Edited by Donald R. Kennon
“This definitive blueprint of the capitol building will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in both art conservation and historic preservation.”
Booklist
The United States Capitol is a national cultural icon, and among the most visually recognized seats of government in the world. The past quarter century has witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the art and architectural history of the Capitol. The emergence of the historic preservation movement and the maturation of the discipline of art conservation have refocused attention on the Capitol as the American “temple of liberty.” Major restoration and conservation projects have made possible a better understanding and appreciation of the building and its decoration.
The United States Capitol: Designing and Decorating a National Icon is a product of this revival of scholarly interest. The book combines the papers from the U.S. Capitol Historical Society’s first two conferences dedicated to the visual history and appreciation of this most significant of public buildings in the United States.
The first six papers in the collection focus on the roles of the architects of the Capitol from the contentious and delay-ridden first decade of construction through the twentieth–century expansion and modernization. The six essays in the book’s second section examine a variety of topics relating to the Capitol’s artistic decoration, including the origins of Statuary Hall, the mural Westward Ho! and other paintings and artistic embellishments.
Donald R. Kennon is the former chief historian and vice president of the United States Capitol Historical Society. He is editor of the Ohio University Press series Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789–1801. More info →
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978-0-8214-1302-9
Retail price: $32.95,
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Release date: August 2000
185 illus.
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328 pages
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7 × 10 in.
Rights: World
Hardcover
978-0-8214-1301-2
Out-of-print
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Art and Empire
The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860
By Vivien Green Fryd
The subject matter and iconography of much of the art in the U.S. Capitol forms a remarkably coherent program of the early course of North American empire, from discovery and settlement to the national development and westward expansion that necessitated the subjugation of the indigenous peoples.In Art and Empire, Vivien Green Fryd’s revealing cultural and political interpretation of the portraits, reliefs, allegories, and historical paintings commissioned for the U.S.
American Pantheon
Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol
Edited by Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma
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.
