Constantino Brumidi, Michelangelo of the United States Capitol

by Myrtle Cheney Murdock

The real fight of the petitioners was evidently against the employment of a foreign artist. However, this was not expressed openly in the Memorial but the select committee of

DISCOVERY

The theme of Brumidi’s ceiling fresco in the President’s Room, as portrayed by Christopher Columbus, is that of “Discovery.” This subject is intensified by use of the globe and map in the cherub detail above the portrait. At upper left is a segment of the medallion, “Executive Authority,” and at the right a portion of another medallion, “Liberty.” The four small decorative medallions at the portrait corners are State seals. At the upper left is Vermont; at upper right, Kentucky; lower left, Arkansas, and lower right, Michigan.

five from the House of Representatives made the open accusation. Said they in their Report, “The Committee have not been informed that American artists have been engaged upon the embellishment of the Capitol, but they have been made painfully conscious that the work has been prosecuted by foreign workmen under the immediate supervision of a foreigner. As a consequence the Committee find nothing in the design and execution of the ornamental work of the Capitol, thus far, which represents our own country, or the genius and taste of her artists.”

This unjust criticism of Brumidi found expression in the New York Daily Tribune for May 17, 1858, through that paper’s Washington correspondent. The New York attack on the artist, however, was answered in the Tribune for May 31, 1858, by Guglielmo Gajani, a friend of Brumidi’s. Extracts of this defense of Brumidi follow:

To the Editor of the New York Tribune:

I have lately been at Washington and derived much pleasure from visiting the National Capital and its splendid buildings and works of art. I admired them and was much pleased with the frescoes and decorations of my fellow citizen Signor Constantino Brumidi. But on my return to New York my attention was directed to a correspondence of the Tribune (May 17) and to other attacks made against that artist and his works at the Capitol.