Republican Art

“From Royal to Republican:  The Classical Image in Early America” by Caroline Winterer, in The Journal of American History (March 2005), 1215 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington, Ind. 47401.

In the 1770s, as the 13 colonies drew closer to war with England, neoclassical images began to flood the consciousness of Americans. Prints and engravings were filled with temples, eagles, and triumphal arches. Pictures of the Roman goddesses Liberty and Minerva appeared everywhere—in journals and broadsheets; on coins, currency, seals; in fashion and architecture; on wallpaper and furniture and even punch bowls. Was the wide distribution of these images a deliberate effort at political spin?

Clearly yes, says Winterer, a Stanford University historian. “Classical imagery in and of itself did not point to revolutionary ideology,” she writes, “but that imagery was reinvented to suit the ends of a new political program.” By using the symbols of the classical world to convey the moral authority of Greek and Roman antiquity, artists, craftsmen, and writers were able to foster the impression that a new Rome was at hand. Paul Revere, who created many engravings of revolutionary iconography, was one key promoter of the new republican imagery. Another was Thom­as Hollis, a radical English Whig who never left the mother country but who contributed to revolutionary fervor in the colonies by publishing and shipping to America books, prints, and medals that exalted the republican ideal.

Interest in the ancient world was hardly new among the educated American elite. In inventories of colonial libraries, the titles of classical texts appear almost as frequently as  those of popular works of Christian devotion. Homer’s Iliad turns up often, along with two standard reference books on antiquities: John Potter’s Archaeologiae Graecae (1697) and Basil Kennett’s Romae Antiquae Notitia (1696). Charles Rollin’s Ancient History (first published in 1729) was a colonial bestseller.

Such books, and the illustrations that accompanied them, emphasized the Baroque aspect of classicism, especially the glories and plunder of war. But the neoclassical style of late-18th-century America transformed the bellicose images into ones of inevitability and harmony. Minerva and Liberty, for example, were no longer depicted as warlike and authoritarian but as peace-loving symbols of reasoned republicanism, allied with literature, science, and the arts. Ancient virtue was represented not by military action but by serene poise and balance. By adapting classical iconography in this manner, the image makers of the emerging nation were able to address some of the troubling questions raised by revolutionary struggle against the mother country and to present the upstarts with a flattering vision of themselves. A modern political consultant could not have done better.