Constantino Brumidi: The Artist
of the Capitol
Barbara Ann Boese Wolanin, Curator for the Architect of the Capitol
Constantino Brumidi, who called himself “the artist of the Capitol,” contributed more than any other single person to the beauty and significance of the interior of the major symbol of freedom and democracy around the world, the United States Capitol. His engaging and lively cherubs, graceful allegorical figures, historical scenes and portraits, and patriotic symbols grace walls and ceilings in many of the most important spaces. He set figures and scenes into a decorative complex of illusionistic carvings, gilded frames, and scrolling vines that places the Capitol in the tradition of the palaces of Europe. Following the Renaissance tradition he learned during his years of training and work in Rome, he had an uncanny ability to make flat painting look three dimensional and allegorical figures seem alive (fig. 1).
Brumidi arrived in the United States on September 18, 1852, when he was 47 years old. He came to Washington, D.C., at the end of 1854, just as the new wings on the Capitol had been constructed and were ready for decoration. He worked at the Capitol over a quarter of a century, most intensively for the first decade and then sporadically for the rest of his life.
Brumidi’s murals in the Capitol are being cleaned of grime, discolored varnish, and heavy-handed overpaint, and damaged areas are being restored, through the conservation program managed by the Architect of the Capitol since the early 1980s. Many of the conservators hired by the Architect first gained expertise in fresco restoration in Italy. The conservation program has enabled people to assess his talent, and it inspired the preparation of the book on Brumidi by the Architect of the Capitol, which was published by the United States Congress in 1998.
There are still many unanswered questions about the painter’s personal life, beginning with his name. “Constantino” was the first name most often seen in records and publications after he came to the United States, although “Costantino” and “Constantine” were also used. He usually signed his paintings simply “C. Brumidi.” Brumidi originally emigrated to the United States in search of church commissions at a time when the Roman Catholic Church was growing rapidly and building major churches and cathedrals in the New World. While still in Rome, he had been asked to paint the altarpiece at St. Stephen’s Church in New York City; he completed it soon after he had begun work at the Capitol. That altarpiece was later dwarfed by the monumental mural of the Crucifixion and other murals Brumidi created in the early 1870s after St. Stephen’s Church (now Our Lady of the Scapular and St. Stephen) was enlarged. Brumidi eventually would paint altarpieces and murals in churches in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Philadelphia; New York; Mexico City; and Havana, Cuba. He also filled private commissions for portraits, such as the one of Eveline Fessenden Freeman, and for house interiors, such as the tondo Progress.
Captain Montgomery C. Meigs described in his journal the day that Brumidi began his career at the Capitol at the end of 1854. The captain of the Army Corps of Engineers had been placed in charge of the construction of the Capitol when it was moved under the authority of the War Department in 1853. Meigs, trained in art at West Point, took on the commissioning of architectural art as part of his construction responsibilities. He had never been to Europe, but he knew about the frescoes of Raphael and Michelangelo from books, and he was determined to have the walls of the Capitol embellished in monumental true fresco. Despite many efforts, he had been unable to find an artist who had mastered the fresco technique. Meeting Brumidi must have seemed like an answer to a prayer. The Roman artist described his work in the house of the banker Torlonia, but of course he had no example to show. They agreed that he would paint a trial fresco in the almost completed room that Meigs had just begun using as an office, and that the subject would be Cincinnatus, the Roman hero called from the plow to defend his country. This subject was appropriate for the room intended for use by the Committee on Agriculture. It was also connected with the first president, George Washington, who was called the American Cincinnatus. Washington would appear in many of the murals Brumidi would later design for the Capitol.
Brumidi rightly claimed that his mural in that room (today’s room H-144) was the first true fresco to have been painted in America. Many people, including the president, came to view his progress. After a month of work, Brumidi’s fresco was completed and approved. He was put on the pay roll of the Capitol and proceeded to complete the decoration of the room with a lunette of a parallel scene from the American Revolution, Putnam Called from the Plow; a ceiling with figures representing the Four Seasons; and walls with illusionistic reliefs of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and scenes of old and new ways of reaping wheat. The lower walls were defined by illusionistic stone molding, recently uncovered by conservators. He conceived of the room as a whole, with the subjects relating to each other across the architectural space and painted illusionistic arched moldings in fresco on the walls below, all apparently illuminated by the light from the windows. The concept of creating illusionistic architecture, figures, sculpture, and paintings in fresco had its source in the ancient Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque art he had studied.
Brumidi credited first-century Roman wall painting as a major inspiration in the room for the Naval Affairs Committee (S-127). A notice was posted explaining how its decorative scheme was modeled after those in Pompeii and the Baths of Titus (now understood to be in the Golden House of Nero under the baths) and listing the various classical sea-related deities that are depicted. Brumidi received approval for his design based on a watercolor sketch. The ceiling of the room, with classical gods and goddesses related to the sea and mythological creatures framed by trellises, resembles ceilings in the Golden House of Nero. Only one of the Pompeiian architectural stage sets in the lunettes was completed. On the lower walls, maidens floating on newly restored blue panels hold objects related to the ocean and navigation. In all of its details, this was the most Roman room Brumidi created in the Capitol. It contains only a few figures and details referring to America, and it was criticized by some for this very reason.
Another area in the Capitol directly inspired by decoration that Brumidi knew well in Rome, and that Meigs admired in illustrated books, is on the first floor of the Senate wing, now called the Brumidi Corridors. The artist based his designs directly on Raphael’s loggia in the Vatican, which was in turn inspired by first-century Roman wall painting. The panel in the Vatican loggia with squirrels, mice, and snakes climbing in the rinceaux is strikingly similar to four of the panels in the first-floor Senate corridor. Other details in the corridor are closely related to designs at the Villa Torlonia in Rome. In the section called the Patent Corridor, striped American shields are the focal point of each panel. In other sections the panels are filled with New World birds, animals, insects, reptiles, flowers, and fruits. Trompe-l’oeil relief portraits of leaders of the American Revolution punctuate the panels. The elaborate sculpted bronze railings of the private staircases for the Senators were based on a sketch by Brumidi and sculpted and cast in Philadelphia. They echo the motifs in the wall panels.
In his first years at the Capitol, when the decoration was proceeding rapidly, Brumidi was assisted by as many as 30 fresco and decorative painters working in different rooms at one time, dispelling the common misconception that he painted everything himself. In the first-floor Senate corridors, for example, Brumidi was assisted by English, German, and Italian painters, who worked following his designs. It is clear, however, that the Roman artist truly was considered to be the major artist of the Capitol, for he was paid at a much higher rate than anyone else, even Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, the supervising engineer.
By 1857, Brumidi was working in several rooms at once, in addition to the corridors, and creating designs for some rooms that would not be completed for many years. He designed lunettes with Revolutionary War battle scenes for the room to be used by the Senate Military Affairs Committee (now S-128 used by the Senate Appropriations Committee). He painted the first lunettes in 1858 but had to wait many years, until 1871, to paint the rest. In this post-Civil War period, one of the scenes was changed from a battle scene to the Boston Massacre, highlighting the role of the African American Crispus Attucks.
Brumidi also designed scenes representing areas of knowledge, such as History and Geography, for the room intended for the Senate Library (now S-211 and named the Lyndon B. Johnson Room). He painted the first sections of the ceiling in 1858. The room actually became the Senate Post Office, and when he was finally hired to complete the murals in 1867, one of the scenes was changed to Telegraph.
At the end of 1857, when Captain Meigs was pushing to finish the new Hall of the House, architect Thomas U. Walter suggested Brumidi to paint a fresco in one of the wall panels mainly because the plaster was too wet for regular paint. Brumidi completed a scene showing Washington negotiating the surrender of Cornwallis, soon after his American citizenship has become final. He proudly noted that fact in his signature: "C. Brumidi Artist Citizen of the U.S."
The artistic quality of the fresco was sharply criticized, while Meigs defended Brumidi for having been given so little time to work. Research has shown that the attacks in the 1850s on Brumidi's art, either for its quality or for being full of classical motifs and not American enough, were not made on purely aesthetic grounds. They resulted in part from the dispute between engineer Meigs and architect Walter over control of the decoration of the Capitol. More important, many American artists were disgruntled that a military man was selecting artists and that Americans were not getting the commissions. Meigs defended himself, arguing that no Americans were trained in how to paint in true fresco or in decorative wall painting. The debates were fueled by the American Party, nicknamed the Know-Nothing Party, which was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. In 1859, these various forces joined together in securing the passage of legislation that removed Meigs from his position, prevented new art from being started, and created an Art Commission. A year later, the commission submitted a report recommending large expenditures for art. By this time, the American Party’s political strength had faded. The commission was abolished, and Meigs was reinstated for a brief time. Ultimately, the commission had little effect, for Brumidi continued over the next twenty years to execute designs for murals that Meigs had approved in the 1850s.
Even while the Art Commission was in existence, Brumidi was able to carry out work already started, including the President's Room. Here, the richly decorated walls with leafy scrolls and cherubs against a gold background were similar to designs he would have painted in Rome. This room has direct sources in the Italian High Renaissance. The illusionistic framework of the ceiling is modeled after the one in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. The female allegorical figures in the tondos also pay tribute to Raphael, while in the corners are seated men who contributed to the development of the nation, such as Christopher Columbus and Benjamin Franklin. The portrait of George Washington, a copy of the one by Rembrandt Peale purchased by the Senate, is the focal point of the room, while portraits of members of Washington’s first cabinet grace the walls below.
The Senate Reception Room at the opposite end of the Senate Lobby is complex in both its decor and its history. The ornate decoration consists of frescoed vaults, a dome, illusionistic sculpture framing scenes that were never painted, and exuberant gilded plaster work. Unlike the President’s Room, which Brumidi completed in a single campaign, documents show that the painting of the Reception Room was a source of protracted frustration for the artist. He created the first design for the room in late 1855. Three oil sketches of historical scenes approved the next year were never executed. By the end of 1858 he had painted the allegorical scenes in the domed ceiling. He made more designs for the room the next year, giving cost estimates for them in 1862 and again in 1866. At last, he was authorized to paint the frescoes in the groin-vaulted half of the ceiling in 1869. In the next two years he painted the illusionistic statues, and finally, in 1872, he executed the only completed historical scene, which shows President Washington with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. In 1876, he was still unsuccessfully petitioning to be allowed to finish the decoration of the room. The myth that Brumidi intentionally left some spaces blank for future events is disproved by documents such his sketches and letters. Removal of a brownish coating and overpaint during the conservation of the murals and decorative surfaces has made a dramatic change in the appearance of the room. The U.S. Senate has since added portraits of Senators painted on oil on canvas.
Brumidi's most important fresco in the Capitol is The Apotheosis of Washington in the canopy in the eye of the Rotunda dome. It was painted over an eleven-month period at the end of the Civil War. As far as is known, he painted it alone. This fresco is the culmination of the homage Brumidi paid to Washington in other parts of the Capitol. Washington rises to the heavens directly over the spot where he was once to have been buried. In the six groups on the earthly level, Brumidi mixed classical deities, such as Minerva, with historical figures and American inventions, such as the early electric batteries shown in the foreground. Brumidi depicted Neptune, god of the sea, and Venus helping lay the transatlantic cable, which was being laid at the time the fresco was being painted. The boxy iron-clad ship with smokestacks behind the cherub riding a dolphin is believed to be one that operated on the Mississippi River. When Meigs, now a brigadier general, came to see the canopy after the scaffold was removed, he wrote to the artist: “I am glad the country at length possesses a Cupola on whose vault is painted a fresco picture after the manner of the great edifices of the old world.”
In the fifteen years after the completion of the canopy, Brumidi was sporadically authorized to complete rooms and to fill blank spaces, such as the lunettes over the doorways in the first-floor Senate corridors (for example, the one showing Robert Fulton in the Patent Corridor). In 1876 he created a new composition celebrating the end of the Civil War, Columbia Welcoming the South Back into the Union. Outside of the Capitol he carried out a number of major church commissions, such as the monumental Crucifixion fresco for the Church of St. Stephen’s in New York. He also made paintings for private homes, such as Senator Justin Morrill’s in Washington, D.C.
Brumidi’s last work, the Rotunda frieze, had been on hold for almost two decades. He created the sketch with scenes from American history in 1859, but he was not authorized to paint it until 1877. He began with Columbus, painting in true fresco on the wet plaster and using browns and whites to simulate sculpture. The painter was by then in his seventies and his health was not good, but he was required to climb up many steps and down a long ladder to a little scaffold dangling 60 feet above the Rotunda floor. His near fall is well known: his chair leg slipped off the edge of the scaffold, but he managed to hold on to a rung of the ladder until rescued. Newspapers described how he climbed back up the next day and accomplished more on the fresco than he had for a long time. His work on the fresco ended with the central figure only partially completed in the scene “William Penn and the Indians.” He painted Penn’s left foot, and the successor he recommended, Fillippo Costaggini, also trained at the Academy of St. Luke, painted the right one. For the last few months of his life Brumidi stayed in his studio working on his full-size cartoons to enable someone else to complete his design. Unfortunately, because of a miscalculation, his design did not fill the full three-hundred-foot circumference of the Rotunda, despite Costaggini’s efforts to lengthen the scenes. When Costaggini completed painting the last scene Brumidi sketched in 1889, a gap remained that was not filled until 1953. The fresco was first professionally conserved in 1986.
Professional conservation has made a tremendous difference in the way one can see and understand Brumidi’s murals. Conservation is a relatively young profession in the United States, for it was only in 1963 that the American Institute for Conservation established a code of ethics and standard of practice. The goal of conservation is to preserve and reveal the original work of the artist as much as possible, using scientific analysis to help guide decisions as appropriate. Flaking paint is re-adhered rather than scraped off, and missing sections are filled in with reversible pigments, using archival photographs as guides for reconstructing damaged areas where possible. In contrast, from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, it was common practice in the Capitol to have decorative painters retouch or paint over murals rather than to clean and conserve them. Effective cleaning techniques were not known, and in any case it is quicker and less costly to simply go over designs with new paint. In the 1920s and 1930s, so-called restorers painted over Brumidi’s compositions with oil paints, sometimes adding their own details, and often signing and dating their work, as in the case of the lunette Columbus and the Indian Maiden. In 1959, Allyn Cox repainted The Apotheosis of Washington in the Rotunda rather than cleaning it; fortunately, unlike the earlier artists, he used paints that could be easily removed and submitted a report on the steps he had carried out and the materials he used.
Based on a survey made in 1981, each year since 1985, more of Brumidi’s original work has been uncovered, allowing an appreciation of his radiant colors; his masterful understanding of light and shade to make forms look three dimensional; and the wealth of his subjects, gestures, and expressions, all of which had long been obscured by grime and muddy overpaint. Looking at his work from a distance, one can appreciate Brumidi’s symphony of rich and subtle colors in his overall decorative scheme and the way the frames and borders surrounding his scenes are part of the total effect.
On the walls of the Brumidi Corridors, which had previously thought to have been painted with oil pigments, exposures showed the original much lighter and brighter colors and subtle details. The walls were first repainted at the turn of the century, and some areas, such as the borders, have many layers of paint, each one successively darker as the colors were matched to dirt and discolored varnish. It is now clear that the original colors in the corridors were not the dirty brown, green, and yellowish tan that was visible, but rather creamy white, sapphire blue, and deep red, surrounded by grayish tan stone-colored moldings, similar to the color schemes seen in Rome. The walls of all but the west corridor have now been conserved and the beauty of the overall design and of the myriad details can be appreciated.
Nearly a century and a half has passed since Montgomery Meigs wrote a letter of recommendation for Brumidi as the only person capable of painting the fresco under the dome, calling him “an artist of great experience and of great ability” and asserting, “The best pictures and decorations of the wall of that building are his design.” Today, ongoing conservation has enabled people to understand and appreciate his art, including his originality in bringing together the classical tradition of mural painting with American history and symbols. The research and publications about Brumidi and the conservation of his work in both Washington and Rome serve as strong foundations for the celebration of his achievement on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth.
Notes
1. Constantino Brumidi, Petition to the Senate and the House of Representatives, November 17, 1879. Architect of the Capitol, Curator’s Office.
2. Barbara Wolanin, Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998. See this publication for further details and sources of information for Brumidi’s life and career.
3. Entry for December 28, 1854 in Wendy Wolff, ed., Capitol Builder: The Shorthand Journals of Montgomery C. Meigs, 1853-1859, 1863, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001, pp. 180-181. The progress of the mural is described in subsequent entries. Also see excerpts in Appendix A of Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol.
4. “The Decoration of the Capitol,” New York Tribune, May 17, 1858.
5. Brumidi was first paid $8 a day; his salary was increased to $10 a day in 1857 and remained at that rate until the end of his life. Other artists were paid $6 or $4 a day and Meigs received $150 a month or $5 a day. Records of payments to Brumidi and other artists are in the Capitol Extension Records, Records of the Architect of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.
6. Cornwallis Sues for a Cessation of Hostilities under a Flag of Truce was covered during the modernization of the House Chamber in 1950; in 1961 the section of wall with the fresco was moved to the new House Members’ Dining Room (H-117), where it is on display.
7. The commissioners were sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, portrait painter James R. Lambdin, and landscape painter John F. Kensett. Report of the United States Art Commission, Ex. Doc. No. 43, House of Representatives, 35th Congress, 1st session.
8. Letters and vouchers in the Records of the Architect of the Capitol, Curator’s Office.
9. Meigs to Brumidi, January 19, 1866, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 48, series 290.
10. “Death of a Great Artist,” Washington Post, February 20, 1880, and “The Allegorical Work at the Capitol,” Forney’s Sunday Chronicle, October 12, 1879.
11. Brumidi had been told the frieze was 9 feet high and based his calculations on that figure. Because the field was actually less than 8 feet high, his scenes ended up proportionately shorter in length as well; this was verified by comparing the notations on his sketch to the dimensions of the frescoed scenes. The last three scenes were added by Allyn Cox.
12. Quarter-Master General Montgomery C. Meigs to Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith, June 5, 1862, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 48, series 291.
Barbara Ann Boese Wolanin, Curator for the Architect of the Capitol
Constantino Brumidi, who called himself “the artist of the Capitol,” contributed more than any other single person to the beauty and significance of the interior of the major symbol of freedom and democracy around the world, the United States Capitol. His engaging and lively cherubs, graceful allegorical figures, historical scenes and portraits, and patriotic symbols grace walls and ceilings in many of the most important spaces. He set figures and scenes into a decorative complex of illusionistic carvings, gilded frames, and scrolling vines that places the Capitol in the tradition of the palaces of Europe. Following the Renaissance tradition he learned during his years of training and work in Rome, he had an uncanny ability to make flat painting look three dimensional and allegorical figures seem alive (fig. 1).
Brumidi arrived in the United States on September 18, 1852, when he was 47 years old. He came to Washington, D.C., at the end of 1854, just as the new wings on the Capitol had been constructed and were ready for decoration. He worked at the Capitol over a quarter of a century, most intensively for the first decade and then sporadically for the rest of his life.
Brumidi’s murals in the Capitol are being cleaned of grime, discolored varnish, and heavy-handed overpaint, and damaged areas are being restored, through the conservation program managed by the Architect of the Capitol since the early 1980s. Many of the conservators hired by the Architect first gained expertise in fresco restoration in Italy. The conservation program has enabled people to assess his talent, and it inspired the preparation of the book on Brumidi by the Architect of the Capitol, which was published by the United States Congress in 1998.
There are still many unanswered questions about the painter’s personal life, beginning with his name. “Constantino” was the first name most often seen in records and publications after he came to the United States, although “Costantino” and “Constantine” were also used. He usually signed his paintings simply “C. Brumidi.” Brumidi originally emigrated to the United States in search of church commissions at a time when the Roman Catholic Church was growing rapidly and building major churches and cathedrals in the New World. While still in Rome, he had been asked to paint the altarpiece at St. Stephen’s Church in New York City; he completed it soon after he had begun work at the Capitol. That altarpiece was later dwarfed by the monumental mural of the Crucifixion and other murals Brumidi created in the early 1870s after St. Stephen’s Church (now Our Lady of the Scapular and St. Stephen) was enlarged. Brumidi eventually would paint altarpieces and murals in churches in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Philadelphia; New York; Mexico City; and Havana, Cuba. He also filled private commissions for portraits, such as the one of Eveline Fessenden Freeman, and for house interiors, such as the tondo Progress.
Captain Montgomery C. Meigs described in his journal the day that Brumidi began his career at the Capitol at the end of 1854. The captain of the Army Corps of Engineers had been placed in charge of the construction of the Capitol when it was moved under the authority of the War Department in 1853. Meigs, trained in art at West Point, took on the commissioning of architectural art as part of his construction responsibilities. He had never been to Europe, but he knew about the frescoes of Raphael and Michelangelo from books, and he was determined to have the walls of the Capitol embellished in monumental true fresco. Despite many efforts, he had been unable to find an artist who had mastered the fresco technique. Meeting Brumidi must have seemed like an answer to a prayer. The Roman artist described his work in the house of the banker Torlonia, but of course he had no example to show. They agreed that he would paint a trial fresco in the almost completed room that Meigs had just begun using as an office, and that the subject would be Cincinnatus, the Roman hero called from the plow to defend his country. This subject was appropriate for the room intended for use by the Committee on Agriculture. It was also connected with the first president, George Washington, who was called the American Cincinnatus. Washington would appear in many of the murals Brumidi would later design for the Capitol.
Brumidi rightly claimed that his mural in that room (today’s room H-144) was the first true fresco to have been painted in America. Many people, including the president, came to view his progress. After a month of work, Brumidi’s fresco was completed and approved. He was put on the pay roll of the Capitol and proceeded to complete the decoration of the room with a lunette of a parallel scene from the American Revolution, Putnam Called from the Plow; a ceiling with figures representing the Four Seasons; and walls with illusionistic reliefs of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and scenes of old and new ways of reaping wheat. The lower walls were defined by illusionistic stone molding, recently uncovered by conservators. He conceived of the room as a whole, with the subjects relating to each other across the architectural space and painted illusionistic arched moldings in fresco on the walls below, all apparently illuminated by the light from the windows. The concept of creating illusionistic architecture, figures, sculpture, and paintings in fresco had its source in the ancient Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque art he had studied.
Brumidi credited first-century Roman wall painting as a major inspiration in the room for the Naval Affairs Committee (S-127). A notice was posted explaining how its decorative scheme was modeled after those in Pompeii and the Baths of Titus (now understood to be in the Golden House of Nero under the baths) and listing the various classical sea-related deities that are depicted. Brumidi received approval for his design based on a watercolor sketch. The ceiling of the room, with classical gods and goddesses related to the sea and mythological creatures framed by trellises, resembles ceilings in the Golden House of Nero. Only one of the Pompeiian architectural stage sets in the lunettes was completed. On the lower walls, maidens floating on newly restored blue panels hold objects related to the ocean and navigation. In all of its details, this was the most Roman room Brumidi created in the Capitol. It contains only a few figures and details referring to America, and it was criticized by some for this very reason.
Another area in the Capitol directly inspired by decoration that Brumidi knew well in Rome, and that Meigs admired in illustrated books, is on the first floor of the Senate wing, now called the Brumidi Corridors. The artist based his designs directly on Raphael’s loggia in the Vatican, which was in turn inspired by first-century Roman wall painting. The panel in the Vatican loggia with squirrels, mice, and snakes climbing in the rinceaux is strikingly similar to four of the panels in the first-floor Senate corridor. Other details in the corridor are closely related to designs at the Villa Torlonia in Rome. In the section called the Patent Corridor, striped American shields are the focal point of each panel. In other sections the panels are filled with New World birds, animals, insects, reptiles, flowers, and fruits. Trompe-l’oeil relief portraits of leaders of the American Revolution punctuate the panels. The elaborate sculpted bronze railings of the private staircases for the Senators were based on a sketch by Brumidi and sculpted and cast in Philadelphia. They echo the motifs in the wall panels.
In his first years at the Capitol, when the decoration was proceeding rapidly, Brumidi was assisted by as many as 30 fresco and decorative painters working in different rooms at one time, dispelling the common misconception that he painted everything himself. In the first-floor Senate corridors, for example, Brumidi was assisted by English, German, and Italian painters, who worked following his designs. It is clear, however, that the Roman artist truly was considered to be the major artist of the Capitol, for he was paid at a much higher rate than anyone else, even Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, the supervising engineer.
By 1857, Brumidi was working in several rooms at once, in addition to the corridors, and creating designs for some rooms that would not be completed for many years. He designed lunettes with Revolutionary War battle scenes for the room to be used by the Senate Military Affairs Committee (now S-128 used by the Senate Appropriations Committee). He painted the first lunettes in 1858 but had to wait many years, until 1871, to paint the rest. In this post-Civil War period, one of the scenes was changed from a battle scene to the Boston Massacre, highlighting the role of the African American Crispus Attucks.
Brumidi also designed scenes representing areas of knowledge, such as History and Geography, for the room intended for the Senate Library (now S-211 and named the Lyndon B. Johnson Room). He painted the first sections of the ceiling in 1858. The room actually became the Senate Post Office, and when he was finally hired to complete the murals in 1867, one of the scenes was changed to Telegraph.
At the end of 1857, when Captain Meigs was pushing to finish the new Hall of the House, architect Thomas U. Walter suggested Brumidi to paint a fresco in one of the wall panels mainly because the plaster was too wet for regular paint. Brumidi completed a scene showing Washington negotiating the surrender of Cornwallis, soon after his American citizenship has become final. He proudly noted that fact in his signature: "C. Brumidi Artist Citizen of the U.S."
The artistic quality of the fresco was sharply criticized, while Meigs defended Brumidi for having been given so little time to work. Research has shown that the attacks in the 1850s on Brumidi's art, either for its quality or for being full of classical motifs and not American enough, were not made on purely aesthetic grounds. They resulted in part from the dispute between engineer Meigs and architect Walter over control of the decoration of the Capitol. More important, many American artists were disgruntled that a military man was selecting artists and that Americans were not getting the commissions. Meigs defended himself, arguing that no Americans were trained in how to paint in true fresco or in decorative wall painting. The debates were fueled by the American Party, nicknamed the Know-Nothing Party, which was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. In 1859, these various forces joined together in securing the passage of legislation that removed Meigs from his position, prevented new art from being started, and created an Art Commission. A year later, the commission submitted a report recommending large expenditures for art. By this time, the American Party’s political strength had faded. The commission was abolished, and Meigs was reinstated for a brief time. Ultimately, the commission had little effect, for Brumidi continued over the next twenty years to execute designs for murals that Meigs had approved in the 1850s.
Even while the Art Commission was in existence, Brumidi was able to carry out work already started, including the President's Room. Here, the richly decorated walls with leafy scrolls and cherubs against a gold background were similar to designs he would have painted in Rome. This room has direct sources in the Italian High Renaissance. The illusionistic framework of the ceiling is modeled after the one in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. The female allegorical figures in the tondos also pay tribute to Raphael, while in the corners are seated men who contributed to the development of the nation, such as Christopher Columbus and Benjamin Franklin. The portrait of George Washington, a copy of the one by Rembrandt Peale purchased by the Senate, is the focal point of the room, while portraits of members of Washington’s first cabinet grace the walls below.
The Senate Reception Room at the opposite end of the Senate Lobby is complex in both its decor and its history. The ornate decoration consists of frescoed vaults, a dome, illusionistic sculpture framing scenes that were never painted, and exuberant gilded plaster work. Unlike the President’s Room, which Brumidi completed in a single campaign, documents show that the painting of the Reception Room was a source of protracted frustration for the artist. He created the first design for the room in late 1855. Three oil sketches of historical scenes approved the next year were never executed. By the end of 1858 he had painted the allegorical scenes in the domed ceiling. He made more designs for the room the next year, giving cost estimates for them in 1862 and again in 1866. At last, he was authorized to paint the frescoes in the groin-vaulted half of the ceiling in 1869. In the next two years he painted the illusionistic statues, and finally, in 1872, he executed the only completed historical scene, which shows President Washington with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. In 1876, he was still unsuccessfully petitioning to be allowed to finish the decoration of the room. The myth that Brumidi intentionally left some spaces blank for future events is disproved by documents such his sketches and letters. Removal of a brownish coating and overpaint during the conservation of the murals and decorative surfaces has made a dramatic change in the appearance of the room. The U.S. Senate has since added portraits of Senators painted on oil on canvas.
Brumidi's most important fresco in the Capitol is The Apotheosis of Washington in the canopy in the eye of the Rotunda dome. It was painted over an eleven-month period at the end of the Civil War. As far as is known, he painted it alone. This fresco is the culmination of the homage Brumidi paid to Washington in other parts of the Capitol. Washington rises to the heavens directly over the spot where he was once to have been buried. In the six groups on the earthly level, Brumidi mixed classical deities, such as Minerva, with historical figures and American inventions, such as the early electric batteries shown in the foreground. Brumidi depicted Neptune, god of the sea, and Venus helping lay the transatlantic cable, which was being laid at the time the fresco was being painted. The boxy iron-clad ship with smokestacks behind the cherub riding a dolphin is believed to be one that operated on the Mississippi River. When Meigs, now a brigadier general, came to see the canopy after the scaffold was removed, he wrote to the artist: “I am glad the country at length possesses a Cupola on whose vault is painted a fresco picture after the manner of the great edifices of the old world.”
In the fifteen years after the completion of the canopy, Brumidi was sporadically authorized to complete rooms and to fill blank spaces, such as the lunettes over the doorways in the first-floor Senate corridors (for example, the one showing Robert Fulton in the Patent Corridor). In 1876 he created a new composition celebrating the end of the Civil War, Columbia Welcoming the South Back into the Union. Outside of the Capitol he carried out a number of major church commissions, such as the monumental Crucifixion fresco for the Church of St. Stephen’s in New York. He also made paintings for private homes, such as Senator Justin Morrill’s in Washington, D.C.
Brumidi’s last work, the Rotunda frieze, had been on hold for almost two decades. He created the sketch with scenes from American history in 1859, but he was not authorized to paint it until 1877. He began with Columbus, painting in true fresco on the wet plaster and using browns and whites to simulate sculpture. The painter was by then in his seventies and his health was not good, but he was required to climb up many steps and down a long ladder to a little scaffold dangling 60 feet above the Rotunda floor. His near fall is well known: his chair leg slipped off the edge of the scaffold, but he managed to hold on to a rung of the ladder until rescued. Newspapers described how he climbed back up the next day and accomplished more on the fresco than he had for a long time. His work on the fresco ended with the central figure only partially completed in the scene “William Penn and the Indians.” He painted Penn’s left foot, and the successor he recommended, Fillippo Costaggini, also trained at the Academy of St. Luke, painted the right one. For the last few months of his life Brumidi stayed in his studio working on his full-size cartoons to enable someone else to complete his design. Unfortunately, because of a miscalculation, his design did not fill the full three-hundred-foot circumference of the Rotunda, despite Costaggini’s efforts to lengthen the scenes. When Costaggini completed painting the last scene Brumidi sketched in 1889, a gap remained that was not filled until 1953. The fresco was first professionally conserved in 1986.
Professional conservation has made a tremendous difference in the way one can see and understand Brumidi’s murals. Conservation is a relatively young profession in the United States, for it was only in 1963 that the American Institute for Conservation established a code of ethics and standard of practice. The goal of conservation is to preserve and reveal the original work of the artist as much as possible, using scientific analysis to help guide decisions as appropriate. Flaking paint is re-adhered rather than scraped off, and missing sections are filled in with reversible pigments, using archival photographs as guides for reconstructing damaged areas where possible. In contrast, from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, it was common practice in the Capitol to have decorative painters retouch or paint over murals rather than to clean and conserve them. Effective cleaning techniques were not known, and in any case it is quicker and less costly to simply go over designs with new paint. In the 1920s and 1930s, so-called restorers painted over Brumidi’s compositions with oil paints, sometimes adding their own details, and often signing and dating their work, as in the case of the lunette Columbus and the Indian Maiden. In 1959, Allyn Cox repainted The Apotheosis of Washington in the Rotunda rather than cleaning it; fortunately, unlike the earlier artists, he used paints that could be easily removed and submitted a report on the steps he had carried out and the materials he used.
Based on a survey made in 1981, each year since 1985, more of Brumidi’s original work has been uncovered, allowing an appreciation of his radiant colors; his masterful understanding of light and shade to make forms look three dimensional; and the wealth of his subjects, gestures, and expressions, all of which had long been obscured by grime and muddy overpaint. Looking at his work from a distance, one can appreciate Brumidi’s symphony of rich and subtle colors in his overall decorative scheme and the way the frames and borders surrounding his scenes are part of the total effect.
On the walls of the Brumidi Corridors, which had previously thought to have been painted with oil pigments, exposures showed the original much lighter and brighter colors and subtle details. The walls were first repainted at the turn of the century, and some areas, such as the borders, have many layers of paint, each one successively darker as the colors were matched to dirt and discolored varnish. It is now clear that the original colors in the corridors were not the dirty brown, green, and yellowish tan that was visible, but rather creamy white, sapphire blue, and deep red, surrounded by grayish tan stone-colored moldings, similar to the color schemes seen in Rome. The walls of all but the west corridor have now been conserved and the beauty of the overall design and of the myriad details can be appreciated.
Nearly a century and a half has passed since Montgomery Meigs wrote a letter of recommendation for Brumidi as the only person capable of painting the fresco under the dome, calling him “an artist of great experience and of great ability” and asserting, “The best pictures and decorations of the wall of that building are his design.” Today, ongoing conservation has enabled people to understand and appreciate his art, including his originality in bringing together the classical tradition of mural painting with American history and symbols. The research and publications about Brumidi and the conservation of his work in both Washington and Rome serve as strong foundations for the celebration of his achievement on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth.
Notes
1. Constantino Brumidi, Petition to the Senate and the House of Representatives, November 17, 1879. Architect of the Capitol, Curator’s Office.
2. Barbara Wolanin, Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998. See this publication for further details and sources of information for Brumidi’s life and career.
3. Entry for December 28, 1854 in Wendy Wolff, ed., Capitol Builder: The Shorthand Journals of Montgomery C. Meigs, 1853-1859, 1863, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001, pp. 180-181. The progress of the mural is described in subsequent entries. Also see excerpts in Appendix A of Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol.
4. “The Decoration of the Capitol,” New York Tribune, May 17, 1858.
5. Brumidi was first paid $8 a day; his salary was increased to $10 a day in 1857 and remained at that rate until the end of his life. Other artists were paid $6 or $4 a day and Meigs received $150 a month or $5 a day. Records of payments to Brumidi and other artists are in the Capitol Extension Records, Records of the Architect of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.
6. Cornwallis Sues for a Cessation of Hostilities under a Flag of Truce was covered during the modernization of the House Chamber in 1950; in 1961 the section of wall with the fresco was moved to the new House Members’ Dining Room (H-117), where it is on display.
7. The commissioners were sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, portrait painter James R. Lambdin, and landscape painter John F. Kensett. Report of the United States Art Commission, Ex. Doc. No. 43, House of Representatives, 35th Congress, 1st session.
8. Letters and vouchers in the Records of the Architect of the Capitol, Curator’s Office.
9. Meigs to Brumidi, January 19, 1866, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 48, series 290.
10. “Death of a Great Artist,” Washington Post, February 20, 1880, and “The Allegorical Work at the Capitol,” Forney’s Sunday Chronicle, October 12, 1879.
11. Brumidi had been told the frieze was 9 feet high and based his calculations on that figure. Because the field was actually less than 8 feet high, his scenes ended up proportionately shorter in length as well; this was verified by comparing the notations on his sketch to the dimensions of the frescoed scenes. The last three scenes were added by Allyn Cox.
12. Quarter-Master General Montgomery C. Meigs to Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith, June 5, 1862, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 48, series 291.