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6 THE CAPITOL DOME awful voice echoes through the vault of heaven, in favor of the rights of man." Ceracchi's animated Statue of Liberty was the crowning piece of a monument that was to be, overall, sixty feet high, about fifty feet in diameter, and comprised of four more giant allegorical groups surrounding the original bronze equestrian statue of Washington. His six foot drawing of the monument was exhibited in public in a Philadelphia tavern in 1791, but is now lost. 7 Ceracchi never had the opportunity to carve his grandiose monument to American Liberty. After a vain attempt to win the favor of leading members of the Washington Adminis- tration and of Congress by carving their portraits (fig. 7), followed by a return to Europe, an exile from Rome, and another trip to America, his subscription plan to finance the ambitious monument failed. 8 Ceracchi's technical approach to carving the sixty-foot high monument is not known, but it is difficult to imagine the complexity of carving the baroque Liberty descending through volumes of marble clouds and a rainbow in a horse-drawn chariot at a time when the construction of the Capitol was not yet even begun. His hyperbolic vision of American Liberty died in 1795, and a handful of years later so did he. Marked by as great a pas- sion and hubris as exemplified his time in America, he lived his remaining years in Paris increasingly disenchanted with Napoleon's despotic usurpations, until he was implicated in an alleged assassination attempt against the "First Consul" in 1800. Perhaps some version of his chariot for the Capitol survived after all, in the triumphal chariot—said to be of his own design—that carried him to the guillotine early the next year. While on his first American venture, Ceracchi did carve in terracotta a colossal bust, Minerva as the Patroness of American Liberty, nearly six feet tall, which was placed behind the Speaker's dais in Congress Hall in 1792. Whether the Minerva was meant to be the Liberty is not clear, as in his own words, his Minerva figure occupied a lower place in the gigantic monument. Nor is Minerva integral to the design of this chamber. Because of its colossal scale, the bust was most likely intended to demonstrate the artist's ability to execute his giant monument. The composite photograph by the author (fig. 8) shows the Minerva, in scale, as it might have appeared in the House chamber. Minerva (fig. 9) was given to the Library Company of Philadelphia when Congress moved to Washington in 1800, and it remains there today. Fig. 6. Description of Giuseppe Ceracchi's proposed monument to the American Revolution (1795) PRINTED EPHEMERA COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Fig. 7. John Jay (terracotta, 1792), by Giuseppe Ceracchi COLLECTION OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES