The Public Memorial and Godefroy's Battle Monument

Abstract

THE PUBLIC MEMORIAL as we know it is essentially a creation of the Revolutionary age in France.1 Indeed, the first American-made war memorial, Maximilian Godefroy's Battle Monument (Fig. 1) in Baltimore, built 1815-25, might have been erected in Paris more than a decade earlier. The allegorical temper of that age was especially amenable to symbolic architecture having a relationship between subject matter and function usually ignored today. Edme' Bouchardon's equestrian portrait of Louis XV (Fig. 2) was set up in what is now the Place de la Concorde in 1762 about half a century before Godefroy designed the Battle Monument. The distance separating these two, however, was not simply a matter of space and time. Profound changes, philosophical, political and artistic, set these two monuments worlds apart. The portrait statue, consecrated to the dynastic ruler, gave way to the commemorative monument, more abstract in its form as the object of dedication became more general, more democratic and more popular. There is no need to detail the events that elevated the