US CAPITOL

Squares of rain on the plaza at the base of the Library of Congress’ ceremonial stair form a murky mirror to reflect street lights and the Capitol dome. Particularly striking is the dome’s double image, crystal clear with every column distinct as it soars into the night sky above, while the reflected dome below is blurred but still recognizable in a netherworld of paving squares and rain water.

This dark and light version is a nice metaphor for the way government works. What’s the lesson here? That all soaring precision is undergirded with ephemeral murk? Which dome is real, which is the illusion?

Look at the upper image to consider, as a case in point, the finial called Freedom that tops the US Capitol dome. This statue depicts the classically-draped figure of a woman, almost twenty feet high, sculpted by Thomas Crawford (1814-1857), an American who, like many 19th-century sculptors, worked in Rome. From Italy, he shipped back the plaster model; the statue itself was cast in bronze by slave labor at Clark Mills’ Bladensburg foundry.

Crawford was well known because, in 1840, he won the prestigious commission to sculpt the equestrian statue of George Washington that is in Richmond; a statue of Crawford himself is there at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Though he lived out his life far from his native New York, Crawford’s career was, nevertheless, touched by America’s mid-century turmoils. For one thing, his wife’s sister was Julia Ward Howe, who wrote that most stirring of Civil War anthems, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” while in a hotel room at the Willard.

For another, his first version of Freedom showed the woman wearing the Phrygian Cap (also called the Liberty Cap), which in ancient Roman times signified a freed slave. It was famed as an emblem during the French Revolution.

When the design of Freedom with her highly-charged headgear became known, it caused a great brouhaha. Since in those days all federal buildings were the provenance of the Army Engineering Corps, this statue’s hat went right up to the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who took umbrage at the lady’s millinery as a gratuitous slap at the South’s “peculiar institution.”

It was Davis himself who suggested the change to a less charged (if more baffling) headdress: a helmet with a circle of stars “expressive of endless existence and heavenly birth,” on top of which is an eagle’s head and a burst of feathers suggestive of the ceremonial headgear of a Plains Indian.

PHOTOGRAPH BY VOLKMAR K. WENTZEL (CC ‘74); TEXT BY JUDITH W. FRANK (WASHINGTON BY NIGHT)

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