sand and mud, one of Europe’s finest engineering feats. 157. Glenn Brown was secretary of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and one of the main champions of the McMillan Plan. This is Brown’s summary of the situation from colonial times to 1900 (Memories, 200–3): “In the early history of our country, young architects of talent came across the water to try their fortunes, and carpenters were faithful students of the various publications on the orders. It was not many years before the supply of educated men ceased to equal the demand, and the builders apparently discarded all precedent, and produced nothing that was beautiful. . . . This gradual decline culminated in the most debased period of Architecture between 1850 and 1860. . . . No standard of fees or of ethics was recognized. The profession was not appreciated by the public, the fine arts were thought of little importance, and constructors and carpenters as practical men were thought far superior to the architect.” When the AIA was organized in 1857, “only twelve architects were found whom it was thought advisable to invite to join the new Society.” When the Civil War caused the AIA to cease meetings in 1864, stagnation lasted until 1889. James Marston Fitch’s American Building: The Historical Forces That Shaped It (New York, 1966) tracks changing views taken toward American builders and architects engaged in domestic housing. 158. Who was responsible to whom was further muddled by bureaucratic divisions within the Department of the Interior and its relation to the Committee on Military Affairs. Meigs, as an army man, had to balance his duties as architect, engineer, and supervisor of decoration before his own superiors as well as to placate Congress. On several occasions, Congress attacked Meigs for the extravagance it expected whenever funds were placed in the hands of military men. He should only be allowed “to construct fortifications and military roads,” but never “to do architectural work or to order marble” (Documentary History, 610–11, 670, 691 [March 1, 1854, May 19, 1858, June 1, 1858]). Meigs’s problems are addressed in Russell F. Weighley’s Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of Montgomery Meigs (New York, 1959) and his “Captain Meigs and the Artists of the Capitol: Federal Patronage of Art in the 1850’s,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 1969–1970 (1971): 285–305. Cowdrey’s A City for the Nation also gives full attention to Meigs’s career. He was named in 1851 as successor to Joseph G. Totten as the army engineer in charge of the capital’s water system, assigned the reconstruction of the Capitol in 1853, and was the man on the scene through to his retirement in 1882 (17–21). Cowdrey notes Meigs’s vanity and drive to install his personal taste but has great praise for his accomplishments. 159. Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 139. In Fairman’s account, Meigs was responsible for the statuary on the Senate pediment and the bronze doors for the east entrance to the Capitol as well as the statue of Freedom that topped the dome. The annual report Meigs submitted on October 14, 1855 regarding the “history of America” that decorates the rotunda indicates he shared in



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the standard notion that “the civilized races” must win out over “the savages” (Documentary History, 994), but he was no pro-slavery man. Fryd imposes guilt by association since Meigs’s work placed him under the hand of the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis. Davis’s sympathies influenced the decorations Meigs was assigned to place within the Capitol during Davis’s tenure between 1853 and 1857—in particular the head covering for Crawford’s Freedom statue. In 1855 Crawford understood Davis might “object to the cap of Liberty and the fasces” that were part of his original design, although he wished to incorporate them since “the work is for the people, and they must be addressed in language they understand, and which has become unalterable for the masses” (Hazelton, The National Capitol, 64). The letter Davis sent to Meigs on January 15, 1856 regarding his objections to the cap conferred upon freed slaves in ancient Rome suggests his awareness of the shifting meaning, and power, of what he calls the “language of art.” Art, “like all living tongues, is subject to change; thus the bundle of rods, if no longer employed to suggest the functions of the Roman Lictor, may lose the symbolic character derived there from, and be confined to the single signification drawn from its other source—the fable teaching the instructive lesson that in Union there is strength. But the Liberty Cap has an established origin in its use, as the badge of the freed slave, and though it should have an established meaning to-day, a recurrence to that origin may give to it in the future, the same popular acceptation which it had in the past” (Documentary History, 997). Davis’s references to “past” as compared to “future” readings of this language can be read both ways, but one assumes Davis was not waiting in the hope that the South would free its slaves. 160. Fryd, Art and Empire; Weighley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army; Skramstad, “The Engineer as Architect in Washington”; Weighley, “Captain Meigs and the Artists of the Capitol.” 161. Weighley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army, 61. 162. In 1860 Meigs was temporarily replaced as the Capitol’s engineer. Work on the dome was suspended, then renewed so that it was well under way by Meigs’s return to duty in 1861. Meigs’s later life was filled with other contributions to the city, as well as his ongoing connections with the city’s scientific community. A “member of Washington’s ruling elite,” he met regularly with the city’s science club, became regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and completed his design for the National Museum in 1884. Understanding needs caused by Washington’s humid summers and cold winters, his Pension Building included the newest technological innovations, such as forced air ventilation, skylights, and roof trussing. He traveled extensively in Europe, where he was impressed by Milan’s arcades and the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. See Skramstad, “The Engineer as Architect in Washington,” 278, 282–83. 163. “Art at the Capitol,” Scribner’s Monthly, September 1873, 493–500, expressed dislike for the iron dome (mere “smithy work”) placed on a marble building. Ruskin also believed that cast iron should be limited solely to railroad stations, but recent appraisals of Meigs’s work praise his “economical solution to the problem of building technology” (Skramstad, “The Engineer as Architect in Washington,” 274). It was “an accomplishment in terms of both technology and aesthetics” (Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation, 55). Weighley states that Meigs kept to Jefferson’s concern that buildings reflect the “sturdy, pure, and masculine mode inspired by republican Rome” (Quartermaster General of the Union Army, 63). 164. Weighley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army, 7. 165. Fairman notes Meigs’s reliance on Gouverneur Kemble, representative from New York, knowl-

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edgeable on current art matters (Art and Artists of the Capitol, 149–50). Meigs supplemented Kemble’s coaching by reading art books and visiting New York galleries (Weighley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army, 73). 166. See Weighley, “Captain Meigs and the Artists of the Capitol,” 296; letter of Meigs to Davis, in Skramstad, “The Engineer as Architect in Washington,” 274. 167. Weighley, “Captain Meigs and the Artists of the Capitol,” 268. 168. Ibid., 290. 169. The Franzoni brothers, Giuseppe and Carlo, together with Enrico Causici and Luigi Persico, were responsible for the rash of representations of Justice and Liberty. Fairman tries hard to sort out the Italians’ contributions despite confusing documentation of their work (Art and Artists of the Capitol, 11, 19, 41). In 1817 Justice appeared as a plaster relief in the chamber used by the Supreme Court for sixty years after the fire of 1814. She holds scales in her left hand, her right hand resting on a sword. To her right an eagle guards a stack of law books; to the left, a winged male figure (seemingly the Young Nation), crowned by the rising sun, points to the Constitution. Following the design suggested by President John Quincy Adams and executed by Luigi Persico in 1826, The Genius of America dominates the east central pediment of the Capitol. With spear in hand and eagle at her side, her right arm rests on a shield inscribed with “USA,” supported by an altar bearing the date “July 4, 1776.” Justice stands to her right, holding a scroll marked “Constitution, 17 September 1787” and the scales of judgment. To her left is Hope, leaning against an anchor. Spurred on by Liberty, this nation, based on the equalizing rule of law, yet urges Americans to strive after their individual desires. 170. Old-style lobbying aided American artists to snag commissions for work in the Capitol. Friends of Erastus Dow Palmer contacted President Buchanan on behalf of Palmer’s wish to sculpt the east pediment of the newly extended Capitol. The Albany Journal published a description of Palmer’s design for The Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, which includes a crouching Indian, his dog, and two wolves who, “half in surprise, half in fear, peer cautiously out.” The spatial format allowed Palmer “to symbolically arrange his figures in the ascending scale of intellectual development. Lowest of all is the savage life typified by the Indian and his dog.” At the crest of the evolutionary pyramid is “the kneeling form of Rose [Standish], and the Elder absorbed in prayer [who] typify Religion, the crowning glory of our civilization.” The article noted that the scene is “not disfigured by any of the so-called ‘classical’ adjuncts often resorted to by modern sculpture” (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 194–95). That Palmer did not receive the commission could not be blamed on the favored themes he chose. 171. According to Walter’s letter, workmen were ordered to avoid any demonstration (Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 219), but both Hazelton (The National Capitol, 64) and Fryd (Art and Empire, 199) insist that Walter arranged an elaborate celebration, with a thirty-five-gun salute and the unfurling of the American flag, in order (in Fryd’s words) “to symbolize the nation’s reunification under northern hegemony.” 172. Wiseman’s Myths of Rome provides a section on Freedom and the Republic (65–73) where he argues that Father Liber, worshipped by the populus, represented “freedom from” oppression by the optimates, who supported “freedom to” do as they willed. Both political factions sought liberta, but the Senate was Apollonian, whereas the people equated Father Liber with Marsyas, Rome’s Dionysias. 173. Fryd, Art and Empire, 190 (letter of May 1855). Crawford’s first design—“Freedom Triumphant



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in Peace and War”—had no pike and no Liberty Cap. She was a comely woman wearing a wreath of wheat and laurel, holding an olive branch and a sword and shield. Crawford’s second submission, titled “Armed Liberty,” was a figure standing on a globe. He kept the sword, added the Liberty Cap, and removed the olive branch. His final version (officially called Statue of Freedom but still alluded to as Armed Liberty by Jefferson Davis and Crawford) follows the model of the militant Minerva, adorned with helmet, breastplate, and shield embossed with “U.S.A.” (See Fryd, Art and Empire, chap. 8, “Liberty, Justice, and Slavery,” 177–208.) 174. See Yvonne Korshak, “The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1 (1987): 53–69, for a history of the French use of this headdress. At the same time Crawford was dissuaded from including the Liberty Cap, Brumidi’s Apotheosis of George Washington inside the Capitol dome gave Young America “the bonnet rouge of France” (see Wyeth, Description, 184). By 1907 the question of associating Liberty with the wearing of the ancient Phyrgian cap came to an end with the design by Augustus Saint-Gaudens of “Liberty” coinage that used an Indian bonnet. Not that racial elements were overlooked. When criticized for using an Irish servant girl as model, Saint-Gaudens tartly retorted that it might be smart to place an Irish head on a Swedish body with a drop of Negro blood, since only Indians are “pure Americans.” See Homer Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus SaintGaudens (New York, 1913). 175. Vague concepts and inadequate art continued, as seen in the lunettes designed for the Committee of Internal Affairs in 1905 (Henry Lynman Sayen’s Good Government paired with Rule of Justice and Rule of Tyranny), the Amateis bronze doors for the west front of the Capitol (whose Apotheosis of America, designed in 1910, were not installed until 1972), and Apotheosis of Democracy of 1916 (marble pediment design by Paul Wayland Bartlett for the Capitol’s east front). See Art in the United States Capitol, 313, 350, 361. 176. A judicious (I use the term consciously) review of the constantly evolving nature of “Justice” in relation to “Freedom” is available in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford, 1995). Socrates and Plato argued that the role of Justice in the republic means an avoidance of hurting the interests of others, not solely those of the strong. As mirrored in Brumidi’s Apotheosis of Washington, the American obsession has been with Freedom that overcomes tyranny, but also with the selective employment of Justice. Washington’s Freedom wins against Kingly Power, yet in 1863 a new war wages outside the Capitol in a land where unjust relations between master and slave still rule. 177. The extensive system of checks and balances devised by Venice’s leaders assured that no one dynasty would control Venice. One hundred and seventeen doges (by and large figureheads) paraded through Venetian history, chosen by members of the Maggiore Consiglio—the patriciate whose election was based on an intricate scheme of lots and ballots that allowed elements of chance. Still further groups, councils, and tribunals restricted to short periods of service oversaw the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. 178. Venice did not rest upon a compact landmass until the fourteenth century. Yet by the sixth century the area between Chioggia and the Site estuary “was to become known by the phrase ‘a Deo conservata Venetiarium provintia’ [the province of the Venices preserved by God]” (see Dorigo, “Venetia Before Venice,” 10). In the fledgling years of Washington, D.C., the material and political elements grounding the nation’s providentially guided “manifest destiny” were only beginning to solidify.

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179. Muir’s Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (71) notes the passion for exact details that marked medieval accounts of a city’s founding—especially when it came to establishing an earlier origin for a particular city than its rivals. See Muir for Jacopo Dondi’s declaration of March 25, a.d. 421 as Venice’s founding date, one confirmed by other medieval writers (71). Venetians used three different dating systems for their municipal affairs: March 25 to mark the year’s beginning; March l for public acts and documents; January l for private records. According to the time frame still held by literalists of the Bible, God created the world about 6,000 years ago. Naples claimed its founding at about 2,804 years after the Creation, 20 years after Troy’s fall, and 408 years before Rome’s inception, but no city is as precise in its dating as Venice. 180. Sabellico, L’historie vinitiane, fol. 3v., cited by Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 72. The date of 421 b.c. simply indicates the birth date of the second Venice. Guided by Giovanni Diacomo and Antonio Carile, Venetians skirted the embarrassing assertion that Venice was a latecomer once they claimed the city had been founded immediately after the fall of Troy. See Patricia Fortini Brown, “The Self-Definition of the Venetian Republic,” in Molho, Raaflaub, and Enlon, City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy. For further evidence of the importance of Venice’s founding date, see “Miraculous Birth,” chap. 1 of Rosand’s Myths of Venice. From the first, San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale were joined in both material space and in sacred significance. The Praying Virgin and the Archangel Gabriel, partners at the Annunciation, are portrayed on the west facade of the Basilica as primary defenders of the Venetian State, “of which the building was the symbol.” See Giovanni Lorenzoni, “Byzantine Heritage, Classicism, and the Contribution of the West in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Romanelli, Venice: Art and Architecture, 76. In contrast, the materiality of the U.S. Capitol is unpaired with an institutionalized spiritual counterpart. 181. Local commemorations of December 21, 1620 as the landing date for the Mayflower did more for family pride than to mark the coming of the City of God to Massachusetts. July 4 no longer carries the semimystical weight it enjoyed through the early part of the nineteenth century. The birthdays of Washington and Lincoln are jammed together for a weekend holiday, and November 11 (Armistice Day) and October 12 (Columbus Day) are occasions for mall sales. December 7 is waning in power, and what becomes of the aura of September 11 remains to be seen. Only Columbus Day (now attacked as the day that began the death of native cultures) once joined July 4 as a day of beginnings. The commemorative dates cited above (together with D-Day) are associated with death rather than birth (divine or mortal). See Kammer, Mystic Chords of Memory for the leap in official “commemoration” days between 1890 and 1910, fueled by rising national patriotism. 182. The relation between Venice and the figures of St. Mark and the Winged Lion is long and fascinating. If Catholic Rome had the Apostle Peter as its patron, Venice claimed the Evangelist Mark (baptized by Peter) as its protector, along with the Winged Beast associated with St. Mark in Ezekiel’s vision. (For more details regarding St. Mark’s importance, see “The Peace of Saint Mark,” in Rosand’s Myths of Venice.) In a dream Christ promised Mark that he would be buried in Venice. After St. Mark’s death in Alexandria (Egypt, not Virginia), two men from Torcello stole the saint’s body (deemed a “Rescue” in Tintoretto’s painting in the Accademia) and brought it to Venice in 829, where it was placed in the original Basilica of San Marco. When the church was rebuilt, the relics were lost, then miraculously found in 1024. In contrast, Virginia refused to



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release Washington’s body for burial in the Capitol. An iconic lion appears in the Amateis bronze doors of the U.S. Capitol, and lions draw the chariot for “America,” but unlike Venice’s beast (or Florence’s Marzocco Lion), they are of little use to the American imagination. Theodore Roosevelt (who shot lions in Africa) favored the American buffalo over the lion (its images placed in the state dining room). The American bald eagle remains the emblem for American virtue since Latrobe taught Italian sculptors how to “do” its feathers. 183. Compare and contrast the manner of imagery by which Siena offered its own version of civic pride. In the Sala della Pace of the Palazzo Pubblico, the wall with Lorenzetti’s Good Government displays allegorical representations of the civic virtues ranked to the part they play. Wisdom, which holds the books of the Bible, is linked by a cord to Justice, seated just below. The pans of Justice’s scales do double duty: the one is “distributive”—doling out judgments; the other is “commutative”—giving rewards. Justice is important but she is not to be equated with the charmingly relaxed figure of Peace. 184. Nothing remained static. Howard, “Jacopo Sansovino and the Romanization of Venetian Architecture”; Wolfgang Wolters, “Venetian Figurative Sculpture, 1460−1530”; and Bruce Boucher, “The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino and the Later Cinquecento,” in Romanelli, Venice: Art and Architecture, 304–35, mark alterations over time in representations of Justice, as seen in the images offered by Filippo Calendario in 1340–55, Jacopo del Fiore in 1421, the Solomon figures placed upon the Palace of Justice (during extensions made to the Palazzo Ducale in 1424–38), Bartolemeo Bon (1438–42), and Jacopo Sansovino’s Loggetta in 1537–46. The career of Calendario, head architect for the Palazzo Ducale, is especially striking. He portrayed Adam and Eve, above whom stands the Archangel Michael with the inscription “Ense Bonos Tengo Malorum Crimina Purgo.” His stern Venetia also makes clear her readiness to punish offenders against the state, armed as she is with the scroll of the law and the sword of retribution, with writhing captives under her feet and no scales of mercy. In 1355 Calendario was executed for his part in the Doge Marin Falier conspiracy. Note that in Rosand’s “Venetia Figurata: The Iconography of a Myth” (177, 188) and his Myths of Venice (5), distinctions between simile and metaphor tend to blur. Rosand elects the metaphor when he states, “Venice is Justice.” This places it in contrast to “America,” which is like “Justice.” 185. Literary documents emphasized these equivalences. That they were recognizable to foreigners is demonstrated by Thomas Coryat and James Howell, unversed in Italian, who were deeply impressed by the visual statements made by the Basilica and the Palazzo Ducale. For further citations from Coryats Crudities of 1611 and Howell’s S.P.Q.V.: A Survey of the Signorie of Venice, of Her Admired Policy, and Method of Government, etc., see Rosand, Myths of Venice, 39. 186. Political affairs in Washington, D.C. often support the belief that the business of America is business, but the city does without physical reminders of this fact. Whereas New York City carries that burden, with its Wall Street, meat-packing district, fish market, and Seventh Avenue clothing district, only Washington’s K Street symbolizes what counts more than the fine-sounding abstractions emanating from its halls. 187. After the fires of 1483, 1574, and 1577, extensions were made throughout the Palazzo Ducale to provide space for the growing numbers of voting members and variety of civic activities. Under Doge Andrea Gritti, the renovatio substituted classical allegories for the conventions of Christian iconography tabulating the city’s Virtues, while fifteenth-century “romanticizing” began to

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emphasize Venice’s links to Rome’s former spiritual and political heritage. See Giandomenico Romanelli, “Architecture between Humanism and Renaissance,” in Romanelli, Venice: Art and Architecture, 172–91. 188. In Myths of Venice Rosand notes (137, 140) that Olympian additions to the saga of Venetian glory take to the ceilings—vast spaces that displayed “increasingly ambitious self-representation.” The introduction of the gods also “sanctions the succession of pagan Rome by Christian Venice,” an act in which Renaissance Italy delighted, even though it later upset the minds of America’s congressmen and presidents. 189. Venice was figured first as Justice and as the Virgin. Venus was added as part of the “deliberate application of classical visual language to the glorification of the Republic” (ibid., 118–19). 190. Now on display at the Accademia Galleries, Jacobello del Fiore’s panel was originally located in Palazzo Ducale, hung in the Magistrato del Proprio where judges settled property disputes. Justice sits upon a throne with paired lions and holds the sword of punishment and the scales of judgment. To one side Michael conquers Satan and slays Sin. To the other Gabriel announces the Virgin Birth and the coming of peace for humanity, while the words on the scrolls over the head of Justice were traditionally associated with Christ as the Judge. See ibid., 20, 25, and Accademia Galleries of Venice (Milan, 1985), 124. 191. One must take a boat to the far lagoons of Venice to witness earlier renditions of Justice at the Last Moment of Divine Judgment. Torcello’s Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta was founded in 649, altered in 864, and rebuilt in 1008. Its hauntingly vivid Byzantine style dates from the twelfth through the thirteenth centuries. The west wall of the counterfacade mounts the Last Judgment in mosaic, a forceful adumbration of the countless Judgments that continued to preoccupy the Italian imagination. Flanked by angels in gem-studded robes, Christ wields the Cross instead of the sword. Below, layered scenes divide the saved from the damned, Mary raises her hands in intercession to the Son, while an angel with the scales of judgment flies above. Yet it is the mosaic of the Hodegetria Virgin in the central apse that most commands one’s memory. She holds neither sword nor scales but only “the Blessing Child,” who grips the scroll of the laws, while the inscription below her feet promises that, through her Son, she frees those trapped in sin. The extraordinary elongation of her figure soars upward like a divine exclamation mark into the gilded vault. This suggests a form of Justice that assures that the Cosmos contains no space wherein to escape either merited punishment or unmerited love. Not even the councilors of the Palazzo Ducale have such power. See Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge, 2005), for Hall’s optimistic introduction to the baroque violence of the Sistine Chapel. The traditional emphasis on Christ as the punitive Judge shifts to Christ the Redeemer, from dread of eternal torment to hope in the resurrection of “a new spiritual body” (21). Also see Thomas F. Mayer’s “The Historical and Religious Circumstances of the Last Judgment” (76– 94) in the same edition. 192. Cosetino and Glassie, The Capital Image, 195. Even before the Civil War, hidden neighborhoods with the names Grease Alley, Cabbage Alley, Blood Alley, and Tin Pan Alley harbored thousands of blacks in areas that later became gentrified. Among histories of the growth of the black population, with the advent of government clerks, educators, servants, and laborers, are Edward S. Green, National Capital Code of Etiquette (Washington, D.C., 1920); Samuel Denny Smith, The Negro in Congress, 1870–1910 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1940); Constance Green, Secret City:



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A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, 1967); William B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990). 193. Shepherd’s accomplishments (reminiscent of Baron Haussmann’s boulevards, sewers, and water system, which created a modern Paris out of a medieval one, and Robert Moses’s re-creation of New York City’s roadways in his own image) were damned with faint praise in “The New Washington,” Century, March 1884, 643–59, cited in Reps, Washington on View, 196. Speaking of changes to the city’s appearance that “plunged the city into a debt,” the article concludes that such “fundamental and revolutionary” additions took a “man of Shepherd’s intolerant energy, which sacrificed individual rights for the future benefit of the whole community. Had it been attempted prudently and cautiously, these individual rights would have defeated the whole scheme, for the community was not wealthy enough to compensate the injury done to them.” Joseph West Moore, in Picturesque Washington (1870) and Theodore Noyes’s article in the Washington Evening Star for September 19, 1892, gave their approval. Moore was particularly grateful that the city was saved from being removed to St. Louis once “a strong man came into leadership, and turned aside the current that was flowing perilously against the city.” Shepherd brought into realization “a combination of ancient Babylon and modern Philadelphia, with much of the grace and beauty of Versailles.” Less excitable than Moore, Noyes welcomed “the magical transformation” taking place through Shepherd’s efforts. Empowered by “the legislators of to-day,” it resulted in “a new Washington, more extensive in area than the original city, which shall not be inharmonious and discreditable when compared with the work of the forefathers.” Cited in Reps, Washington on View, 216, 226. 194. William Archer, America To-Day (cited in Reps, Washington on View, 234). 195. Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman, 2: “Letter IX: The Social Life and the National Spirit in America.” The ups and downs of Medici power tracked changes within the city’s communal politics. During the 1300s the Medicis acted as protectors of the popolo minuto and as foe of the powerful families (the Albizzi, Ricci, Strozzi, Albertis) that might thwart their ambitions to command the actions of the Signoria. During the 1400s the line from Cosimo to Lorenzo to Popes Leo X and Clement VII, down through Cosimo I and Ferdinand I forcefully imposed Medici will. Clinging to the idea of the republic after the city fell under the Medicis, Florentines looked to Venice as a viable model, but the nature of a “republic” shifted as the guild system assumed corporate principles and was replaced by a political elite consisting of both the “old” and the “new” families. All the while, Medicis with humanistic interests insisted they were heirs to Rome’s great days. See Gene A. Bruckner, “Humanism, Politics, and the Social Order,” in Renaissance Florence: Society, Culture, and Religion (Keip Verlag, 1994) and Nicolai Rubinstein, “Oligarchy and Democracy in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” 99–111, in Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations, Acts of Two Conferences at Villa I Tatti in 1976–77, organized by Sergio Bertelli, Nicolai Rubinstein, and Craig Hugh Smith, vol. 1, Quattrocento (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). The role played by the cittadini piu principali is addressed in Gene A. Bruckner’s Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378 (Princeton, 1962). 196. “Art at the Capitol,” Scribner’s Monthly, September 11, 1873, 494. In the House Proceedings of June 27, 1870, when Congress met to consider (once again!) extensions to the Capitol, Representative Wood stated, “I think if there is anything that illustrates the instability of the American character and of American institutions it is the style of architecture that has been adopted peri-

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odically with reference to this Capitol. . . . We have no fixed style of architecture; we have no plan; we have nothing stable; nothing is fixed beyond this periodical disposition of the American people to change, change, change. We no sooner establish one thing, however well and carefully matured, than those who succeed us in public life see some improvement to be made, and make a still further change. This is, however, I regret to say, the physical temperament of the American people” (Documentary History, 868). 197. “Art at the Capitol,” 494−95. 198. Ibid., 495−96. 199. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (Hartford, Conn., 1873), 220, 222–23. Note that “you” are cautioned not to ascend to the Capitol dome since there is no way to avoid seeing the Brumidi frescoes that decorate it—“and why should you be interested in the delirium tremens of art?” (221). 200. See von Moos, “The Palace as a Fortress.” Under Pope Paul III Michelangelo strove to complete his work. He died in 1602, but the grand staircases he designed were completed by the 1650s. 201. Ibid., 56, 65, 147. 202. Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (New York, 2003). Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. See Bishop, Presidential Nominations and Elections, 1–5 regarding the early American caucus meetings whose agenda was determined by members of the city’s power structure. Later, overmanipulation by machine politics began to resemble the less attractive actions of Medici rulers and Renaissance popes. 203. For these details, see Brown’s Memories, 308–20, which includes the quotation given below from the oration delivered in 1885 at the final ceremony. Thomas, Lincoln Memorial, lays out the delays and debates that plagued the planning, construction, and completion of the Lincoln Memorial. 204. Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 222. 205. Brown, Memories, 319−20, from oration by Robert C. Winthrop. At the International Henry James Society Conference in Venice (2005), Robin Hoople’s paper, “Henry James’s ‘Alphabet of Impressions’: The Example of the Obelisk,” pointed up “the waste of shame” and the “mere lust for riches” represented by the Washington Monument. Hoople’s argument that James’s The American Scene singles out “the bartered dream in the intrusive Obelisk” in order to chastise “the culture that demolishes history” supplements James’s reading of the U.S. Capitol in the pages that follow. 206. The McMillan Plan was meant to amplify the pleasure experienced by earlier visitors when viewing the city from a distance. On May 27, 1870, during Senate debates over appropriations to improve the Capitol and its surrounding area, the comment was made, “As the stranger approaches the city of Rome, and looks down on her floating in the midst of the Campagna,” one thinks of Rome’s glories. “And so may the pilgrim from the distant West, in approaching this beautiful city, seated on these magnificent hills,” be able to feel “just as proud as if he had been born in the city of Washington” (Documentary History, 1098). Closer views led to distaste. The House proceedings of April 11, 1872 focused on the Mall, “an open common, denuded of grass, seamed with gullies, covered with stones, and over which stray horses and cattle may range at their leasure [sic], and which seems to be merely the depot of a parcel of railroads that are running to and from it. I repeat, therefore, that the condition of affairs as it stands now is a national disgrace; for even the magnificent monument of the Father of the Country . . . is protected only by a rickety,



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tumble-down wooden fence, not even creditable to a farmer’s barnyard” (1120). The next day another member stated, “Democracy is not a coarse and vulgar thing, but the ideal creation of the best and the most beautiful.” Referring to Athens, the Roman Forum, and the Capitoline, he observed that “the republicans of the Middle Ages in Florence, Pisa, or Venice, decorated and adorned their capitols with glorious statues or frescoes or noble parks; the people in all of them, the democratic people, feeling that as they exalted their own chosen governments they exalted the democratic principle, and also exalted themselves” (1131). 207. Major sources for this discussion include Reps, Washington on View and Monumental Washington; Jon A. Peterson, “The Hidden Origins of the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C., 1900– 1902,” and Cynthia R. Field, “The McMillan Commission’s Trip to Europe,” both in Historical Perspectives on Urban Design: Washington, D.C., 1890–1910, ed. Antoinette J. Lee, Occasional Paper No. 1, Center for Washington Area Studies (Washington, D.C., 1983), plus the recollections of two active participants: Charles Moore (secretary to James McMillan), in Washington, Past and Present, and Glenn Brown (national secretary of the AIA), in Memories. Peterson sorts out the battle lines drawn among “Senators, Congressmen, army engineers, Centennial promoters, local boosters, the Washington press, and numerous civic leaders” who debated “questions of civic art, park system design, and even slum removal” (7). Thomas’s Lincoln Memorial traces the continuation of the post−McMillan Plan fray into the 1920s. 208. Brown singled out Cannon’s efforts to block projects to beautify Washington. Cannon finally came around in support of the McMillan Plan, although not for the purpose of national aesthetics. On February 10, 1903 he stated that although he had “never been an advocate of extravagant expenditures,” he was now willing to fund its innovations. Since the Capitol must be “a clean, healthy place with room enough in which to transact the public business,” this means “economy instead of extravagance” (Documentary History, 1276–78). See Thomas, Lincoln Memorial, for details on Cannon’s adversarial position regarding plans to tidy up the Mall and choice of locations for the projected Lincoln Memorial. 209. The subtitle of Brown’s Memories is “A Winning Crusade to Revive George Washington’s Vision of a Capital City.” 210. Brown, Memories, 103, 137, 157. These were the same virtues honored by the late 1890s and early 1900s once renewed nostalgia over colonial architecture began to take hold. Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory points to two significant facts (146–47, 260–61). Between 1881 and 1883 (at the same time it brought Old Master paintings to the public’s attention), the Century published three essays that mark the rise of interest in the South’s architectural culture. In the 1890s the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities was founded for the safeguarding of the spiritual legacy of George Washington. (It was not until 1910 that the Society for the Preservation of New England was formed.) 211. Brown, Memories, 1–3. 212. Ibid., 4−5. Brown reports that without “a whimper, regret or recrimination,” his grandfather “arranged for the negroes to work the plantation on shares. They happily agreed to the plan and few if any left until after his death” (ibid., 4). Brown later praises William Thornton, the early architect for the Capitol, for being “an active member of the Colonization Society, to send negroes back to Africa.” In words reminiscent of Trent Lott’s praise for Strom Thurmond, Brown adds that had the Colonization Society been “successful,” it “would have saved this country untold suffering” (47). Brown’s favorite stories were of King Arthur, his favorite novels were by Sir Walter

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Scott (pace! Mark Twain) and his revered military heroes (other than Washington) were “the talented, efficient gentleman, Robert E. Lee, and the genius for war of the austere, fanatic Stonewall Jackson” (5). 213. Oliver Larkin, cited in Peterson, “The Hidden Origins of the McMillan Plan,” 8. 214. Field, “The McMillan Commission’s Trip to Europe,” 19, 22. Field details the commission’s itinerary, which included Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Budapest. Attention was primarily paid to the gardens designed by André Le Nôtre in Paris, Raphael’s Villa Madama and Villa Alban, and the layout of the cities’ main thoroughfares. The commission enjoyed its stay in Venice but brought away no ideas for the Washington project. 215. Spiro Kostof, “The Emperor and the Duce: The Planning of Piazzale Augusto Imperatore in Rome,” in Millon and Nochlin, Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, 270–325. Mussolini believed that the piazza must “serve a function similar to its original one.” He had no interest in “the picturesque and so-called local color of Rome,” only in monuments of past glory. For the latest political uses of the site, see John Seabrook, “Roman Renovation: Can Richard Meir Undo What Augustus and Mussolini Wrought?” New Yorker, May 2, 2005, 56–63; Alan Riding, “Imperial Rome Treasure Gets a Modern Home,” New York Times, April 27, 2006, 6–7. 216. Barrett Wendell, Stelligeri and Other Essays concerning America (New York, 1893), 39. 217. W. E. B. DuBois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (Boston, 1989), 305. DuBois’s novel was first published in 1911, but the narrative is set in the later years of the 1890s. 218. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. John Sears (New York, 1994), 250. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 219. Greenough, Form and Function, 27. 220. Artistic “discretion exists, throughout [the Capitol], only as a flower of the very first or of these latest years” (e.g., the early 1800s and the 1890s). The “large middle time” is likened (“and even that unequally”) “with the Victorian, of sinister memory” exampled by the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, filled by “the immense amount of vulgar, of barbaric, decoration, that of terrible artistic tributes from and scarce less to, the different States—the unassorted marble mannikins in particular, each a portrayal by one of the commonwealth of her highest worthy, which makes the great Rotunda, the intended Valhalla, resemble a stonecutter’s collection of priced sorts and sizes” (James, The American Scene, 266). 221. Wyeth’s Federal City cites a foreigner visitor to the Capitol who likened the Washington statue to a “domestic Jupiter” (44), which is not what an American would want to hear said of its heroic leader. See Martha Banta, “Scaling Up to War,” in Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in American Culture (New York, 1987). 222. James was never as demonstrative as Adams about the leveling qualities of the democratic system—the blame for which this descendent of the Adams dynasty laid upon Andrew Jackson, who had defeated John Quincy Adams in 1828. James mildly expressed his dislike of a country where individual differences seemed swept clear. His greater concern was over a democracy that “did not know where it was going”—the similar problem cited earlier by Matthews’s The Clash of the Gods in regard to the early Christian communities. 223. When first confronted by Rome, Mary Garland is shaken by a city whose “life” includes “all this splendour, all Rome; pictures, ruins, statues, beggars, monks.” Rowland Mallet tells her, “All these things are impregnated with life; they’re the results of an immemorial, a complex and



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accumulated, civilisation.” Mary replies that “those are words I’m afraid of ” (James, Roderick Hudson, 1:334). 224. Brown viewed the proposal to run the Gettysburg Highway through the Mall as a scheme to promote automobile manufacturing. Thomas gives a more sympathetic reading by focusing on populist excitement over the mobility promised by modern technologies. Although this proposal was defeated in 1913, it created yet another wedge between political parties leagued with either tradition or modernism. See Lincoln Memorial, 31–32, 52–54. Brown gives a running account of the victories of the Park Commission, in which he believed that he (and Roosevelt) played a major role. See Memories, 67, 81–83, 150–54. Thomas provides a different angle on the standoff between the “populist” aesthetic of the Progressives and the “refined” tastes of the traditionalists. Attempts to control the public use of the Mall had a cost. When Coxey’s Army of the Commonweal gathered in 1894 in hopes of receiving money from Congress to allay the plight of the unemployed, the city’s residents were upset by this “invasion.” Antipathy to Coxey’s Army was heightened by the fact that its leaders “disregarded the law to ‘Keep Off the Grass,’ whereupon they were promptly surrounded by officers on horseback and arrested” (Hazelton, The National Capitol, 80). 225. Other national museums crop up in separate sections of the capital, headed by the National Gallery of Art near the Capitol, complemented by the American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the National Museum of the American Indian. The Corcoran, the Phillips, and the Dumbarton Oaks Museum are important private additions to the city’s cultural scene. The presence of the National Archives and the Library of Congress, together with the Folger Library, establish Washington, D.C. as an intellectually viable center whose reach extends past the business of doing politics. However, the city does little to honor America’s artists, philosophers, scientists, and authors (albeit there is an Einstein Memorial near the NASA Building), whereas London’s Westminster Abbey has the Poets’ Corner and the tomb of Isaac Newton. Italy’s churches are lavished with tombs and plaques for Raphael, Ghiberti, Michelangelo, Galileo, Titian, Monteverdi, and Veronese, as well as for popes, doges, dynastic rulers, and condittorei—all recognized as Men of Power of importance to the state. In a satiric jab against the government’s neglect of American artists, a drawing titled Monument to the Unrecognized Artist by Jeffrey Vallence (at an exhibition on Monuments for the USA, Los Angeles, 2005) depicts a barren pedestal for sculpture and empty picture frames. 226. James Stevens Curl, A Celebration of Death (New York, 1980) is a compendium of funerary architecture from the Romans through the nineteenth century. He concludes his study of “private” burial art with separate sections on the cemeteries, memorials, and monuments that call upon distinctive types of architecture for those dead in battle. “The Art of the Dead,” James Fenton’s review in New York Review of Books, February 22, 2006, of Sandra Berresford’s Italian Memorial Sculpture, 1820–1940, focuses on changing attitudes toward monuments to “great men.” 227. One example: the navy erected the capital’s first war monument in 1804 in honor of naval officers killed at Tripoli. The original monument (later relocated to the Navy Yard) was described as “a beautiful little rostrated column of white marble, surmounted by an American eagle,” placed on an elevated pedestal with “fine emblematical statues.” Excursion through the United States during the Years 1822–23 by an English Gentleman (1824) states, “It is one of the handsomest and most chaste little monuments that I have ever seen, and was made in Italy.” Reps, Washington

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on View, 80. More in key with the New Washington is the U.S. Navy Memorial of 1990, which stands in a large plaza decorated by a granite map of the world and a seven-foot statue, The Lone Sailor. Nearby is the Naval Heritage Center, with a gift shop, and the Navy Log Room, with a computer-based store of naval records. Add in memorials to wartime leaders (Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and a scattering of memorials not directly associated with war (Boy Scouts, National Law Enforcement Officers), as well as a few (James Garfield, Mary Washington, Alex Haley) that absorb personality into service to an ideal. The U.S. Holocaust Museum (opened in 1993 off the Mall) is an important addition to the city scene, but it is not numbered among the official memorials to the American dead. 228. Nothing prevents the American entrepreneur from making a commercial stab at nationalistic glory. One such, David Adickes, was inspired to get closer to the presidents than the remotely viewed heads on Mount Rushmore. Adickes has opened two “theme parks,” in South Dakota and Virginia, with a third planned for Florida. Featuring giant concrete heads of the presidents arranged along public walkways, his parks are prize examples of the power of the Big. 229. The final resting place for the bodies of presidents is another matter. U. S. Grant’s tomb is in New York City. Jefferson’s remains are at Monticello. Lincoln’s body went home to Springfield. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is buried in Hyde Park, New York. The present mode is to memorialize presidents (even while still living) with libraries scattered across the continent. The Reagan name is given to Washington, D.C.’s airport and a government office building. (Lobbyists urge adding Reagan’s face to Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore, but the mountain is unforgiving. There is no space left.) The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts supplements the presence of John F. Kennedy’s grave in Arlington Cemetery, near that of his brother, Robert E. Kennedy. Virginia continues its dogged possession of Washington’s body, with his burial site under the energetic guardianship of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, founded in 1853. In response to the realization that visitors to Mount Vernon arrive in ignorance of just who this man was, an extensive “orientation and educational center” was opened in October 2006—“a striking melange of history, art, civics, forensic science, educational television, Hollywood, Madame Tussauds, and a little bit of hokem.” No money is ever accepted by the association from federal, state, or local government (although funds for the project came from the Ford Motor Company and the Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas). Designed “to amuse the restless eighth grader” and “a more sedate visitor,” the site features life-size bronze statues of Washington and his family; a film, We Fight to Be Free; “an enormous three-dimensional life mask of Washington” whose “eyes seem to follow the visitor”; a museum; thirteen galleries; and three theaters—all intended to reestablish the first president to the unknowing public in “the heroic mode.” See Stanley Meisler, “Countrymen, Get Reacquainted,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2006 and Edward Rothstein, “More of Washington, but Still Mysteries,” New York Times, October 27, 2006. Henry Adams’s little band that roamed the simple pastoral scene in Democracy would not recognize the personage now on display. 230. At the time, the Confederate dead were allowed onto the site with a separate monument. 231. Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton, 1997) examines the relation of mainstream white politics to representations of black history in the post−Civil War era. Savage traces attempts to bring the black body into public sculpture by Henry Kirke Brown, John Quincy Adams Ward, Vinnie Reams, Thomas Ball, Clark Mills, and others, which were, however, weakened by reliance on the convention of the Grateful Black Man bent under the protec-



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tive hand of Lincoln, the Great White Benefactor. His treatment of memorials to Robert E. Lee and the Common Soldier indicates the difficulty of breaking the grip of history directed by white men. 232. Recall that Wyeth’s guidebook of 1865 compared the reverence held toward the Capitol by a war veteran, which conflicted with his reaction toward the paltry, quarrelsome members of Congress who inhabited its halls. 233. Guerin offered an inventory of the symbolism included in the two panels, which “typify in allegory the principles evident in the life of Abraham Lincoln.” Placed to the side, almost obscured in the dimness, are Freedom, Liberty, the Angel of Truth, Justice, Law, Intelligence, Immortality, Faith, Hope, Charity, Everlasting Life, Unity, representations of each of the Arts, the Future, Fraternity, Man and Woman (“The Mural Decorations,” Art and Archaeology 13 [January−June 1922]: 259–60). See Thomas on Guerin’s murals (Lincoln Memorial, 126–29), as well as chap. 5, which details how the memorial shifted its function once it became the site for dissent through ritual ceremonies that surpassed the “official” intentions of its design. 234. Details of the private sources of funds for the memorial, the part played by Congress in the selection of the final design, and the reactions to Lin’s black wall, as well to The Three Fightingmen (Hart’s statuary placed nearby in 1984 to give a “Human face” to the “Wall of Hurt”) are well documented by Karal Ann Marling and Robert Silverman in “The Statue Near the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Art of Remembering,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 1 (1987): 5–29. Twenty years later a plaque was added to honor (in the words in July 2004 of the Associated Press in “Vietnam Memorial Adds Plaque”) “uncounted veterans who died after their war service from the lasting effects of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange, posttraumatic stress disorder or other unseen wounds.” Monies for the plaque were raised by lobbyists for the Vietnam War in Memory Memorial and by members of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. 235. Quotations from Marling and Silverman, “The Statue Near the Wall.” 236. Christopher Knight, “Our Values and Ideals Enshrined: In ‘Monuments for the USA,’” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2005, 4. President Truman’s statement, incised into one wall, does speak of “sacrifices” that will “never be repaid,” a “debt” by which all “earned” our gratitude. 237. Christopher Knight, “A Memorial to Forget,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2004. Knight’s scathing indictment focuses on its “[p]omposity, arrogance and mediocrity” and the “extravagant hodgepodge of pomp and circumstance.” Among the memorial’s many critics is Paul Goldberger, who wrote “Down at the Mall” for the New Yorker (May 3, 2004). 238. Knight, “A Memorial to Forget.” 239. Greenough, Form and Function, 3. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 240. Wendell, Stelligari and Other Essays concerning America, 39. Statements carved into the walls of the World War II Memorial form an anthology of such “high sounding phrases,” topped by General MacArthur’s claim that with the war’s end “[m]en everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace.” Only Truman’s words suggest that American forces were aided by other nations “that fought by our side.” 241. Henry James, “Honoré de Balzac,” in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (London, 1987), 92. 242. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in The Critical Muse, 206. 243. With eight hundred thousand visitors expected for the dedication, hotels offered “greatest gen-

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eration” packages. Restaurants and bars listed items of World War II nostalgia, and the manager of the Hay-Adams Hotel declared, “This is going to be huge. Everybody is gearing up.” Reported by Johanna Neumann, “For WWII Generation, a Memorial for the Ages,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2004. 244. In 2005 a movement was organized by Joseph Grano, self-appointed chair of the Constantino Brumidi Society, to bring attention on Brumidi’s work. Although the two hundredth anniversary of his birth was marked by a celebration held beneath the Apotheosis and by speeches delivered around his grave, plans to honor Brumidi with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and commemorative coins and stamps have not yet been fulfilled. Grano’s crusade is based on the need to define Brumidi as an Italian who found success in America, not as an accomplished artist. Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. of New Jersey is pleased that, after all the talk about the “‘Sopranos,’ this is an elevating point. This is what Italian-Americans should be talking about.” Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Restoring Reputation of ‘Artist-Citizen of the U.S.,’” New York Times, July 26, 2005. 245. The current tangle of political interests (both local and national) with commercial, aesthetic, and emotional concerns continues to complicate plans to memorialize the empty spaces left by the destruction of the World Trade Center. 246. In the process of commemorating as many presidents as possible (leaving out nonentities like Tyler, Buchanan, Pierce, and Harding), a memorial was finally dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his exceptional wife, Eleanor. Certain rules imposed on the design of the Roosevelt Memorial by special interest groups meant that wheelchairs are in; fur collars are out. During the nineteenth century, Congress took as its privilege the power to sanction or ban the use of particular artistic details. Now decisions that dictate “the right look” that avoids offending anyone have been opened up to the general public. In 2005 an off-Broadway production entitled Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses examined the abrasive question “How one creates public works in a democracy.” 247. Fowler, Renaissance Realism, 84. Fowler’s concern with early modern aesthetics takes him to the close of the seventeenth century, but he cites two modern novels (James’s The Golden Bowl and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) as providing worlds “observed, not participated in, by their narrators’ mediating sensibilities” (ibid.). Fowler could have made more of the complex role of “the restless analyst” Henry James brings to The American Scene and the consequences of his acts of participating, empathetic “spectatorship.” 248. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 218. “Henry James@Ground Zero: Remembering the Future,” by Beverly Haviland makes excellent use of Casey regarding remembrances of the dead of September 11, 2001 (Henry James Review 25, no. 3 [2004]: 285–95). Haviland, like myself, recognizes the importance of the demand made by James in The American Scene when, speaking of the disparity between the images of General Sherman and Peace placed in unsettling juxtaposition in Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture located at the edge of Central Park: “monuments should always have a clean, clear meaning” (130). Haviland reminds us of the uncertainties that occur when official memorials to a war are placed before the general public (e.g., Grant’s Tomb, dedicated to the hero of the Union cause; Maya Lin’s design, dedicated to no one cause). How are Japanese Americans to experience uplifting intimacy with the tributes offered to the victors at the World War II Memorial? How is every individual to react to whatever may be inserted into the empty spaces left by the World Trade Center?



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249. Casey, Remembering, 220. 250. The Freedom Wall at the World War II Memorial is guilty of bad math. Bronze panels with eleven rows of sixteen handmade gold stars (totaling 4,048) are meant to represent the 405,973 dead of the U.S. Armed Forces. 251. The following quotations are from David W. Dunlap’s article in the New York Times of January 12, 2006, A25. 252. The point of the empty vessel has been questioned. “The ashen remains are in Fresh Kills in a garbage dump. Now, on the site itself, it’s going to be an empty box.” Comment by Edie Lutnick, executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund. (Note the chilling resonance of the name for the world’s largest landfill, located on Staten Island.) It has been suggested that a small vessel (containing a few remains) be placed inside the large “symbolic” vessel in the hope it will represent the rest of the body parts entombed behind a nearby wall. Human remains are treated differently within different religious traditions, so how can one solution satisfy even those open to sweeping symbolic acts? 253. See James’s remarks regarding his approach to the dead in “The Turn of the Screw,” in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), 169, and to general questions of mortality in “Is There a Life After Death?” in The James Family, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York, 1961), 614—responses that “reach beyond the laboratory brain” and reject “the mere modern ‘psychical’ case, washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to the flowing laboratory tap.” Part Three addresses James’s dual responses to fact and fiction, and the ways in which he defined “the real” and “the romance.” 254. Wyeth, Federal City, 24–26, 66–67, 71, 108. In Renaissance Realism, Fowler comments on dream narratives in which the spectator-dreamer encounters “allegorical personifications,” which he regards as precursors of realistic fiction. Through the recounting of dreams, authors “give anxious assurances that their stories were neither lies nor libelous history” (71). In Wyeth’s own use of this centuries-old tradition, his allegorizing of Lincoln’s death at the hand of Booth adds a certain gravitas to what is otherwise a pat guide to the “Ins and Abouts of Washington.” Note that Wyeth’s meditation on the defeat of the “giant Snake” reverses Benjamin Franklin’s use of this type. Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon placed in the Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754 called for the disparate colonies (imaged as a snake cut into sections) to unite their efforts. A century later, the Union Eagle of the North slays the Confederate Snake, which had attempted to cut the States in two. 255. This was a Frenchman’s response to L’Enfant’s plan, reported by Frederick Gutheim in Worthy of the Nation, 21. 256. “Washington in 1859,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1859, 1–17, quoted in Reps, Washington on View, 98. 257. Brown’s Memories includes these words of praise, together with a slight touch of the negative: “A majestic dome, graceful and imposing in its pure white outline against the blue sky, a beacon on the darkest night, under the brilliant electric lights, crowns the hill where our laws, sane and insane are made” (37). 258. James, The American Scene, 248–49, 246–247. 259. Hazelton, The National Capitol, 69. Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun brings Rome’s moonlit evenings of love and joy into the present. During “a moonlight ramble,” the protagonists find their way to the Coliseum. “On the steps of the great black cross, in the center of the Coliseum, sat a

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party singing scraps of song, with much laughter and merriment between the stanzas,” participating in “the thin delights of moonshine and romance” (154–55). 260. Hazelton, The National Capitol, 69–70. Thomas reports that the lighting of the Lincoln Memorial makes it one of the nocturnal city’s most romantic places (Lincoln Memorial, 146). Elsewhere, because of the delight Hazelton takes in romance, he describes “Midnight in the Rotunda,” wherein “the belated visitor finds himself looking fearfully for some demon—some spirit—to leap up in his path, or drop leopard-like from above. Behind each arch lurks, then, the Quasimodo of the Capitol” (30). 261. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Naturalism,” in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, with Jason Gaiger (Oxford, 1998), 414. 262. Hawthorne, “The Custom-House: Introductory to The Scarlet Letter,” in The Scarlet Letter, ed. Nina Baym (New York, 2003), 38. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. In 1853 the former classmate of Hawthorne at Bowden College, Franklin Pierce, was elected president. Since Hawthorne had contributed a little campaign biography, Pierce appointed him American consul in Liverpool. From this venture came Hawthorne’s travels to Italy, his notebooks on Rome and Florence, and The Marble Faun. 263. Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun includes a scene at Rome’s Fountain of Trevi where sculptors of “Bernini’s school had gone absolutely mad in marble,” yet “the calm moonlight soothed [these “artificial fantasies”] into better taste than was native to them” (144). 264. Hawthorne’s Rome “afforded a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land” (preface to The Marble Faun, 3). (The complex meaning of this statement is tested further in the crucial literary theories examined in Part Three.) “My Kinsman Major Molyneux” was published in 1851, a year after The Scarlet Letter. It treats Massachusetts colonial politics in the tense days just prior to the American Revolution when young Robin arrives in the city (Boston) on a “moonlight evening” to seek his fortune under the patronage of his kinsman, a powerful member of “the court party.” The strange events of the evening are bathed in moonlight that seems to dissolve the solid structures (social and architectural) around him, causing the confusion and pain that attend any radical alteration in the social fabric. The Marble Faun also includes the conceit by which a tumultuous band of revelers enacts a parody of the undoing of political power. During the Roman carnival, “a phantom, styled the Roman Senator—proceeding to the Capitol,” is attacked by “an impious New Englander” who aims a nosegay, making it seem “that the Republic was again crumbling into ruin” (443). 265. James’s discussion of his predecessor’s taste for allegory and fancies appears in Hawthorne (Wittits, Calif., n.d.), 51–54; first published as one of the English Men of Letters Series in 1879. For James’s assessment of the social, political, and cultural disadvantages of those who grew up before the Civil War, see 115–17. Fowler suggests how one can read Hawthorne’s allegories in ways James did not. “Medieval discourse is generally didactic. . . . Its images were designed as memory-prompts, not mimesis. . . . They may be vividly lifelike, but they seldom contain much details unrelated to the moral. . . . Not that medieval authors knew nothing of emotional life.



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But that was unlikely to find its way into fiction through character and probably motivation. Instead, it was dispersed—displaced onto description, for example, especially description of the marvelous” (Renaissance Realism, 45). 266. William Stillman, “The Decay of Art,” New Princeton Review 2, no. 1 (1886): 22. As Howells put it, Old Master paintings were “made when Art was—if ever—a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence” (Italian Journeys, 238). 267. Stillman, “The Decay of Art,” 20. In Stillman’s view, the rise of the history painting, the genre study, the portrait, and the realistic novel was the final doom of art, although the decline began with Michelangelo’s “ostentation of the anatomist” and Raphael’s “pride of knowledge.” “Art was no longer expression, poetry, but a representation, a simulation, more or less earnest, of an identity.” The last true artists—guardians of the poetic tendency—were Turner, Linnell, and Palmer (32–34). Stillman’s preface to Old Italian Masters: Engraved by Timothy Cole, with Historical Notes by W. J. Stillman and Brief Comments by the Engraver (New York, 1892) expresses bitterness that a divide had opened between “the superficial qualities of art” latent in the Italian Renaissance love of scientific skills and “the telling of a spiritual truth, not the relation of a natural phenomenon or fact” imaged by “the poet, not the scientist” (vi). 268. Stillman, “The Decay of Art,” 21. 269. Ibid., 26. 270. Henry Adams tried to figure out the moral significance of Rome, both ancient and modern, while seated on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria di Ara Coeli. He had believed he had a valid theory about the Justice represented by the angelic warrior at Mont-Saint-Michel and the icon of Mercy he found at Chartres figured by the Virgin. His equanimity was shattered in 1900 by the presence of the Dynamo, which symbolized neither Justice nor Mercy. 271. Stillman, “The Decay of Art,” 36. 272. See Vernon Lee, Essay on Art and Life (East Aurora, N.Y., 1896), 80; Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 166. 273. Richard N. Murray, “Painting and Sculpture,” in The American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (Brooklyn, 1979), 153–89. 274. Richard Gay Wilson, “Architecture, Landscape and City Planning,” in The American Renaissance, 92. By the 1920s, however, “Control over design passed from the [Army] Corps to an able and self-confident architectural establishment which reshaped the official city into a monumental neoclassical form. But the Corps retained the responsibility of making much of this vision real, and, in their own fields, engineers helped to reshape the face of progressive Washington” (Cowdrey, A City for the Nation, 46). 275. Helen-Anne Hilker, “Monument to Civilization: Diary of a Building,” and John Y. Cole, “Smithmeyer & Pelz: Embattled Architects of the Library of Congress,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 29, no. 4 (1972): 234–66 and 282–307. Contemporary reviews of the newly opened library give no sign of the battles over the building process; instead they offer cogent reactions to the arts of the interior. Royal Cortissoz, “A National Monument of Art: The Congressional Library at Washington,” Harper’s Weekly, December 28, 1895, 1240–41; William A. Coffin, “The Decorations in the New Congressional Library,” Century, March 1897, 694–711. 276. Much has been written (rightly so) about the race-bound implications of the sculpted heads that form the keystones of the exterior of the second floor of the Jefferson Building. Based on scien-

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tifically executed models of racial types taken from the Department of Ethnology of the National Museum of Natural History, they are a record of how the features of non-Americans were set off against the library’s idealized representations of True Americaness. 277. Among the major primary and secondary sources on the primacy of the mural: John La Farge, “Puvis de Chavannes,” Scribner’s Monthly, December 1900, 672–84; Pauline King, American Mural Painting: A Study of the Important Decoration by Distinguished Artists in the United States (Boston, 1902); William Walton, “The Field of Art—Mural Painting in This Country since 1898,” Scribner’s Monthly, November 1906, 637–40; Charles H. Caffin, “Mural Painting in America,” Harper’s Monthly, May 1907, 845–58; Edwin Howland Blashfield, The Scammon Lectures Delivered Before the Art Institute of Chicago, March 1912, and since Greatly Enlarged (New York, 1913); E. V. Lucas, Edwin Austin Abbey, 2 vols. (New York, 1921); Frank J. Mather Jr., Charles R. Morely, and William Henderson, The American Spirit in Art, vol. 12 of The Pageant of America: A Pictorial History of the United States, ed. Ralph Henry Gabriel (New York, 1927); Royal Cortissoz, The Works of Edwin Howland Blashfield (New York, 1937); Richard V. West, Occasional Papers I—The Walker Art Building Murals (Brunswick, Maine, 1972); Jeanne Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago, 1981). The mural impulse gained new life during the 1930s. See Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis, 1982); Richard P. Horowitz, “Making Sense of Mural America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1984): 139–44. 278. Artists given commissions to decorate the library included Olin L. Warner, Herbert Adams, Charles P. Perce, John White Alexander, Elihu Vedder, Charles H. Niehaus, and Edwin Blashfield. In a sour version of the old anti-Irish slur, it can be said of the library’s commissions, No Italians need apply! 279. Coffin, “The Decorations in the New Congressional Library,” 706, 709, 711. 280. Cortissoz, “A National Monument of Art.” He is the one who wrote down the inscription carved into the wall above the Lincoln statue in 1922—words that emphasize “temple” (the sacred) and “people” (the all-inclusive identity that promises reunion). See Thomas, Lincoln Memorial, 130–31. 281. Blashfield originally planned to be an engineer. He studied in Germany and at MIT before turning to the Paris ateliers of Gérôme and Bonnat. His murals for the state capitols of Iowa and Pennsylvania are among his best-known public works. 282. There have been attempts, however, to appropriate the women in the paintings of Homer and Eakins to the cause of Americanist arguments. The rustic types presented by Homer were taken as proof of the sturdy virtues of the American Girl, while the weary, somewhat neurotic faces of Eakins’s urban women were (and still are) used as examples of what the American female should not be. See Margaret C. Conrads, Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s (Princeton, 2001); Elizabeth Johns, Thomas Eakins (Princeton, 1983); Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed (Oxford, 2005); Banta, Imaging American Women. 283. In 1879, while assessing “The New Dispensation of Monumental Art” in an essay focused on Boston’s Trinity Church and Albany’s Assembly Chamber, Henry Van Brunt glanced condescendingly at Brumidi’s “mechanical spirit” and the “cold artisan spirit” capable only of “excellent conventionalities.” “The industrious Signor Brumidi at Washington has grown gray in the service of art while covering the walls of the National Capitol with Italian decorations, carried to the point of manual perfection which leaves nothing to be desired as regards technical qualities,



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but which has proved itself absolutely barren of results. The art of the country is no better for it, and possibly no worse.” Atlantic Monthly, May 1879, 634. 284. William Stillman, “The Popularization of Art,” Century, November 1888. The arts and crafts movement had to protect its own flanks from being branded as elitist rather than a champion of art for the people. The following remarks merge views from two articles in the Craftsman, October 1904, 18–27 and 28–34: “Mural Painting from the American Point of View” by Charles M. Shean and “Comments on Mr. Shean’s ‘Mural Painting from the American Point of View’” by Irene Sargent. 285. Elisabeth Luther Cary’s essay, “The Scholarship of Edwin Howland Blashfield,” in the American Magazine of Art, November 1916, 4. Blashfield’s polished technique and compositional sophistication stand in contrast to Leutze’s mural, decried by James Jackson Jarves, who singled out this instance of “the shop-work of the melodramatists” as “the maddest” of all Leutze’s “frantic compositions,” “a vicious example in composition and coloring. . . . Confusion reigns paramount, as if an earthquake had made chaos of his reckless design, hot, glaring coloring, and but ill compounded theme.” Art Thoughts: The Experience and Observations of an American Amateur in Europe (New York, 1869), 298. Compare the response of Senator Cannon to the view held by Jarves, the type of idealistic dilettante Cannon deplored. “I have had about the experience that the average citizen has had. I don’t know that I have an eye for the beautiful,” yet Leutze’s Westward strikes him as “the greatest work my eyes ever beheld.” As for the members of the AIA, whom he was addressing, “To you it may not be anything, but to me it typifies the development of the Republic” (Brown, Memories, 100). Could there ever be a single set of aesthetic principles that could satisfy both a Jarves and a Cannon? 286. Cary, “The Scholarship of Edwin Howland Blashfield,” 6. 287. The frieze for the rotunda, intended to depict outstanding events in American history (begun by Brumidi but left unfinished at his death), was taken up by Filippo Costaggini. In 1896 objections were made to the fact that the painted narrative skipped from the Mexican-American War to President Cleveland’s opening of the Columbia Exposition of 1892. Why had the Civil War been omitted? The frieze was completed only in 1953, when Allyn Cox added the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the Birth of Aviation. See Hazelton, The National Capitol, 99–100; Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 253. 288. Brown’s letter of February 12, 1856, in Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol, 191–92. 289. Van Brunt, “The New Dispensation of Monumental Art,” 640. Both William and Henry James took drawing lessons from Hunt (the former more serious at his work than his younger brother). See Charles C. Eldridge’s American Imagination and Symbolist Painting (New York, 1979), which stresses the Americanized version of the European taste for visions and dreams that put their shadowy imprint on turn-of-the-century art. 290. I draw upon remarks by Peter Schjeldahl on the “eureka moment” when Johns’s painting “was the American flag—a sign the same as what it signified. By taking an object from the realm of common fact . . . and then returning it to that realm transfigured,” Johns altered how we might “look at any painting—as a thing as well as a picture” (“String Theory,” New Yorker, May 31, 2005, 96–97). 291. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London, 1927), 72. 292. See Rosand, “Venetian Painting of the Cinquecento,” 376.

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1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, introduction to Nature (1836), in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York, 1983), 7. 2. William James, “Frederic Myers’ Services to Psychology” (1901), in Memories and Studies (New York, 1911), 148−49. 3. The Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History, ed. John Shearman and Marcia B. Hall (Princeton, 1990). 4. Geoffrey Scott, epilogue to The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, 2nd ed. (New York, 1924). 5. For extracts from Henry’s “Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetic,” see Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, with Jason Gaiger (Oxford, 1998), 953–58. 6. Fry’s remarks are from “The Art of Florence” and “Some Questions of Esthetics,” in Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (New York, 1926), 11 and 1, 6. 7. James Herbert Morse, “Before the War: The Native Elements in American Fiction,” Century, June 1883, 98. 8. James Herbert Morse, “Since the War,” Century, July 1883, 362. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 9. Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York, 1986), 73. 10. Another battle was taking place on both sides of the Atlantic with the War of the Books between the Classics and the Mods. It was not until 1848 that Oxford was able to steel itself to accept time given to studies other than Latin and Greek grammar, while Cambridge (more “scientifically” oriented) delayed its recognition of “modern” literature until 1914. 11. William Dean Howells, “Emile Zola” (1902), in Selected Literary Criticism, vol. 3, 1898–1920, ed. Ronald Gottesman (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 64. 12. Ibid., 65, 70. 13. See Henry James, “Emile Zola,” in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (London, 1987), 403. 14. Ibid., 404−5. The following quotations are from essays titled “Honoré de Balzac” of 1875 and 1902, in The Critical Muse. Pagination is given within parentheses. 15. James’s preface to The Awkward Age distinguished between “the American theory,” which upholds a perennial state of innocent girlhood, and “the British theory,” which knows there is more to be known but is committed to ignorance in the name of the “proprieties.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), 104–5. 16. Henry James, preface to The American, in The Art of the Novel, 31. 17. Ibid., 31–32. 18. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. John Sears (New York, 1994), 248. 19. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in The Critical Muse, 206. 20. Ibid. 21. Henry James, “The Lesson of Balzac,” in The Critical Muse, 422–23. In “The New Novel,” James sees the novel as “susceptible at once of being entirely known and of seeming delectably thick.

















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Reduction to exploitable knowledge is apt to mean, for many a case of human complexity reduction to comparative thinness.” The Critical Muse, 600. 22. His Masterpiece was first published in 1886 as L’oeuvre. The views of Zola’s Sandoz (which merge the “romantic” with “realism”) partner with James’s remarks of 1907. See His Masterpiece, ed. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (New York, 1915), 35. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 23. James, “The New Novel,” 605. 24. Henry James, Roderick Hudson, in Novels and Tales (New York, 1907–17), 1:61. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 25. William Dean Howells, Editor’s Study, ed. James W. Simpson (Troy, N.Y., 1983), 41. 26. “Zola as a Romantic Writer” (1896) and “Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901), in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin, 1964), 71 and 77. 27. James, preface to The American, 33–34. For James’s admission that he knew about Art before he learned more about Life, see his preface to The Tragic Muse, in The Art of the Novel, 80. 28. Angus Fletcher notes that “theory” is the means by which literature imitates science, a point he presses hard in A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of the Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 13. 29. See James’s preface to The Tragic Muse, 79. 30. That Sir Arthur S. Eddington, professor of astronomy at Cambridge, grew increasingly sensitive to shifts taking place in scientific thought is reflected by titles of three of his books: The Nature of the Physical World (1927), Science and the Unseen World (1930), and The Philosophy of Physical Sciences (1939). 31. Albert Einstein, cited in Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study (New York, 1987), 40. 32. The Tragic Muse, in Novels and Tales, 8:410. Subsequent pagination is given in parentheses. Further along in Part Three there is another definition that refers directly to the painters of the Italian mannerist period. Scathing in tone, it fits what many have said about the late Jamesian style. 33. “Henry James: (Post) Modernist?” Henry James Review 25, no. 2 (2004): 168–94, by David McWhirter extends well beyond the special case of James as it sorts out the controversies still swirling around modernism and postmodernism. McWhirter’s quotations from Simmel’s essay appear on 179. For the entirety of “The Conflict of Modern Culture,” see Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Form: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, 1971), 375–93. 34. James, “The New Novel,” 601. 35. McWhirter, “Henry James: (Post) Modernist?” 179. 36. Ibid., 180. “We arrive here at the postmodernity [Frederic] Jameson has been concerned about for the last two decades: a radically leveled and disoriented cultural space characterized by ‘the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory,’ ‘in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own popular images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.’” Jameson is cited from Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991), 25. 37. Horatio Greenough, “Criticism in Search of Beauty,” in Form and Function, ed. Harold A. Small (Berkeley, 1957), 103.

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38. Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 12–13. Fletcher favors the Complexity Theory and the Incompleteness Theory. 39. James describes Nash as “a young man [who] was fair and fat and of the middle stature; he had a round face and a short beard, and on his crown a mere reminiscence of hair.” He could be recognized “immediately as a gentleman, but a gentleman unlike any other gentleman [Biddy] had seen” (7:23). 40. Vizetelly’s preface to His Masterpiece states that the figure of Bongrand mingles attributes of Courbet, Cabanel, and Flaubert (vii). 41. Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute, in Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin, 1964), 130. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. Norris worked on Vandover (posthumously published in 1914) and McTeague in 1894–95. 42. Theodore Dreiser, The “Genius” (New York, 1915), 474. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 43. In “The Return of the Genius,” a parable Dreiser published in the Chicago Globe in 1892, the wish of a young genius to enjoy fame and glory without travail is answered by the God of Genius. After a time in the perfect world of heavenly bliss, he longs to return to earth midst the toils of mankind, although this means giving up fame. Journalism, vol. 1, Newspaper Writings, 1892–95, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Philadelphia, 1988), 4. 44. Chase’s statement is in Ronald G. Pisano, William Merritt Chase (New York, 1979), 26–27. The following description of his attire is from 13. Born in Indiana like Dreiser but with a personal panache Dreiser never mastered, Chase made manifest his dream life with astute training in the arts: classes at New York’s National Academy of Design (1869), study abroad in Munich in 1872 (the city whose ateliers replaced those of Rome and Florence, where his classmates included Frank Duveneck and Walter Shirlaw), and his return to New York in 1878 to enter upon a successful career as painter and teacher at the newly formed Art Students League. Sheldon’s inventory of Chase’s studio is from G. W. Sheldon, Hours with Art and Artists, 179−82. (Published in New York in 1882, this edition is a Garland reprint, The Art Experience in Late Nineteenth Century America, ed. H. Barbara Weinberg [New York, 1978].) He includes descriptions of the studios of H. Humphrey Moore, Samuel Colman, H. Dolph, Louis C. Tiffany, and R. Swain Gifford (171−79). 45. William H. Downes, “William Merritt Chase: A Typical American Artist,” International Studio, December 1909, xxix. 46. Trilby, George du Maurier’s excessively successful novel of 1894, centers its tale of Paris on three young art students—the band of brothers obligatory for such narratives. 47. Scientific communities consider cooperation one of their main strengths, but there are many examples of competitiveness that match the notorious race to be the first to discover DNA and the rivalries within the Manhattan Project. 48. As Roderick and Rowland are rowed to Torcello, James watches Roderick “watching a brownbreasted gondolier making superb muscular movements in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic.” The sight causes Roderick to long to “make a colossal bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square in Rome” (107]. An essay by Alan Chong, “Artistic Life in Venice,” recounts the relations between John Addington Symonds and the gondolier Angelo Fausto, and between John Singer Sargent and his servant thought to be a gondolier. “Infatuation with gondoliers was common enough among gay and straight men and women” (112). See Gondola Days: Isabella















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Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle, ed. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Alan Chong, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and Richard Lingner (Boston, 2004). 49. Take note of the changes James made in the wording of the final scene of Roderick Hudson as it appeared in the New York Edition as opposed to the 1878 English Macmillan edition. “Now that all was over Rowland understood how exclusively, for two years, Roderick had filled his life. His occupation was gone.” 50. Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, in The Writings in Prose and Poetry of Rudyard Kipling (New York, 1899), 24. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 51. The pietà pose that concludes Kipling’s novel of 1890 is replicated in Soldiers of Fortune, Richard Harding Davis’s novel of 1897. As an engineer, military man, and patriot who serves American commercial interests abroad, Davis’s Robert Clay reflects the talent for technology and managerial expertise honored by Thorsten Veblen and Frederick Winslow Taylor. As heroic comradeat-arms, he also meets the demands of the romance tradition. When his closest friend is killed in a melee with swarthy-skinned Latin American natives, Clay holds him in his arms. Davis’s description lingers over the body’s milk-white skin, as soft as a woman’s, eroticized by its bloodred wounds. See Martha Banta, “The Sexuality of War,” in Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago, 1993), 68–74. 52. Jack London, The Sea-Wolf: The World’s Classics, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford, 1992), 13. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 53. Compare Larsen with the figure of Donatello in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s attempt to portray sunny, amoral paganism before a creature like the “faun” is swallowed up by a modern culture that introduces him to guilt. 54. If Van Weyden (and London) are repulsed by the lip-smacking pleasure Mugridge takes over Van Weyden’s milky white skin, when it comes to Larsen, both are captivated by this atavism of “the white-skinned, fair-haired savages” who spawned the Nordic race. 55. James, preface to The Tragic Muse, 96 (emphasis added). 56. Ibid., 96−97 (emphasis added). 57. Greenough, “Criticism in Search of Beauty” and “Aesthetics at Washington,” in Form and Function, 19, 27. 58. Emerson, Nature, 45−46. James’s personal distaste for gigantism was a point of contention in his relationship with his soul mate, the young sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen. Andersen drew plans for a World Center of Communication, a city based (in James’s words) on “megalomania,” “la folie des grandeurs,” “the infatuated and disproportionate love and pursuit of, and attempt at, the Big, the Bigger, the Biggest, the Immensest Immensity, with all sense of proportion, application, elation and possibility madly submerged.” See Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in American Culture (New York, 1987), 520. 59. Janice Simon’s dissertation on the Crayon traces this parable to Novalis, who called upon “an inner awakening to a higher spiritual and creative self.” See “The Crayon, 1855–1862: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and the Fine Arts (Vols. I and II),” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1990, 84–85n13. In Roderick Hudson, Rowland and Mary Garland find “a little bluestreaked flower” in the New England woods before the young men’s departure for Europe (1:78). In Rome, where Roderick’s flower should be blooming into art, he willfully comes near to breaking his neck trying to pluck a blue flower from a ledge at the Coliseum to give to Christina Light, but Rowland stops him in the name of “preventing you from doing a very foolish thing” (1:266).

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In turn, it is Rowland who ventures to procure a precious flower for Mary from a high rock in the Alps (1:469). 60. Tepid tales of uplift made their way into the Crayon. On October 1855, the first act of a fivepart drama, Correggio: A Tragedy, appeared. In February 1859 “Correggio’s First Picture” was published (named as a translation but with no indication of the author’s name or its original language). In this fictive portrait, the youth is aflame with aspirations, trains hard, sells his first painting to save his aged parent from destitution, and is betrayed by his patron, who places his own name on the work. “Free from pride, forgetful of the wrongs of his enemies, and loving to do good, he found the reward of his mild virtues only in the purity of his conscience and the peaceable enjoyment of his art.” 61. At times Vandover and the Brute reads like late-nineteenth-century manuals that cautioned schoolboys against masturbation. No one is safe, however. “Dolly” Haight is a paragon of pure mind and body, but a chance encounter with one of San Francisco’s “fast women” results in a kiss planted on his lips, which by chance has a small cut. Therefore, he is fated to a tragic end, rotting away as a syphilitic (304). 62. James handles the rise and fall of his protagonist more discreetly than does Norris, but the curve of both narratives is essentially the same, even to the presence of Mallet as Roderick’s “third self ” who is witness to the battle between the other two selves. Vandover’s affliction is not a mere borrowing of werewolf folklore. Although there are still too few reported cases to aid in its study, the condition is viewed as most likely a form of schizophrenia. 63. Students of Zola note that his early novels tend to work within the tradition of the medieval “humors” that afflict individual temperaments. Later, as Zola moved from physiology to sociology, he shifted his attention to genetics, wherein the group inherits certain traits. 64. Or early death, as in the case of Jacques, Claude’s little son, who is described as the “[p]oor little offspring of genius which, when it begets at all, so often begets idiocy or physical imperfection” (206). 65. Vandover undergoes torment in deciding whether to shoot himself to end his suffering, but he concludes that he must “go on.” “Was there any need of suicide? Suicide! Great God! his whole life had been one long suicide” (184). 66. James, preface to The Tragic Muse, 42. 67. To Vizelley, this is Zola’s version of Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe. Recent critics connect Zola’s rendering of Claude Lantier’s life and work with Cézanne; this caused the breakup of the men’s friendship. See Rachel Cohen’s review of the rift in “Artist’s Model,” New Yorker, November 7, 2005. 68. The final sentence of James’s tale “Broken Wings” of 1900 seals the pact between the happily united couple, a painter and a writer: “And now to work!” See Jack London’s “Getting into Print” (1903): “Spell it in capital letters. work, work all the time.” From No Mentor but Myself: Jack London on Writers and Writing, 2nd ed., ed. Dale L. Walker and Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Stanford, 1999), 57. 69. Henry James, preface to Roderick Hudson, in The Art of the Novel, 3. 70. Ibid., 13. 71. Ibid., 18−19. 72. James, preface to The Tragic Muse, 89. 73. Readers may be relieved that Miriam chooses not to marry Peter. Pragmatic muse that she is,













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she marries Basil Dashwood, who will serve as her business manager without imposing undue emotional strain. The true “marriage” she elects is the one she consummates nightly with her audience. This is Miriam’s answer to the fate of Verena Tarrant, caught between the oppressive wills of Basil Ransom and Oliver Chancellor in The Bostonians. 74. Adam Sonstegard’s “Painting, Photography, and Fidelity in The Tragic Muse,” Henry James Review 24, no. 1 (2003), 27–44, takes up the question of “fidelity” played by various media, placing emphasis on late-nineteenth-century photographical technology. I point to distinctions between the commercial value of photography found in Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse according to the way the “muses” think about photographs in relation to their authentic “selves.” Christina Light, who would prefer not to be made a “professional beauty,” is painfully aware of her mother’s eagerness to sell her daughter’s likenesses as part of her own marketing scheme, thereby robbing Christina of whatever inner being she wishes to hide from view. As a professional actress Miriam relies on the public’s response to her celebrity. There would be no reason for her to object to selling her “persona” in the shops as well as on the stage. 75. Eugene’s best artwork is not imitative of Renoir-like maternal muses. That it is of urban street scenes reflects Dreiser’s admiration for William Louis Sonntag Jr., Alfred Stieglitz, and others of the Ashcan School, who used painting and photography to explore modern city life. See Art, Music, and Literature, 1897–1902: Theodore Dreiser, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Urbana, 2001). 76. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 36. See Woolf ’s “The Mark on the Wall” (1917) and “Three Pictures” (posthumously published in 1942), in The Complete Stories of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (New York, 1985), as examples of “marks” that draw our attention, whether or not they turn out to be false. 77. In a letter of October 23, 1911, London explains, “A certain definite percentage of men are so homosexual, or so nearly homosexual, that they can love another man more than they can love any woman.” He has “studied the sex problem even in its ‘most curious way’” but has “never dreamed of drawing a homosexual male character. Perhaps I am too prosaically normal myself,” although, he adds, “I think I know it fairly thoroughly and scientifically.” After concluding, “Flatly, I am a lover of women,” he mentions choices made by commercial authors in the days prior to the current market potential for gay literature. “Unfortunately, those who figure vitally in that problem constitute too small a percentage of the human race to be an adequate book-buying inducement to the writer.” See No Mentor but Myself, 133. 78. J. V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (New York, 1997), 32. 79. James, The Golden Bowl, in Novels and Tales, 23:189 (emphasis added). Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 80. See Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991). 81. As put in The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists, ed. Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lyonton (New Haven, 2000), 344, perspective art is “[a] very special kind of realism, which is intended to deceive the viewer.” Whereas trompe l’oeil lures one to believe that the “pictorial or sculptured representation is the actual thing represented,” perspective art leads to “misjudging the real environment.” Both kinds are forms of “illusionism,” but the latter delights in “extensions” of architectural structures, as seen in the verbal illusions by which Henry James enhances just such “misjudgments.” Still, vanishing-point perspectives do not guarantee glimpses into infinity. Vistas

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laid upon the horizontal planes of Italian Renaissance paintings may “stop” when they come to the Tuscan hills in the distance or are swallowed up by the blankness of Venetian lagoons. The vertical planes that dominate paintings with staircases are also apt to hit “dead walls” at the top of the ascent. 82. “Perspective,” in The Oxford Companion to Art, ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford, 1970), 858. 83. “Behold the Forms,” chap. 4 of Regis’s Who Got Einstein’s Office? offers an alternative to the goals of applied science in his description of how mathematicians practice their intellectual magic at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Engineering and economics in the Veblenian tradition study the world in order to master its structures. While pure math is also obsessed with understanding “the behavior of the whole thing,” computer-generated pictures reveal “something real, only it’s not of this world.” Prime numbers deal with “pure abstraction,” but when made visible, mathematicians gain “a glimpse of the Forms themselves, a direct vision of the Platonic Heaven.” These pictures have no worldly “use” since their “motivations are primarily aesthetic.” They glory in images that are “beautiful in their own right” (70–71, 75–76). 84. James, The Wings of the Dove, in Novels and Tales, 20:261. Subsequent pagination is given within parentheses. 85. St. Mark’s relics rest within the Basilica, located on the San Marco Piazza. Benoit Mandelbrot of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, inventor of the field of fractals, has placed on his computer “one of his more symmetrical and pleasing fractal shapes.” Named “the San Marco dragon,” it is a “wild extrapolation of the skyline of the Basilica in Venice, together with its reflection in a flooded Piazza.” As pictured in Regis’s Who Got Einstein’s Office? (93), it replicates the God-overview of Pitati’s painting. 86. “Mannerism, Mannerist, Mannered,” in Oxford Companion to Art, 687–88. The new language of Jamesian modernism was as difficult to comprehend as the language of art introduced by mannerist methods. Newton’s Principia, known for “its dense proliferation of radical ideas, ambiguities, and geometrical construction that neither followed traditional canons of mathematical intelligibility nor quite corresponded with those developed by Leibnitz and his disciples,” met similar difficulties. The need to decipher Newton’s writings for “a new generation” made the “transmission” of his ideas “a formidable task.” Yet, as in the case of James’s late style, the Principia led others “to investigate problems that they might not have otherwise gotten around to dealing with quickly.” See Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York, 2005), 67–68. 87. “Mannerism, Mannerist, Mannered,” 687−88. 88. See George E. Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (Chicago, 2000), 4. 89. Henry James, Preface, The Portrait of a Lady, in The Art of the Novel, 46. 90. Add to Hersey’s study William MacDonald’s Piranesi’s “Carceri”: Sources of Invention (North‑ ampton, Mass., 1979) and Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, tr. Richard Howard (New York, 1984). Yourcenar dwells on the dreamlike, irrational world of the Carceri, which dizzies us “not from its lack of measurements (for never was Piranesi more of a geometrician) but from the very multiplicity of calculations which we know to be exact and which bear on proportions which we know to be false” (113). 91. The Palazzo Leporelli is the name James gave to the Palazzo Barbaro, constructed between 1425 and 1457, situated on the Grand Canal across from the Accademia. 92. The reference to Veronese might just as well be to his Marriage at Cana (1562–63), now at the



Notes to Pages 225–228

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Louvre, rather than to the House of Levi at Venice’s Accademia. In “Tracing the Venetian Masters in Henry James,” a paper delivered by Nelly Valtat-Comet of the University of Tours at the International Henry James Conference in Venice (July 2005), the argument is made that Merton Densher (would-be writer) fails to displace the visual effect of the Veronese onto a verbal portrait of Milly or to convert ekphrasis into epiphany. She suggests that the failed attempt of James’s characters to take over Italian master paintings for their own need is part of James’s quest to depict himself as the “ideal Author.” Paintings “wield a different semiotic system altogether,” thus “reference to them in literary texts is oblique and doesn’t challenge the existence of the power of the master of text.” Think of James’s likening of Kate Croy to “a figure in a picture stepping by magic out of its frame” (19:171). If Kate is the epitome of magnificent “Life,” her desires will be “framed” within James’s “Art.” 93. Densher finds himself “walking in short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the proprieties . . . reduced themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him.” His moral “abysses” are unlike Milly’s, which were based on her wish to live with passion. Prompted by his passion for Kate and “her pure talent for life,” he submits to her demand that he betray Milly’s faith in him by enacting a false love so that they will receive a fortune at the time of her death (20:175–76). 94. The Golden Bowl, a partner to The Wings of the Dove in its dramatization of betrayals, passions, and existential abysses, depicts a similar situation when Maggie Verver tries to explain what it is like when “you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all.” So placed, she often seems “not to know quite where I am”; she concludes, “why then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down” (24:262). 95. Arlene Croce, “Degas’s Mystery Painting,” New Yorker, December 2, 2002. 96. Charlotte and Amerigo will follow “the forms . . . that are two thirds of conduct,” forms that Maggie and Adam “impose” upon them (23:391). 97. Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque, 133, 198. These forms call up the much later invention by Benoit Mandelbrot of “fractals”—“a geometrical object whose contours are not smooth, like the lines, curves, and surfaces of classical euclidean geometry.” The fractal is “irregular, broken, and jumpy,” with an “undoctored nature” that is “irregular and fragmented.” Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? 88. Compare the miniature staircase models crafted by members of the guild system, known as compagnonnage, which flourished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These models relied on principles of traditional geometric design that assured viewers that one might mount these spiraling constructions without fear of being betrayed by ambiguities of space. 98. J. L. Locher, “The Work of E. C. Escher,” in The World of E. C. Escher (New York, 1974), 5–7, 9, 13–14. Note that Escher’s half brother, professor of geology at the University of Leiden, led him to his interest in crystallography, that Escher greatly admired the work of Piranesi and the mannerist artist Parmigianino, and that his lithographs gained international fame among scientists. 99. Escher, The World of E. C. Escher, 15. 100. Henry James, preface to The Princess Casamassima, in The Art of the Novel, 78. 101. Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1929), 345.

Index

Adams family: Brooks, 13, 51, 154; Henry, xxviii, 4, 7, 11, 13, 48, 52, 56, 69, 109–10, 134–35, 243n.83, 291n.270; John, xx, 50–51, 66, 85; John Quincy, 50–51, 79, 94, 99, 160, 172, 262n.154, 276n.169, 284n.222 Alberti, Leon Battista, xvi, xxiii, xxvii, 34, 168, 221–23 Allegory, 99–100, 105, 164–65, 173–75, 263–64n.96, 279n.183, 279–80n.187, 289n.254, 290–91n.265 American art scene, 19–20, 63–64; architecture, 49, 136, 168; art critics, xiv, 9, 15, 22, 28, 35, 98, 142, 179, 202, 235n.19, 245n.98; art histories, 11–12, 15, 23, 32, 38, 229–30n.5, 230n.9, 242– 43n.79, 248n.,117; art schools, 23–25, 239n.46, 241n.68; collectors, patrons, 3, 42–43, 67–68, 139, 171; decorative arts, 3, 167; exhibitions, 20, 250n.130; institutional training, 35–36, 53–54, 250–51n.139, 251n.140; landscapes, 30, 32, 53, 172, 239n.48, 264n.99; market values, 43, 239n.49, 240n.59–60, 248n.119, 248n.121, 249n.125, 264n.100; murals, xxvi, 3, 170–74, 270n.133, 287n.233, 292n.277, 292n.281, 293n.284, 293n.289; paintings, xxvi, 3, 24–25,

38, 41, 43–44, 48, 171, 174, 201, 207, 247n.112, 265n.104, 293n.290, 296n.44, 296–97n.48; publications, 19–21, 56, 181, 240n.56–57, 240–41n.61, 241n.72, 248n.117; public taste, 48–49, 239– 40n.55, 240n.56, 249–50n.128, 263n.95; sculpture, 3, 97–98, 150–51, 159, 173, 258n.60, 264n.99, 265n.106, 267n.115, 267–68n.117, 268n.118–19, 276n.170, 277n.174; tourism, 83–84, 92, 110, 114 American Institute of Architects (AIA), 115, 137, 168–69, 274n.157 American political figures: Joseph Cannon, 137, 146, 188, 190, 283n.208, 293n.285; Jefferson Davis, 117, 121–22, 129, 263n.95, 274–75n.159, 276– 77n.173; Ulysses S. Grant, 51, 131, 134, 271n.141; Daniel Webster, 95, 134, 160, 273n.154 Augustus Caesar, 62–63, 75, 109, 112, 140, 284n.215 Brown, Glenn, 64, 75, 85, 116, 137–40, 169, 273–74n.156, 274n.157, 283n.207, 283–84n.212 Brumidi, Constantino: “Apotheosis” design, xxvi, 94–95, 99, 144, 161, 262– 63n.90, 265n.107, 266n.108, 277n.176,

302



Index 282n.199; émigré artist, 89, 119, 288n.244, 292–93n.283

civic ceremonies, 77–79, 100, 257–58n.54, 258n.57, 258n.59, 259n.63 civic icons, 276n.172, 277n.174, 277n.176, 279n.183; last judgments/justice, 107, 280n.191; Venice, 126–29, 280n.190; Washington, D.C., 120–23, 129, 274– 75n.159, 276n.169, 276–77n.173, 277n.174, 277n.176 Cole, Timothy, 20, 40–41, 54–56, 181 Constantine, 97, 111–14, 150, 272n.150 Crawford, Thomas, 117, 119–23, 129, 160, 274–75n.159, 276–77n.173, 277n.174 Crayon, xxii, xxiv–vi, xxvii, 10, 15, 21, 28, 34–35, 37, 174–75 Darwin, Charles, xv, xviii, xxix–xxx, 2, 4, 51 Dreiser, Theodore, xxiv, 296n.43, 299n.75; The “Genius,” xviii, 6–7, 27, 44, 191–92, 199–200, 209, 212, 215–16 Eakins, Thomas, 24, 171, 241–42n.72, 264– 65n.101, 266n.109, 292n.281 Einstein, Alfred, xv, xviii, 4, 167, 178, 187, 192–93, 220, 231n.19 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xiv–xvi, xviii, xxi, 4–5, 58, 155, 173–74, 176–77, 182, 185, 207, 229n.2 Escher, M. C., xxvii, xxix, 227–28, 301n.98 European art scene, 88, 199; England, 30, 34, 166, 177, 214, 264n.97; France, xxiii– iv, 41, 77, 135, 163, 207, 216, 298n.67; Netherlands, 3, 39–40, 199, 207, 264– 65n.101; Spain, 40–41, 199 genre debates, 180–82, 184–89, 192–94, 294n.10, 295n.33, 295n.36 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 14, 99, 181, 290n.264; The Marble Faun, 111, 268n.121, 269n.129, 272n.147, 289– 90n.259; Passages from the French and

303

Italian Notebooks, 95, 107, 110–12, 114; The Scarlet Letter, 163–65 Hawthorne, Sophia, 110–111 Howells, William Dean, 47, 182–84, 188– 89, 242n.75, 269n.126, 291n.266 humanistic studies, devaluation of, xiv, xvi–xviii, xxii–xxiv, xxviii–xxix, 3, 9–11, 194–95, 207, 234n,13, 236n.29 Italian art scene: business matters, 103–4, 207, 248n.118; engineer-architects, 102, 120, 168, 221, 271n.139, 272n.150, 273– 74n.156; mannerism, 222–23, 300n.86; Mariolatry, 21, 101–2, 269n.126; 269n.127; painters, 3, 25, 34, 37–38, 56, 95, 97, 101, 104–8, 111, 127–28, 165, 173, 221–27, 262n.89, 264–65n.101, 266n.108, 266–67n.113, 267n.114, 270n.132, 280n.190, 298n.60; perspectival arts, 34, 220–28, 232–33n.5, 244n.90, 299– 300n.81; sculptors, 88, 102, 106–7, 196, 269n.125, 270n.134, 279n.184, 290n.263 Italian city-states: civic structures/urban design, xxix, 70, 96–7, 103–4, 108–113, 133; Palazzo Ducale, 94–95, 126–29, 224, 279n.184–85, 279–80n.187, 280n.190; Palazzo Pubblico, 104–5, 266–67n.13, 270n.132, 279n.183; Palazzo Vecchio, 105–6, 290n.132 —origin myths: Florence: 72; Rome: 71–74, 255n.33, 255n.37–38, 256n.42; Siena: 269–70n.130; Venice: 123–25, 255–56n.38, 277n.178, 278n.179–80 —political systems: Renaissance, 102–3, 256n.44, 259n.64, 277n.177; Risorgimento, 100, 109, 268–69n.124, 272– 73n.153; Macchiaioli, 101, 238n.44, 268– 69n.124; Fascist state, 109, 139, 284n.215 James, Henry, xxviii–xxix, 14, 21, 29, 289n.253, 297n.58, 298n.68; The American Scene, 141–45, 159, 161–63, 185, 284n.220; The Golden Bowl, xxvii, 139, 191, 220, 222–28; Hawthorne, 164–65,

304

Index

James, Henry (continued) 239n.45, 243n.81; literary criticism, xxvi– xxvii, 154, 185–87, 236n.32, 294–95n.21; The Portrait of a Lady, 187; prefaces, 184, 189–90, 206, 210, 212–14, 294n.15, 295n.27; Roderick Hudson, xviii, 17, 22–23, 25, 46, 175, 187, 191, 196–98, 202–4, 207–9, 211–12, 217, 267n.115, 297–98n.59; The Tragic Muse, xviii, 17–18, 26, 191, 193, 197, 212, 217; William Wetmore Story, 83–84; The Wings of the Dove, xxvii, 191, 212, 220, 222, 224–25, 227–28 James, William, xxiv–xxv, xxviii–xxx, 5, 12, 42, 47, 50, 177–78, 189, 214, 238n.44, 243n.81 Jarves, James Jackson, 1, 86, 293n.285 Jefferson, Thomas, 64–65, 84, 88, 253n.15, 257n.46, 275n.163 Julius Caesar, 63, 74, 83, 93 Julius II, 42, 93–94, 112–14, 133, 207 Kipling, Rudyard: The Light That Failed, xviii, 18, 46–47, 191, 204, 210, 215, 217 Lee, Vernon, 108, 179, 251n.143 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles, 75, 81–82, 85– 86, 116, 130, 145, 148, 169 Leonardo da Vinci, 19, 37, 42, 97–98 Lester, C. Edwards, 61, 86–87, 94, 98, 104, 130, 264n.100 Leutze, Emanuel, 99, 172, 188, 190, 256– 57n.45, 266n.111, 293n.285 Library of Congress, 169–172, 270n.133, 291n.275, 292n.278 Lincoln, Abraham, 253n.13, 258n.57 Lincoln Memorial, 148, 150, 152, 169, 262n.89, 267n.115, 282n.203, 283n.207– 8, 290n.260, 292n.280 literary figures: in America, xxvii–xxviii, 39, 132, 141, 145, 162, 181–82, 195; in England, xiv, 95–96, 102, 109, 186–87, 194; in France, 182–86, 189, 194

London, Jack, xxiv–xxv, 192, 298n.68, 299n.77; The Sea-Wolf, xviii, 6, 204–5, 216–17 Marcus Aurelius, 93, 97, 113 Mark, Saint, 63, 125–26, 259n.62, 278– 79n.182 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), 32, 47, 131; The Gilded Age, 45, 132–36, 282n.199 Medicis, 63, 95, 106–7, 130–31, 270n.134, 270n.134–35, 281n.195 Meigs, Montgomery, 112, 115–23, 148–49, 273n.155, 273–74n.156, 274n.158, 274– 75n.159, 275–76n.165 memory, mourning, 156–59, 278n.181, 288n.245, 288n.247–48, 289n.252 Michelangelo, 37, 39, 42, 89, 91, 95, 97, 107, 109, 113, 115, 165, 180, 207, 252n.10, 270n.132, 270n134, 280n.191, 282n.200 Moore, Charles, 64, 75, 85, 169, 283n.207 Mumford, Lewis, 42, 49, 247n.107 Newton, Isaac, xv, 177, 266n.108, 285n.225, 300n.86 Norris, Frank, xxv; literary criticism, xxvii– xxviii, 189; Vandover and the Beast, xviii, 26, 191–92, 198–99, 208–10, 212, 216 Peter, Saint, 150, 259n.62, 271–72n.144, 278–79n.182 philosophical constructs (pre- and postDarwin), xxii–xxiii, 7–9, 28, 35, 49, 52, 192, 242n.78 Piranesi, Giovanni, xxvii, xxix, 111, 223–24, 227, 300n.90, 301n.98 Rand Report, 88, 188, 262n.87 Raphael, xxii, xxix, 21, 42, 51, 97–98, 111, 180, 256–57n.45, 266n.108; market values, 43, 48, 101, 207; reputation, 40, 56, 178, 247n.106; ripeness, 37, 39, 172, 247n.105



Index

Roosevelt, Theodore, xvii, xix–xx, 16, 64, 136–37, 146, 258n.58, 264n.99, 278– 79n.182 Ruskin, John: authority figure, xiv, 21, 23, 53–54, 178, 244–45n.91, 246n.101, 275n.163; critic of scientific knowledge, 3, 5, 12, 23, 33–34, 156, 166, 184, 272n.150 scientific aesthetics: 1, 8, 35, 43, 53, 167, 173, 178–79, 237n.36, 247–48n.114, 300n.83, 300n.85, 301n.97 scientific inquiry (pre- and post-Darwin): xxiv, xxviii, 2, 190, 231n.19, 232n.26, 236n.33, 237n.38 Scott, Geoffrey, xxiv, xxviii, 87–88, 179, 251n.143 Spencer, Herbert, 2, 12, 192 Stein, Gertrude, 7, 12–14, 18, 21, 39, 41, 43, 47, 49, 249n.125, 250n.138 Stillman, William, xvii, xxiii, xxv, 1, 4, 9, 25, 28, 35, 40, 53, 86, 156, 178, 208, 235–36n.16, 243n.80; Century essays, 39, 54–57, 166, 172; late essays, 166–67, 291n.267 technologies, 13–14, 30–32, 41, 44, 167, 238n.42, 244n.87–88, 247n.111, 248n.120, 254n.23 Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 32–33, 37–38, 49, 82, 191–92, 243n.83 Tintoretto, 127–28, 222, 224, 227, 278– 79n.182 Titian, 28, 30, 38, 43, 48, 56, 95, 111, 224, 252n.10 Trumball, John, 92–93, 96, 107, 172, 263– 64n.90, 264–65n.101, 266n.108 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 62, 115, 137, 257n.46, 291n.274 U.S. Capitol, xvii–xviii, xxii, xxv, 87, 177, 262n.89; Arts Commission, 91–92, 119, 262–63n.90; congressional hear-

305

ings, xvii, 62, 82, 89–90, 259–60n.67, 264n.100, 281–82n.196; émigré artists, 89–90, 92, 119, 132, 260n.68, 262n.88– 89, 262–63n.90, 264–65n.101, 266n.108, 276n.169 —interior decorations: heroic figures, 58, 71, 73, 75, 90–91, 99, 260n.68, 263n.94, 276n.170, 293n.287; military scenes, 97, 148, 266–67n.113, 270n.134; racial representations, 242–43n.79, 261n.83, 264–65n.101 Vasari, Giorgio: artist, 97, 107, 120, 223, 270n.132; historian, 60–62, 96 Veblen, Thorstein: critic of humanistic studies, xvii, 7, 9–11, 234n.13; and scientific inquiry, xxi, xxiii, xxvii, 1–3, 8, 14, 35, 178, 233n.9 Veronese, 95, 127, 176, 207, 224–25, 227, 300–301n.92 Warner, Charles Dudley, 20, 45. See also Mark Twain: The Gilded Age Washington, D.C., 70–72, 261n.83; black population, 130, 140–41, 261n.78, 280– 81n.192; critiques, 62, 70, 81, 84–85, 131–32, 268n.121, 272n.149, 275n.163; design developments, 75, 85–86, 88–89, 94, 117, 119, 130, 133, 135, 145, 169, 259– 60n.67, 261n.81, 273–74n.156, 281n.193; founding/origin myths, 63–66, 124–25, 253n.15, 255n.34; guidebooks, 85, 160, 162, 271–72n.144, 273n.154; local arts scene, 68, 261n.82; “sacks,” 80–81, 259n.65–66, 259–60n.67; southern factor, 66–70, 129, 138–39, 165, 254n.26, 283n.210, 283–84n.212 Washington, George: burial site, 79–80, 94, 258–59n.60; representations, 64, 83, 93–94, 97–99, 107, 134, 189, 258n.55, 265n.103–4, 265–66n.107, 284n.221; reputation, 75–76, 257n.53, 267n.15, 286n.229

306

Index

Washington Mall, 131, 145–55, 282– 83n.206, 285n.224; McMillan Plan, xvii, xix, 64, 75, 82, 85, 114–15, 136–38, 140, 142–43, 145–47, 169, 282–83n.206; Park Commission, 136–37, 146 —memorials, monuments, cemeteries, 147–50, 285–86n.227, 288n.246; Vietnam War Memorial, 151–57, 188, 287n.234; World War II Memorial, 151– 57, 287n.237, 287n.240, 287–88n.243, 289n.250. See also Lincoln Memorial

Washington Monument, 81, 105, 135–36, 146, 150, 152, 207, 268n.121, 281n.205 Weber, Max, 60, 64, 108, 140, 143, 206 Wendell, Barrett, 140, 154 Woolf, Virginia, 299n.76; To the Lighthouse, xviii, xxiv, 175–76, 216 Zola, Emile, xxiv, 182–86, 189, 298n.63; His Masterpiece, xviii, xxv, 6, 16–17, 25, 29, 43–46, 175, 191, 198, 202–3, 207, 209–12, 216–20