A Trojan Horse, Monument Men, and the Cultural Landscape of Historic Sites

Abstract

A Trojan Horse, Monument Men, and the Cultural Landscape of Historic Sites Shae Smith Cox (bio) Francesca Lidia Viano, Sentinel: The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. x +577 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $35.00. Lucia Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 347 pp. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00. I accepted this review assignment in the fall of 2020, but Covid’s persistence and some positive life changes pushed it to the back burner for a while. For a reviewer and for a reader, that approach might have been beneficial; as it turned out, I finished drafting this review as the statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville came down, four years after the deadly Unite the Right rally and its subsequent fallout. Reading these inspiring and well-researched works that grapple with explaining symbolism and our attachment to monuments and architecture that embody our history, values, and legacy strikes a different chord after the events of the last year, including the removal of statues and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. In my own work, I identify pieces of material culture and symbolism from the United States Civil War that continued to manifest themselves in the reconciliation and remembrance phases, pushed by organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Tracing material symbolism—whether good or bad—helps us to understand how we as humans use symbols, cultural sites, and monuments as a method to push our own agendas. While separated by time frame, their global context and understanding of the significance of constructed material connects Sentinel: The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty and Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century. Francesca Lidia Viano and Lucia Allais wrestle with the ways in which those who encounter monuments, cultural sites, and art construct, preserve, and interpret them. Originally published in Italian in 2010, Viano’s book states that “The Statue of Liberty remains a deeply occult symbol, not merely in terms of the largely [End Page 445] ignored esoteric traditions that informed its genesis, but also with regard to the many mysteries that still surround its history” (p. 2). Throughout the work she charts the ways that “images are built, read, and reread” (p. 6). Her overall goal is to trace the international relationship between Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, a painter and the architect behind the Statue of Liberty, and Édouard Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, Bartholdi’s advisor and mentor for the project, to get at the deeper meaning of the Statue of Liberty and to understand their collaboration. She argues that while rarely studied in parallel, signs of their collaboration reveal the origins and deeper meaning of the Statue of Liberty and that these signs are scattered throughout Bartholdi’s and Laboulaye’s lives. The author states that the “Statue of Liberty can be understood as a gigantic exercise in grotesque art: as a colossus, the statue is indeed a sort of monster, shining like the Luciferian morning star against a tar black night” (p. 5). She argues this statue’s monstrosity “ultimately serves the purpose of highlighting its divinity, which heralds regeneration, revelation, emancipation, and divine justice” (p. 6). The author grapples with the questions of how the Statue of Liberty could become a symbol of western liberty, a guardian and image of freedom and liberty, embodying and proclaiming supposedly America’s most cherished inner values, while at the same time serve as a warning, a Trojan horse, and a global symbol. Viano admits that she was unable to access a crucial block of Bartholdi’s letters, which had been removed from his archive, as well as Laboulaye’s personal correspondence because it is privately owned. The author questions whether someone sought to remove evidence of the facts leading up to the earliest projects for The Statue of Liberty, and she acknowledges that with Laboulaye’s letters still in private ownership, “the reconstruction of the earliest encounters between Laboulaye and Bartholdi (and of the Statue of Liberty’s earliest life) is...