Shedding Light on the U.S. Capitol’s Splendors
by Catesby Leigh
Henry Hope Reed’s classical advocacy dates back to the early 1950s, and his output since then, measured in books and articles, has been prodigious. Published by Norton in 2005, The United States Capitol: Its Architecture and Decoration is Reed’s culminating work. Superb photographs by Anne Day, who previously collaborated with Reed on books about the Library of Congress and New York Public Library, illuminate the magisterial text.
No other American building more fully epitomizes the ideals Reed has advocated throughout his career — architectural design in the great tradition, generous decoration by means of sculpture and mural painting, and, last but not least, enlightened patronage. After all, the classical image of Washington that resonates so deeply in the public consciousness is attributable to the city’s namesake as much as anyone. George Washington not only chose the French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant as the planner of the Federal City, but also selected the design for the original Capitol produced by the remarkable amateur architect William Thornton.
Thomas Jefferson put a professional, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, in charge of the Capitol project, and Latrobe developed Thornton’s design brilliantly. In the decade preceding the Civil War, President Millard Fillmore and Jefferson Davis, the latter as U.S. senator and then as Secretary of War, were the crucial supporters of Thomas Ustick Walter, the great architect of the Capitol’s expansion. Captain Montgomery Meigs — an army engineer who, having received sound artistic training at West Point, researched the classical tradition in decoration on his own — saw to it that the embellishment of the enlarged Capitol, with its magnificent new dome, was on a par with its architecture. Meigs supervised the expansion project from 1853 until 1859, while Walter served as Architect of the Capitol from 1851 until 1865. The dome was completed in 1863.
The superb decorator Meigs retained was Constantin Brumidi, whose work Walter opposed early on due to a prejudice against generous decoration typical of Greek Revival architects. A native Roman exiled during the turmoil of the Risorgimento, Brumidi was one of the last of a breed of European painters trained in the grand manner before the classical tradition was derailed by a modernistic naturalism espoused by French academicians during the 19th century. Brumidi’s approach to decoration had its roots in Greco-Roman antiquity, but he took his cues from Raphael above all — especially the Renaissance master’s celebrated Vatican murals. As Reed acknowledges, Brumidi’s drawing of the human figure was uneven, growing weaker as he aged. It was in the realm of designing extremely intricate, endlessly delightful decorative schemes for vast quantities of wall and ceiling surface in which his powers of invention asserted themselves most conspicuously.
Brumidi worked on the Capitol for a quarter century before falling off a scaffold in the Rotunda in 1879. He was 74 at the time. Though he broke his fall by catching the rung of a ladder, he never recovered from the shock and died four months later. Capitol visitors can enjoy the fruits of his virtuosity in the so-called Brumidi Corridors, on the first floor of the Capitol’s Senate wing, which offer a wonderful profusion of flora and fauna (especially birds), and in the Senate Reception Room upstairs. It is true, as Walter complained, that the palette Brumidi employed in the corridors is too dark, but that hardly dispels the enchantment.
Then there’s Brumidi’s Apotheosis of Washington, crowning the Rotunda, which covers no less than 4,664 square feet. Here the formidable technical problems included optical compensation for the concavity of the canopy on which the mural was painted — in the most demanding of mediums, fresco, in which paint must be rapidly applied to wet plaster. Because the center of the canopy is 180 feet above the ground, human figures in the Apotheosis are as much as 15 feet tall.
Reed’s Capitol book starts with a lively narrative account of the development of the Capitol as we now know it. This process extended over a century. It got underway with Thorton’s design of 1793, and was punctuated by the completion of the original Capitol in 1829, with the distinguished Boston architect Charles Bulfinch having a hand in the design along with Thornton and Latrobe. This was a handsome building with a low dome of copper and wood. The expansion, which involved new Senate and House wings and the cast-iron dome (painted white to resemble marble), got underway with Walter’s appointment, and continued until the handsome three-level terrace on the West front, designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, was completed in 1891. (In his preface, Reed only briefly discusses the disastrous scheme for a three-level, 580,000-square-foot subterranean expansion on the Capitol’s east side, the Capitol Visitor Center, which is scheduled for completion in 2007.)
The second part of Reed’s book offers a tour around the building, with detailed description of the exterior of the Capitol as well as its most artistically significant rooms, some open to the public, others not. The tour begins with a concise and extremely useful summary of the principles and elements of classical design. In this passage, as elsewhere in the book, Reed acknowledges his debt to a wonderful primer, Man As Hero: The Human Figure in Western Art (1986), by his longtime friend, the painter and critic Pierce Rice (1916–2003).
Reed’s description of the rooms is extremely detailed, and lay readers will tend to dwell on Day’s superb photographs. However, those who persevere with the text will find that their labors are amply rewarded by the wealth of interesting historical and biographical information Reed has woven in. For instance, Reed quotes Walter’s astonishing description of the intolerable conditions in the Capitol when, early in the Civil War, it served Union troops as an outhouse as well as a barrack.
Reed concludes with useful appendices including an illustrated glossary, interior and exterior photographs of the Capitol with architectural elements identified, and biographies of people involved with the architecture and decoration of the building.
The problems with the book are minor and can easily be rectified in future editions. Leaving aside the occasional copy-editing glitches, certain designers who should have been included in the biographies aren’t there — e.g., Olmsted and his architect associate Thomas Wisedell; the noted Philadelphia classicist John Harbeson, who redesigned the House and Senate chambers around 1950; and the comparatively obscure Harry Merz, who designed the impressive walnut-paneled Sam Rayburn Room after the east front of the Capitol was pushed out by over 30 feet in the late 1950s. And Reed never tells us who got the idea for the dome Walter designed. All we’re told is that he started working on it before Meigs came aboard.
This matters because the dome is the Capitol’s most important feature. The building’s significance as a work of civic art lies principally in its role as a national symbol and a city landmark. The dome, more than anything, is what makes it excel in both categories. Indeed, Walter achieved perhaps as perfect an equipoise between the elements of his dome as has been achieved anywhere. It soars. Reed attributes its power “to Walter’s and Meig’s genius.” Meigs was an inspired patron, even a visionary one, but the genius in this instance was Walter’s alone.
The fact remains that nobody alive could provide the sheer depth of insight that Reed delivers in this volume. One of the brilliant passages in the book — perspicaciously noted by Providence Journal columnist David Brussat in his fine review — involves an analysis of Walter’s Corinthian capitals for his House and Senate wings:
In adopting the Corinthian order for his portico, Walter, of course, was bound by the precedent of [Labrobe’s] center portico, but precedent did not prevent him from devising a better one. The result is very successful. The carving is deeper, the serration of the leaves more detailed and more sharply edged. Somehow the leaves have been given the quality of movement; this may simply derive from the depth of the shadows.
The wonder is that a book that goes into such detail is such a pleasure to read. This is partially due to the unpretentious elegance and lucidity of Reed’s prose and partially due to his extraordinary knack for enlivening his text with anecdote. Reed’s book should be required reading not just for every American student of art, architecture, and the decorative crafts, but for every philanthropist or public or institutional official in this country responsible for commissioning a building meant to last not just for an investment cycle — or a fashion cycle — but for the ages.
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A version of this review appeared in the July/August 2005 issue of The American Enterprise.