A Capitol Tour, Part V: Our Symbolic Rotunda
The centerpiece of any Capitol tour is a visit to the majestic and historic rotunda, also the geographic center of Washington, DC
The previous installments can be found linked at the top of and including this post.
When walking from the Senate side of the Capitol, past the small Senate Rotunda into the enormous Capitol Rotunda, your eyes are almost immediately drawn upward. I tell tours that the Statue of Liberty could fit inside it. It’s 165 feet from floor to ceiling and 80 feet in diameter. The first dome wall stood 45 feet tall.
The Rotunda is the centerpiece of almost every first-time Capitol tour. It not only tells its story of the nation in art but also in construction. It is a fitting symbol of not just Congress but our democratic Republic.
We’ll start with the art, especially the Apotheosis of George Washington, Constantino’s signature Fresco work, completed in 1865 for $40,000.
Brumidi’s early work was criticized for being too Euro-centric. He fixed that by blending mythology with American history, as little as their was nearly 160 years ago.
Let’s start at the center, depicting George Washington having died and risen to heaven in god-like status (thus the word, Apotheosis). He is flanked by females depicting liberty and victory, accompanied by women representing the 13 original states (a vicious rumor has it that models were chosen from local brothels, but I’ll leave that to your imagination).
Surrounding them are six groups of figures representing themes of America’s history and development, each featuring mythical gods and iconic American leaders and progress.
Starting below Washington, we see a theme of War, “Armed Freedom” atop an eagle, overcoming kingly power and tyranny (a woman defeating five men). Moving clockwise past the rainbow (which disappeared for a while from decades of soot from candles, gas-power lights, and fireplaces).
Moving clockwise, a theme of Science emerges. The goddess Minerva demonstrates a steam engine to Robert Fulton, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Morse.
Perhaps the most dramatic of the themes is Marine, featuring the god Neptune, complete with his famous trident, and Venus, depicting the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable from New York to London, completed in 1858.
Our next theme is Commerce, with Mercury handing Robert Morris - the primary financier of the American Revolution - a bag of money.
Mechanics is symbolized in our next scene, with Vulcan forging instruments of industry and war.
Finally, the goddess Ceres sits atop the high-tech farm equipment of the day, the McCormick Reaper, in a theme devoted to Agriculture. America accompanies her in a red liberty cap, and Flora, the goddess of Spring, is picking flowers.
As a reminder from Part I of our tour, the Capitol has sported two domes. The first wooden and copper-topped dome was replaced, mainly during the Civil War, by a nine million-pound fireproof cast-iron dome as the new House and Senate wings were completed. You can tell where the old dome finished - at the top of sandstone walls - and the new iron dome began. It more than doubled the dome’s interior space.
Once I finish with the Apotheosis, our necks now getting sore from craning them to observe Brumidi’s ceiling, I move to his final work, a monochromatic Frieze of American history that circles the dome near where the original dome was located. It depicts 19 scenes of American history, from Christopher Columbus’s arrival to our shores in 1492 to the birth of flight at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, in 1903 (they ran out of room).
Brumidi began work on the Frieze in 1877, 12 years after completing the Apotheosis. I love to point out the scene with Columbus landing, being greeted at the end of a plank by an indigenous American holding two children.
Some purport that Brumidi painted his face onto the youngest of the children. Beard and all. That’s not entirely clear from this close-up, but it makes for a great story.
Two years later, with Brumidi approaching 78 years of age (well beyond the average lifespan for males at that time), he was working another panel entitled “William Penn and the Indians” when his chair slipped from the scaffolding. He saved himself by clinging to the rung of a ladder, but many attribute the shock of his fall for not returning to finish his work and passing away two years later. Another Italian renaissance painter, Filippo Costaggini, completed Brumidi’s remaining eight sketches, including painting his face into the knot hole of a tree. He completed his work in 1889, but open space remained.
It took 60 years for Allyn Cox to be hired to finish the work, and he did in 1953.
The Architect of the Capitol outlines the eight historical paintings found around the chamber’s sandstone walls. I always ask any children on the tour if they remember the baptism of Pocahantas - one of the paintings - from Disney’s animated movie (take a wild guess).
Four revolutionary period scenes were commissioned by Congress from John Trumbull in 1817 and placed in the Rotunda between 1819 and 1824:
General George Washington Resigning his Commission
Four scenes of early exploration were added between 1840 and 1855:
Landing of Columbus by John Vanderlyn
Discovery of the Mississippi by William Powell
Baptism of Pocahontas by John Chapman
Embarkation of the Pilgrims by Robert Weir
These are large and dramatic paintings. The “surrender” photographs are key because British Generals Burgoyne, defeated at Saratoga, New York, and Cornwallis, trapped at Yorktown, Virginia, were planning to converge their armies and divide America. With a huge assist from the French Navy at Yorktown, that never happened.
Each painting is a history lesson worth learning.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out the cultures of 10 former Presidents, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and US Grant, along with a bust of Martin Luther King. The statues of Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan are among the newest.
But the tour ends by focusing on the largest marble sculpture, a tribute to women’s suffrage that features suffragettes Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This 14,000-pound behemoth costs $70,000 to transfer from the first-floor crypt below the Rotunda at the insistence of then-US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA).
I’m often asked what appears to be incomplete marblework behind the “ladies in a tub,” as the monument is facetiously referred to. It represents the “unfinished work of women’s suffrage.”
The Rotunda is mostly remembered today for when former Presidents and dignitaries, such as the late Billy Graham, lie in state or repose. The first president to lie in state upon a hastily constructed catafalque was Abraham Lincoln, the first President who was assassinated. Most recently, former GOP Leader Robert J. Dole lied in state. It usually takes a Joint Resolution of Congress to host an event in the Rotunda, but it remains under the putative control of the Speaker of the House.
The concrete and stone floor of the Rotunda isn’t noteworthy other than the multi-pointed star in the center. It represents the geographic center of Washington, DC.
Part VI takes us to the House side, stopping first at Statuary Hall before moving to the Rayburn Room, the House Chamber, and then a particular spot headed downstairs to the first floor where a reporter shot and killed a former Congressman-turned-lobbyist.