|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
In 1910 John Merven Carrere, a Paris-trained American architect,
wrote, "Learning from Paris made Washington outstanding among
American cities." The five essays in "Paris on the Potomac" explore
aspects of this influence on the artistic and architectural
environment of Washington, D.C., which continued long after the
well-known contributions of Peter Charles L'Enfant, the
transplanted French military officer who designed the city's plan.
Isabelle Gournay's introductory essay provides an overview and
examines the context and issues involved in three distinct periods
of French influence: the classical and Enlightenment principles
that prevailed from the 1790s through the 1820s, the Second Empire
style of the 1850s through the 1870s, and the Beaux-Arts movement
of the early twentieth century. William C. Allen and Thomas P.
Somma present two case studies: Allen on the influence of French
architecture, especially the Halle aux Bles, on Thomas Jefferson's
vision of the U.S. Capitol; and Somma on David d'Angers's busts of
George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. Liana Paredes
offers a richly detailed examination of French-inspired interior
decoration in the homes of Washington's elite in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cynthia R. Field
concludes the volume with a consideration of the influence of Paris
on city planning in Washington, D.C., including the efforts of the
McMillan Commission and the later development of the Federal
Triangle complex.
The essays in this collection, the latest addition to the series
Perspectives on the Art and Architectural History of the United
States Capitol, originated in a conference held by the U.S. Capitol
Historical Societyin 2002 at the French Embassy's Maison Francaise.
Like the ancient Roman Pantheon, the U.S. Capitol was designed by
its political and aesthetic arbiters to memorialize the virtues,
events, and persons most representative of the nation's ideals-an
attempt to raise a particular version of the nation's founding to
the level of myth. American Pantheon examines the influences upon
not only those virtues and persons selected for inclusion in the
American pantheon, but also those excluded. Two chapters address
the exclusion of slavery and African Americans from the art in the
Capitol, a silence made all the more deafening by the major
contributions of slaves and free black workers to the construction
of the building. Two other authors consider the subject of women
emerging as artists, subjects, patrons, and proponents of art in
the Capitol, a development that began to emerge only in the second
half of the nineteenth century. The Rotunda, the Capitol's
principal ceremonial space, was designed in part as an art museum
of American history-at least the authorized version of it. It is
explored in several of the essays, including discussions of the
influence of the early-nineteenth-century Italian sculptors who
provided the first sculptural reliefs for the room and the
contributions of the mid-nineteenth-century Italian American artist
Constantino Brumidi, to the mix of allegory, mythology, and history
that permeates the space and indeed the Capitol itself.
|
|