Capitol artist

[BLUEHAWK]

Does this remind anyone of what Ross Perot insisted on having done to accompany The Wall?



From NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, July 25, 2005

"In a forlorn cemetery a few miles north of the Capitol, a small band of art lovers, history buffs and descendants of Italian immigrants gathered Sunday afternoon around a simple grave. Under the shade of a giant oak tree, they made speeches and laid floral wreaths, paying homage to a man whose paintings have been seen by millions but whose name is known to only a few.

"Let's face the facts," the ceremony's organizer, Joseph Grano, told the celebrants. "Brumidi is not widely known for his achievements. I don't expect one person in 1,000 recognizes his name."

Brumidi, for the other 999, is Constantino Brumidi, the Italian-born fresco artist whose ornate Renaissance- and Pompeian-style murals decorate much of the United States Capitol. Brumidi spent 25 years, from 1854 to 1879, laboring inside America's great symbol of democracy. His pink-cheeked cherubs and classical Greek and Roman figures, woven around distinctly American themes, were intended to uplift and inspire all who walked through the building or worked there.

Yet today, even some members of Congress don't know who Brumidi is.

Enter the irrepressible and relentless Mr. Grano, a fast-talking lawyer and civic gadfly whose causes include historic preservation, and who is now dedicated, he said, to making Brumidi "a folk hero for Americans." As chairman of the Constantino Brumidi Society, a loose-knit group he runs out of his apartment here, Mr. Grano has spent five years poking and prodding Washington's power elite to honor Brumidi: on coins and stamps, with Congressional resolutions, even the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

"I like how he brings mythology and history into his art," Mr. Grano said. "I like the delicacy of his flowers. He makes the building come alive. And I like the story that he's an immigrant, that he was allowed to paint in the most important building in the United States."

There are no coins or stamps yet and no presidential medal, but the work has paid off. On Tuesday, the 200th anniversary of Brumidi's birth, Congress will stage a Brumidi celebration in the Capitol Rotunda, underneath "The Apotheosis of Washington," the grand mural, considered Brumidi's masterpiece, that covers the canopy of the dome. For Italian-Americans like Mr. Grano, it is a particular point of pride.

"I grew up as a very strong cultural-minded Italian, and when I came to the Capitol, I had never even heard of Brumidi," said Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, who along with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, is the chief sponsor of the ceremony. "After all that we've heard, from 'Shark Tales' to 'Sopranos,' this is an elevating point. This is what Italian-Americans should be talking about."

Born in 1805 in Rome to a Greek father and an Italian mother, Brumidi painted murals for Italian noblemen and for the Catholic Church, until he ran afoul of Pope Pius IX during the turmoil of the 1849 revolution. He was imprisoned for stealing church artwork and furniture - he insisted he simply moved them for safekeeping - but later pardoned on the condition he leave Rome for good. He arrived in New York in 1852 and within three years, he had been put on the payroll at the Capitol. His work there would consume him for the rest of his life. He took only infrequent breaks, including some to paint murals at St. Stephen's Church in Manhattan.

"He was the first major trained full-scale muralist to work in this country," said Francis V. O'Connor, an independent art historian who is writing a book on American mural painting.

Yet Brumidi was ignored, the victim of ethnocentrism and snobbery. Though he became a citizen in 1857 (he signed a fresco "C. Brumidi Artist-Citizen of the U.S."), American-born artists cast him as a foreigner and resented his painting Capitol murals. In a few decades, with the rise of modernism, critics would look down their noses at Brumidi's brand of representational art.

When he died, penniless and alone, in 1880, there wasn't even enough money to bury him; his ex-wife agreed to have him interred in her family plot, and the grave went without a marker until 1951.

"He was reviled in what passed as art literature, in the history books," Dr. O'Connor said, "with the result that everyone thought the Capitol was filled with bad art."