The Capitol Dome

8 THE CAPITOL DOME Fig. 13. "American Army Entering the City of Mexico," scene #15 in the Frieze of American History ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL story, of barbarism giving way to civilization, must have been equally clear to the early generations of viewers of Brumidi's frieze. However, I suggest that another of Brumidi's scenes pro- vided the more pressing rationale for including Cortés and Mon- tezuma—one surprising to us, perhaps, but surely as obvious to late-nineteenth-century Americans as the hemispheric history of civilization's forward march. That scene was the fifteenth, "American Army Entering the City of Mexico," depicting U.S. troops taking possession of Mexico City in 1847 (fig. 13). The similarities between the two scenes overwhelm the differ- ences: in both, victorious, armed invaders enter from the left to take peaceful possession of the very same capital city. The parallel is inescapable: General Scott is Cortés, and General Santa Ana is Montezuma; the two acts of surrender in Mexico City echo, illuminate, and legitimize each other, representing resonant moments in the march of progress that is "American History." In Brumidi's lifetime, the Conquest of Mexico was very much on the minds of U.S. Americans and Mexicans, as the two carved out identities as independent nations, going to war with each other in the process. U.S. soldiers carried copies of William Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico on their march from Veracruz to Mexico City. The war made the book, pub- lished a few years before, a bestseller. It did the same for a special wartime edition of Robert Montgomery Bird's Cala- var; or The Knight of the Conquest: A Romance of Mexico, whose new preface compared Scott to Cortés, reminding read- ers that both invaded "the same most magnificent of valleys" with equal "daring intrepidity," facing the same "petty forces." U.S. soldiers wrote home that they were walking in the foot- steps of the great Cortés. Americans started calling their war "the Second Conquest," and Scott asked Prescott to follow his book with one on "the second Mexican war." 6 William Jenkins Worth, one of the generals of the force that occupied Mexico City, later lionized as a war hero, was certainly taken by the apparent parallels between 1519 and 1847. During the occupation, the general had a copy made of the portrait of Cortés that he found hanging in the Hospital de Jesús—which Cortés had built on the site where he had first met Montezuma. The copy was sent to the First Lady, Sarah Childress Polk, who hung it in the White House until the Polks retired in 1849 to Tennessee (where the painting remains to this day; fig. 14). 7 The Cortés portrait was the basis for many published drawings of the conquistador, which Brumidi prob- ably saw. And although he was in Rome during the months the copy hung in the White House, he likely saw the original in Mexico City in 1854 (where he was painting both a "Trinity" for the cathedral and other religious-themed oil paintings) and heard about the copy when he settled in Washington, DC at the end of that year. Just as Brumidi made sketches of the Aztec Calendar Stone when he was in Mexico, incorporating them into his frieze's scene #3, so too did the Hospital de Jesús/ Polk portrait surely influence his own rendering of Cortés in the frieze. 8 Thus Brumidi did not include Montezuma's surrender to Cortés in his frieze simply because it happened (it did not) or because he believed it happened (he surely did, as did his peers). It was included because Montezuma's surrender was seen as a momentous example of barbarism accepting the pro- gressive march of civilization, a strong link in that chain of "American" history, reflecting how the United States sought to build itself and promote its legitimate place in the world. CoMpleting the CirCle Brumidi was highly active in the Capitol, busy for decades creating works of art throughout the building, including the massive Apotheosis of Washington. The work of painting the Frieze of American History did not begin until 1877, so it was unfinished when the Italian died three years later. His assistant, Filippo Costaggini, painted the eight scenes that

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