America’s Rome

c. 1989

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New Haven: Yale University Press

From the early days of the Republic, the American imagination was captured by the classical world, and the ‘ideal’ achieved by the ancient Greeks and Romans in politics, arts, architecture, ethics and education. Hiram Powers (1805-1873) and Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) were both American sculptors who lived and worked in Italy and produced statues and busts in the neoclassical style, often ‘dressing’ their contemporary subjects in traditional Greek and Roman garb. Neoclassical sculptures were the concrete embodiment of American society’s aspirations to the ‘ideal’, portraying the likes of George Washington, among others, in the same way that the great Greek and Roman leaders had been.