Caroline Winterer

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Caroline Winterer | From Royal to Republican: The Classical Image in Early America | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

From Royal to Republican: The Classical Image in Early America

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The discovery of the New World in the fifteenth century triggered a flood of pictorial representations of a new land that few Europeans had ever seen but that they could now imagine as an earthly paradise populated by luxuriant plants, bizarre animals, and hungry cannibals. Yet once resident in that new world, transplanted Europeans maintained a lively interest in the old, especially the ancient classical world. Seen by few but known by many, Greece and Rome were ancient places as fascinating to both Europeans and Americans as the Western Hemisphere was to homebound Europeans. Educated colonial Americans not only read deeply in classical texts, they also looked at pictures of the ancient world in engravings and illustrated books. They not only sought an intellectual grasp of the classical world but also craved a sense of its palpable physicality. Here was a realm of wrestling Greeks, plundering Romans, soaring goddesses, of grand triumphal arches and lowly captives, the whole festooned with foldout maps and lavish title pages.	1
The classical art of the late eighteenth century (usually called "neoclassical," a term coined in the late 1800s) bulks large in our understanding of republican ideals in the new United States. Many associated the austere neoclassical images that burst upon the scene in the American colonies beginning in the early 1770s with such modern republican ideals as liberty, commercial prosperity, and bucolic simplicity. Neoclassical themes, embodied most memorably in such classical goddesses as Liberty and Minerva, appeared in a staggering variety of places in late eighteenth-century America: paintings, newspapers, journals, broadsides, coins, paper currency, seals, almanacs, punch bowls, flags, wallpaper, architecture, furniture, and fashion. Classicism in printed material was not entirely new, for colonists had seen classical motifs in seventeenth-century mannerism and in the rococo classicism of the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. But against the ornate, classicized motifs of those styles, the American neoclassical prints of the late eighteenth century stand out as strikingly new and strikingly political. Peppered with temples and goddesses, eagles and triumphal arches, they announce the new nation as a Rome reborn. But by classifying the neoclassical prints as political, rather than classical, we obscure their roots in the flourishing culture of classical imagery that preceded republican revolution in America. In this article I would like to shift the analytic category and to put the neoclassical prints into an earlier and specifically classical context, the better to see what was kept and lost of an ancient tradition when Americans built their new Rome.¹	2
The illustrated classical texts of the 1600s and 1700s, along with engravings sold in the shops of colonial printers and booksellers from Boston to Charleston, presented a notably different view of antiquity than did the later icons of republicanism, a flamboyant spectacle of aristocratic, energetic, and combative activity. The reach of such prints was not, of course, universal: the audience for classical books tended to be elite and educated, but that audience increased significantly as the eighteenth century progressed. Whatever the limitations of their circulation, such classical images did much to shaped Americans' sense of what Greece and Rome were like. Aside from such books and engravings, little in the way of classical imagery was available in the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, although the truly wealthy could afford classical paintings in the heroic, mythological style and might pose for their own portraits against such vaguely classical backgrounds as columns. Classical engravings and lavishly illustrated classical texts, published in the 1600s and 1700s and purchased, read, and looked at by colonists, would have figured prominently in educated early Americans' perceptions of ancient societies.	. . .

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