Review: Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal, by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Abstract

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2012, 224 pp., 145 color and 82 b/w illus. $45.85, ISBN 9781934772768 Although known primarily as a sculptor, most famously of the Statue of Liberty, the Frenchman Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi was also a painter. Sometime in the 1860s he painted Nymphs and Fauns Frightened by a Train , depicting a placid wooden glade disrupted by a steam locomotive hurtling toward the painting’s foreground. Startled from their primordial playground by the sound of the oncoming train, a dozen or so nymphs and fauns flee desperately into the woods in fear. As Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby notes in her splendid book Colossal , Bartholdi’s surreal juxtaposition conjures an image, at once allegorical and lacking in subtlety, in which “modern transport menaces an ideal of nature and the motifs constituting that ideal—picturesque landscapes, birch leaves shimmering in the sunset, mythological creatures from antiquity” (12). Bartholdi’s painting presents a leitmotif of the familiar themes of humankind’s early experiences of industrial culture—fear and sublimity, whiplash speed, piercing noise, pollution, environmental degradation. It omits one key thing, however: scale. Tucked into a corner and hidden by a thicket of trees, the oncoming train is more implied than evident in visual terms. What we know of its scale is connoted only in the reactions (those of the nymphs and fauns) and absences (the clearing produced by the railway bed) that the locomotive elicits. Grigsby’s main concern in Colossal is that missing entity of scale, and, more specifically, that scale as it is understood in visual terms. Colossal outlines a new understanding of the visual experience of the built environment in the long nineteenth century and how, above all, colossi were constructed and received optically and reckoned with as objects emblematic of a new cultural and industrial epoch. Colossal is ostensibly a book …