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.

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?

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!