Columbia and other monument-topping ladies

I'll admit it: female figures representing classical virtues don't really get me out of bed in the morning. I consider this to be something of a weakness, because they make up a big part of nineteenth-century memorial art. I can't really put my finger on why this is. I suspect that at least some level of it comes down to basic attraction; I've been known to admit to having actual crushes on works of art (this guy and this guy come to mind, as does this detail). But there's more to it than that: "bronze men with guns" (as I sometimes call them) are pretty easy to interpret, but there's something opaque, at least to me, about these cool stone goddesses. While I can draw direct links between the citizen soldiers of the past and things that are happening today, such as National Guard ads, I have trouble making the same links with the ladies. Maybe that's my problem.

Good thing there are other people writing great things about this topic! This past Sunday, the New York Times Disunion blog ran a column by Ellen L. Berg about the figure of Columbia and how she served as a motivating symbol for men fighting on both sides of the Civil War. (Incidentally, if you're at all interested in the Civil War and not following Disunion yet... what's stopping you?) The article is apparently an offshoot of a book-length treatment of the topic of Columbia, and I look forward to reading more when the book comes out. What I like about the article is that it gets at how common figures like Columbia were in popular imagery of the Civil War, and how easily they would have been understood. Clearly, I need to do a lot more thinking to get on that wavelength with my monuments.

Some allegorical ladies that I've encountered in my fieldwork include a copy of Thomas Crawford's Freedom in Peabody, MA (originally designed for the U.S. Capitol):


Martin Milmore's Genius of America atop his Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Boston Common:


The Call to Arms, sculpted by James Edward Kelly, visible at the top of this Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Troy, NY:


And one of my personal favorites, a decidedly odd Defeated Victory, the centerpiece of Frederick C. Hibbard's Confederate Monument at Shiloh:


There's definitely much more room here to think about these figures than I've allowed so far. I'm so glad to find exciting scholars working on these issues who can help me to see them in a new light as well.