The availability of the priceless scroll of working sketches for the Rotunda Frieze has been too late for detailed study at this time and almost too late for a place in this Brumidi book. However, the sketch of the Landing of the Pilgrims reproduced above gives the reader an opportunity to make his own comparisons between one working sketch and its actual rendition in fresco on the belt encircling the Rotunda of the Capitol, as appears on page forty-four.
James H. Rowe, grandnephew of Lola Germon, owns these working sketches for the Rotunda Frieze. The groupings, as planned by Brumidi and sketched on a long and narrow piece of brown wrapping paper, frequently spliced, bears the Brumidi signature and is dated 1859. This prize scroll, thirteen inches wide and some thirty feet long, was given to Mr. Rowe by his grand aunt, Lola Germon. It has been well protected.
The outline drawings themselves are executed in sepia water color with shadows in black and high lights in white. The original titles given to these scroll groupings and written by Brumidi in pencil beneath each sketch vary somewhat from the list preserved in the Architect’s office of the Capitol, yet the subject matter is essentially the same. Brumidi’s title for this “vast conception,” so far as I know, appears in no other record.
At the beginning of the scroll is the artist’s own penciled legend for the Rotunda Frieze, “America and History.”
THIS STUDY OF “Constantino Brumidi, MICHELANGELO OF THE
UNITED STATES CAPITOL,” WAS PUBLISHED BY THE MONUMENTAL
PRESS, INC., WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 1950.