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25 "Doctor of the Church" and his scholarly role as writer and editor. 30 As Dora ornton describes in e Scholar in His Study (1997), the images of learned saints appealed to Re- naissance artists and scholars who built their own studies and grew their own libraries in order "to lay claim to the civility, polite manners, and educated tastes which came to define the ruling elite of the Italian Renaissance." At the same time, such aspirations often reflected larger social imperatives motivated by a desire to establish modern Ital- ian culture as a worthy rival to that of ancient Greece and Rome. 31 It is not surprising, then, that one of the primary sources for this Renaissance portrait type was the seated philosopher statue common to the ancient Greek Hellenistic period. Typical examples include a statue at the Louvre of the third-century B.C. Stoic philosopher Chrysippos, whose portraits were popular throughout the ancient Roman period as representing the epitome of "a cultured man," and a statue of the Epicurean Hermarchos in the collec- tion of the Museo Archeologico, Florence. 32 ese, and other seated philosopher statues, celebrated the intel- ligence of the subjects and the moral tranquility derived therefrom. Brumidi likely was aware of the relevance of this particular lineage to contemporary portraiture, especially in light of a work by Brumidi's own sculpture teacher in Italy, Antonio Canova (1757–1822). Canova produced the ill-fated George Washington, 1819–20, (figs. 14A and 14B) for the North Carolina Statehouse in Raleigh. Clearly, Canova's Washington, destroyed by fire in 1831 and the most famous statue in America during the 1820s, was based on the seated philosopher portrait type. Consistent with this portrait tradition, to which Brumidi's Fulton also ultimately belongs, Canova endowed Washington, who is shown composing his farewell address, with the moral authority, dignity and cultured learning embodied in the seated philosopher statue. ere is of course a seated statue of Fulton in the Capitol, but it portrays the inventor within a very different cultural tradition-the prevailing late-nineteenth-century ideology of success and the celebration of the common man. It is this ethos that animates the wonderful seated statue of Robert Fulton completed in 1883 by Philadelphia sculptor Howard Roberts (1843–1900). One of Pennsyl- vania's two historical portraits of native sons or daughters allotted spaces within the Capitol's National Statuary Hall Collection, Roberts's marble Fulton (fig. 15) rests comfort- ably against the west wall of National Statuary Hall, the former chamber of the House of Representatives. 33 Perhaps the most original sitting portrait statue in nineteenth- century American sculpture, its uniqueness derives largely LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PUBLIC DOMAIN PHOTOGRAPH HTTP://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/WIKI/FILE:GEORGE_WASHINGTON_ BY_ANTONIO_CANOVA_-_DSC05895.JPG Fig. 14A. An 1840 lithograph depicts the statue of George Washington by Antonio Canova in the North Carolina State- house that was destroyed by fire in 1831. Thomas Jefferson recommended the sculptor and suggested Washington be portrayed as a Roman soldier. Fig. 14B. The original plaster model of Canova's Washington was discovered in Italy in 1908 and two years later the king of Italy presented it to North Carolina. In 1970, Italian ar st Romano Vio used the model to sculpt this marble copy for the rotunda of the State Capitol. THE CAPITOL DOME SPRING 2014