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.

Sculpture on Film #1: My Cousin Vinny

Part of watching a movie with me is dealing with the fact that I spend a lot of time scrutinizing the frame around where the main action is happening for fun or worthwhile visual things, and when I find one, I tend to tug on the sleeve of whoever is sitting next to me to whisper about it, because I have a hard time keeping things to myself. This new feature, which will repeat at random whenever I have material for it, is the blogging version of my annoying whispering in the dark. Here, I hope to share films with scenes that prominently feature sculpture.

First up: My Cousin Vinny (1992)! This movie is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, at least partially due to my ongoing and slightly embarrassing crush on Ralph Macchio, and also for the fun it has with its goofy North v. South plotline, and for Marisa Tomei and her *thunk-thunk* biological clock. I had to come up with a way to justify watching it over and over again, and thankfully I found one that is related to my dissertation.

The first time we meet Joe Pesci in the film, he is driving his big, outrageous convertible into a sleepy Southern hamlet to defend his cousin and a friend, wrongfully accused of murder. As rock music blares, shots of Pesci's car are intercut with the locals, who are utterly shocked to see such a person pulling into their town. What interests me is the town itself: one of those typical Southern county seats, with the wide town green in front of a grand courthouse. The setting is supposed to be in Alabama:


Pesci gets out of the car first, followed by Marisa Tomei:


And what's that behind her? Why, could it be a Confederate war memorial? I think it might be!

Whoever was in charge of scouting locations for this film really did a great job. A lot of the film's exterior scenes take place in this town square, and it really adds a lot to the kind of juxtapositions that are so integral to the movie's storyline. It's a popcorn, Saturday afternoon kind of film, yes, but its visuals tell a compelling story.

I did a little sleuthing, and it turns out that the town square and monument actually belong to Monticello, Georgia:


Fabricated by the McNeel Marble Works of Marietta, Georgia, it was dedicated on April 6, 1910. I haven't visited the monument to photograph it myself yet, but I'm hoping to do so sometime in the fall. The second chapter of my dissertation is on Southern monuments, and I have a feeling the Georgia monuments are going to tell me some compelling stories.

And that's how I managed to work My Cousin Vinny into my dissertation!

Civil War Balloons in Sculpture

It seems like there's a lot of news on my Twitter feed about the Union army corps that used hot air balloons for reconnaissance (you can find one example tweeted by @CivilWarWeeks here; or learn more via the Civil War Daily Gazette or Wikipedia). This has a lot to do with the fact that in our march of 150th anniversaries of individual events, we are currently hovering around the opening battles of the war, when the use of balloons was having its heyday.

I first learned about balloons in the Civil War when I saw this odd relief panel for the first time:


This is one of three relief panels gracing the base of the Fitz John Porter Monument in Portsmouth, NH, sculpted by James Edward Kelly and installed in 1904. Kelly is a sculptor very close to my heart - years ago, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on his life and work after discovering a vast cache of his unpublished papers in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. Here's a full view of the Porter Monument:


(Note: position of horse's front right hoof is not a prognosticating device!)

The story of how Porter was maligned for his role in the Union loss at the Second Battle of Bull Run, court-martialed, convicted, but eventually cleared of all wrongdoing is a bit long to tell here, but the inclusion of the balloon in a monument to Porter is simpler: on April 11, 1862, Porter went up in a balloon on a reconnaissance mission only to discover that his soldiers on the ground had lost control of the guide ropes! Porter remained cool as a cucumber, though, and refusing to give up an opportunity, continued to record the enemy's position until the balloon was back under control and he could be safely brought down.

So on April 11 of next year, do we get to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Porter's runaway balloon ride?

The thing about horses and their feet

When I tell people I'm an art historian at a party, sometimes I get blank stares, followed by, "Well, you know, my cousin's best friend's babysitter is a graphic designer, and she knows all about that art stuff." And then the conversation dies. But other times, the conversation will go on to touch upon the old question, "So, what's with the horses' feet in Civil War monuments anyway? Do they predict whether the general died or what?"

I am here today to explain and dispel that old chestnut, as a public service.


The urban legend goes like this: If you see a statue of a Civil War general on a horse, and all four feet are on the ground, that means he lived through the war. If one of the feet is off the ground, that means he was wounded. If two of the feet are off the ground, then he was killed. If three or more feet are off the ground, then, well, you are dealing with one heck of a flying horse. And there are lots of variations on that.

So is there any truth to this? Overall, no. But a little bit yes.

First of all, dispel from your mind that this has anything to do with any place other than Gettysburg. Your local Civil War monument dedicated to your town hero may be an equestrian statue, and it may have four, three, two, or zero feet on the ground, but it doesn't have anything to do with anything related to the war hero's fate. The only thing you're learning by looking at your local monument is whether the artist that sculpted it knew anything about horse anatomy or not.

Now, at Gettysburg, up until 1998, this weird tidbit was, completely by accident, with no forethought or planning, with no consultation with any of the artists.... true. The "number of feet" did accidentally correlate with whether the general was killed wounded, or left unscathed at the end of the three days of fighting. But this pattern was pieced together by code-loving nuts in the twentieth century, never an artistic tradition.


How a sculptor chooses to render the horse component of an equestrian statue has much more to do with artistic license and skill than with anything else. Bronze is incredibly heavy, and thus the most stable way to render a statue of a horse is to place all four feet on the ground. Many great artists have struggled with the concept of a rearing horse, Leonardo being one famous example. The statue above, the monument to General John Reynolds (killed) at Gettysburg by H.K. Bush-Brown, depicts a horse with two feet raised, but the statue is carefully counterbalanced to distribute the monument's weight evenly. The resulting sculpture is a paean to the skill of the artist, not some attempt to adhere to a useless factoid.

I know I said that this weird business was only inadvertently true until 1998 - what changed?


This is the equestrian statue for Confederate general James Longstreet, sculpted by Gary Casteel. Longstreet, often maligned, was one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted corps commanders, but for years after the war he was blamed for the failure of Pickett's Charge due to the fact that he challenged Lee's plan of attacking an entrenched enemy over a mile of open ground (who in the world would think something like that would fail?). Longstreet's star has risen in recent years, however, at least in part due to his sympathetic portrayal in Michael Shaara's historical novel The Killer Angels and the 1995 film Gettysburg. I kind of love the way this monument subverts the idea of a traditional equestrian statue entirely by placing the statue on the ground directly in the viewer's space, and by the horse's dynamically frightened stance. But as you can see, the horse has a hoof off the ground, and Longstreet made it through Gettysburg with nary a scratch.

So, in sum, this old chestnut is never true in most places, was inadvertently and accidentally true for a time at Gettysburg, and now is true no longer. And if I ever meet Sarah Vowell, who I love, I will gush about how I love her writing but scold her for mentioning this urban legend in one of her books.

If you want to see another take on this legend, check out this article on Snopes.

Egyptian Revival in New Castle, Delaware

Today, PEMCI took us to historic New Castle, a gem in northeastern Delaware on the Delaware River packed with historic houses. The day consisted of visits to historic house museums and conversations about how to present these spaces to the public, all very engaging stuff, but I also had a chance to sneak off at the end of the day and add to my collection of photographs of pet interests:


This Egyptian Revival-style mausoleum, located in the churchyard of the Immanuel Episcopal Church, definitely caught my eye. I've been interested in the Egyptian Revival ever since my first year at Delaware, ever since I took a course (Egyptomania!) that encouraged me to explore Egyptian-style design in the American funerary sphere. My research there was centered around the American Sphinx, a highly idiosyncratic Civil War monument in Mt. Auburn cemetery in Boston, and maybe I'll share more of that research at some point when I'm having a slow blog day. Here's the Sphinx with a handsome human scale model:


Anyway, ultimately I hope to use some of my background reading on the Egyptian Revival to write something really compelling about how obelisks were used in cemeteries as early Civil War soldier monuments, and how this connects to Americans' obsession with Egypt. Should be fun times.

Sculptocarbonite

Allegory of emancipation...


...or Han Solo after Boba Fett got to him?

This weird relief panel is part of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Providence, RI, designed by Randolph Rogers, who is swiftly become my favorite American expatriate sculptor (a lot of American sculptors in the mid-nineteenth century moved to Italy and spent the rest of their lives there, as I'm sure I will discuss a whole lot someday).

The whole monument looks like this:


The Emancipation panel above is one of the four panels that you see in the lower register of the monument, right above the stairs. There's a different allegory on each side.

I'm sure there will be a more informative post about Randolph Rogers coming one of these days, because I'm getting to like him more and more, but for now, this is a teaser. It's been a long day learning how to talk about material culture to people on TV, and I'm going to a dinner party in a little bit. Tomorrow: I'm hoping to have something fun to post after my trip to New York City!

A lonely crossroads in rural Wisconsin

This is the Union Civil War monument in Rhine, WI:


It was the first Civil War monument in Wisconsin, erected in 1868, three years after the end of the war. A few months ago, I decided that while I was living in Wisconsin, I should try to visit as many local monuments as possible, especially the earliest ones, as one of my aims in the first chapter of my dissertation is to think about the origins of the soldier monument.

I know this doesn't look like a very exciting monument. Essentially a granite block, it could be a marker for pretty much anything: a grave, a boundary, a nearly-forgotten minor skirmish. What excites me, however, is the strangeness of its particulars.

Let's take a quick look at the site:


This is really strange. Most of the monuments I visit are located in the middle of bustling towns, usually next to a library, courthouse, school, church, or other official building. While they are not always venerated on a daily basis, they are at least highly visible, with lots of foot and vehicle traffic going past. This particular monument is close to the town hall, yes, but the location is completely rural, a copse of somber evergreen trees surrounded by (in late April) snowy fields. From my explorations so far, I think the community of Rhine is more a collection of homesteads, so this monument may serve as a town center of sorts, although in a much different way than I have experienced before.

The inscriptions are also pretty worthwhile. On the south side is the verse, "You wish to know the valor of the West; go ask the rebels for they know it best." One of the suggestions I received over and over again when I first started to frame this project was that my thinking at first focused too narrowly on the binary of North and South, when really, during the Civil War, our nation had three distinct regions: North, South, and West. This inscription suggests to me that there's a lot more to mid-century Western regional identity than I've been allowing myself to consider.

And on the north face of the monument is an inscription in German; the German text is illustrated in this photo, and it translates as: "Of all the good things in life, / Honor is the greatest one. / Though the body goes to dust, / A great name lives on!" I kind of love this. For one thing, it reflects that the town of Rhine (naturally) had a strong German-American identity. Even more importantly, since the German text is not the translation of the English text on the opposite side, and since it is not translated into English anywhere on the monument, this shaft of granite assumes that its viewers will have pretty specialized bilingual knowledge. Pretty cool for a monument that didn't really look too interesting at first, huh?

Here's one last fun thing that occurred to me while I was thinking about this blog post earlier today:


It might be interesting to think about the Rhine monument and others like it alongside some uber-minimalist 1960s sculpture like Tony Smith's Die, one of many iterations of which is pictured above. There's a strong formal relationship, but the Rhine inscriptions really direct the viewer's relationship to the work.

Something to think about, anyway.

A new venture

This is me.


I'm a Ph.D. student in art history, and I'm working on my dissertation. I study soldier monuments, and the way they seemingly came out of nowhere in the wake of the Civil War. We see them all the time now, in all of our hometowns, so much so that for many of us they have all but lost their meaning, but we need to keep in mind that before the Civil War, nobody anywhere in the world was spending so much time making bronze statues of the common man. This is a pretty radical change, and it's at the heart of my dissertation.

Over the next months and years, I'm going to use this blog to help me to think more deeply about my project and about sculpture in general, because I've been having a little trouble getting my head around it lately. I'm hoping to write every day. Post lengths will vary. Sometimes they'll be about soldier monuments, sometimes about war, sometimes about things that interest me in the nineteenth century, and sometimes about public art in general. I hope at least some of them are worth reading.


This is Charlie. He is my fieldwork buddy, sometimes-photographer, GPS operator, and soon-to-be husband. He comes into stories a lot.

So, that's where I will leave it for now. I know, kind of an inauspicious first post, but all projects must start somewhere (sort of how I feel about my dissertation!).