Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1180196
10 THE CAPITOL DOME his work on the Capitol have been transcribed, until this recent study of S-127 the last name of that artist/author remained undeciphered, because the transcriber was not familiar with the various nineteenth-century art- ists/authors who had published volumes on Pompeii, and so the shorthand made no sense to him. A recent re-evaluation of Meigs's entry from that day reveals that the artist/author's last name was indeed "Zan" (Pitman's is phonetic, so Meigs's characters only spell out the sound of our German artist's last name). Thus, we now know that Meigs was comparing Brumidi's completed S-127 to Zahn's volume: "The Pompeian rooms are better than the examples from Pompeii in the book of Zahn." Thus, based on iconographic evidence for the artist and archival documentation for the patron, it seems that both artist and patron knew and consulted this famous, colorful, contem- porary publication of Pompeian decorative painting. BRUMIDI AND THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COPY OF ZAHN'S PUBLICATION But how did Brumidi (and Meigs) have access to Zahn's lavish (and no doubt expensive) publication? It is most likely that this artist and patron team were consulting the copy owned by the Library of Congress and still in the collections to this day (fig. 13). Though we no longer have acquisition records for the Library from the first half of the nineteenth century, new research on the history of the Library of Congress' copy of Zahn's Volume 1 shows that the Library owned the volume by 1856, when Brumidi must have submitted his proposal for the room (approved by Meigs on 20 August 1856). 10 Careful examination of the folio itself along with some archival research helps to reconstruct the history of the Library's copy of Zahn's Volume 1 from publication until the time of Brumidi. From its frontispiece, we know that the copy was pub- lished in Berlin in 1829. But when did the volume make its way from Berlin to Washington? Important information about the history of this copy of the volume comes from a blind stamp embossed on the frontispiece. This stamp reads in German, "VERTRAG VOM 13. MAI 1846" or "Contract of 13 May 1846" (referring to a convention signed on that date) and relates to what has been called "the first international copyright law." This law was established between the kingdom of Prussia and the United Kingdom and "extended British copyright privileges to imported Prussian works, at the same time reducing import duty on them." 11 Other mem- bers of the Prussian Customs Union soon followed suit, and we have evidence that Saxony and Brunswick partici- pated in the convention as well. One article of the conven- tion requires that a stamp containing the text above and a symbol established by responsible authorities be put in all books exported to the United Kingdom. The stamp in the Library of Congress copy of Zahn features the sym- bol of Saxony (which is not surprising, because the city of Leipzig was a major center of the German book trade in this period). Therefore, the presence of this stamp in the Library of Congress copy of Zahn's Volume 1 tells us that though it was printed in Berlin in 1829, this particular copy was exported from Saxony to the United Kingdom after 1 September 1846 (when the convention went into effect). Two further pieces of evidence provide information about the Library of Congress' acquisition date. First, a purple stamp also on the frontispiece of the volume reads "Library of Congress / City of Washington." Not only are there plenty of parallels for this stamp being used Fig. 12. Comparison of (left) Nereid Riding Sea Panther, 1st c A.D. Villa Arianna, Stabiae and (right) Zahn, Die schönsten Ornamente, Vol. 1, pl. 64, Nereid riding a sea panther seen by Zahn in the Real Museo Borbonico in Naples