The Capitol Dome

9 THE CAPITOL DOME Fig. 14. This 1848 copy made for First Lady Sarah Childress Polk of the colonial- period portrait of Cortés in the Hospital de Jesús in Mexico City hung in the White House (1848–49) and then in Polk homes. remained from Brumidi's drawings, taking the story to the Gold Rush. But a miscalculation of measurements left a 30-foot gap. That mistake was viewed as fortuitous in the twentieth cen- tury, as it permitted the Capitol's great muralist of the era, Allyn Cox (1896–1982), to add three more scenes. Masterfully imitating Brumidi's style (as Costaggini had done, but this time with out benefit of Brumidi's sketches), Cox added "Peace at the End of the Civil War" and a scene from the Spanish-American War. 9 (It is notable that Cox did not chose to echo Brumidi's em- phasis on surrenders or peaceful but uneven en- counters; the peace of 1865 is presented as one between equals.) Cox then ended the frieze with the Wright brothers and the "Birth of Aviation." Because of the frieze's circularity, Wilbur Wright is thus adjacent to Columbus, separated only by an allegorical female "America," who was Brumidi's original first scene. (The Wright- Columbus comparison was frequently made in the twentieth century, often updated since 1969 to pair the Genoese navigator with Neil Armstrong. 10 ) This century's visitors to the Capitol can gaze up to see Columbus and the Wrights virtually side by side, just as they can see the mirrored pairs, across the Rotunda from each other, of Cortés and Scott, Montezuma and Santa Ana. The impression of the monu- mental weight of great events, of a predestined sequence of past moments, of facts carved in stone, is irresistible. Yet the frieze is not carved in stone. It is a mural, painted in sepia-toned grisaille, a fresco of whites and browns designed to look like stone. Likewise, the frieze depicts a series of encoun- ters that actually took place, but those encoun- ters are styled and juxtaposed to eliminate their ambiguities and complexities, all in the service of a greater message. Thus the frieze's use of content, like its technique of composition, is an artful trick (literally, trompe l'oeil). We can let ourselves be fooled and accept Montezuma's surrender to Cortés as a fact carved in stone. Or we can open our eyes to the spectacular trickery of a lie that has lived for five hundred years— right beneath our eyes, or, in the case of the frieze, over our heads. PRESIDENT JAMES K. POLK HOME AND MUSEUM, COLUMBIA, TN MATTHEW RESTALL is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and Director of Latin American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his PhD from UCLA in 1992 and has since pub- lished some twenty books and fifty articles and essays on aspects of the history of the Mayas, of the African diaspora in Spanish America, and of the Spanish Conquest period. His best-known book, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003), is available in six languages. His forthcoming book, titled The Meeting, is on Cortés, Montezuma, and the wars surrounding their first encounter in 1519. He will be resident in Washington, DC for part of 2017 as a Kislak Fellow at the Library of Congress.

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