Renaissance Rome and Emersonian Boston: Michelangelo and Sargent, between triumph and doubt

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2002 by Shand-Tucci, Douglass

Art Review Article

In 1896, when he first encountered the grandeur of the Boston Public Library's Sargent Hall-a gallery that takes its name from John Singer Sargent's resplendent mural cycle there, The Triumph of Religion-Ernest Fenollosa, the legendary curator of Japanese art, found the earliest murals evocative of Michelangelo's at the Vatican. Twenty years later, another critic, F. W. Coburn, pronounced the library's majestic, barrel-vaulted gallery, nearly a hundred feet long and two stories high, by 1916 all but filled with Sargent's nearly completed murals, an American Sistine Chapel. Both were right, according to Sally M. Promey, a University of Maryland art historian and author of a splendid and surely definitive new book1 about the murals, a book all the more welcome because it may have helped shame the library's trustees (who have lately been unthinkingly trashing parts of the building that, at great expense, they not so long ago restored) into at last doing something about the grime-coated and ill-lit gallery that enshrines Sargent's murals, surely the building's greatest artistic treasure.

What else call Sargent Hall? Its paintings are the response of a great American master, at the beginning of what has been called the American Renaissance, to Michelangelo's and Raphael's work at the height of the Italian Renaissance, work Sargent saw as "the quintessential mural cycles of western art," and which he went on, in Promey's words, to "assimilate and substantially rework aspects of, [setting] up Rome and the Vatican in particular as the artistic and religious foil for his Boston enterprise." Although it is more for his brilliant portraits and watercolors than for his murals that Sargent has been most widely celebrated, Promey's new study is the strongest indication yet that the library murals are gaining in critical estimation, despite the failure of Sargent's original conception of Sargent Hall, which he ultimately abandoned after his last work there had aroused considerable controversy Seen in the context of the great sweep of Western history Boston is ever, historically, the Puritan and then the Emersonian capital, as Rome is forever the imperial and then the papal capital, and no less than papal Rome for the Renaissance masters, Emersonian Boston offered Sargent at the library complicated times, demanding patronage, and striking opportunity.

The artist began thinking about the Boston Public Library in 1890, on the eve of what was certainly to be, whether or not it was any kind of Renaissance, the American century. It was an era when New York was rapidly coalescing into the nation's preeminent commercial and cultural center, Washington becoming more and more important as the country's governmental capital, and Boston, long thought the American Athens, consolidating its own resources so as to assert itself in the new century as the country's intellectual capital-the last assertion by no means as inevitable-seeming then as now; the idealism of the "city on a hill" Emerson declared fated to -lead the civilization of North America" had somewhat stalled in the post-Civil War era. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for example, distinctly disillusioned, remarked after the war, according to Louis Menand, that, finally, he saw that Boston and the U.S. were not the same; Boston was not, as his father had thought, the measure of all things. Yet what Holmes Junior hardly saw, of course, was that he himself would be a luminary of a new, greater Boston, the role of which in the national life Menand has delineated well in his recent book, The Metaphysical Club. Its title derives from an obscure club that met for only a few months in Old Cambridge in 1872, its leaders three Bostonians-- Holmes, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce. These and their disciple, John Dewey (a more conservative "Vermont Transcendentalist" as opposed to the other more Emersonian "Boston Transcendentalists"), Menand calls "the first modern thinkers in the U.S."

Culture, commerce, government, and intellect being so intertwined, both Boston and Washington, to assert their respective ambitions effectively, would also have (in Boston's case) to sustain and (in Washington's) to stake out-in such places as the National Gallery and the Kennedy Center later in the century-a strong claim to rival, if not always to best, New York's new dominance in the purely cultural realm. For Boston this too was no easy task at a time when its literary repute was in decline and its fame as a musical capital not yet quite coalesced; witness so embarrassing a failure as the bankruptcy, within less than a decade of its founding in 1909, of the once-- renowned Boston Opera Company, despite the building of a grand new opera house. In the city's successes, however, at this time, Sargent played a conspicuous part. All his murals, though he was at the height of his international fame, were in Boston, and each glorified some landmark or other of its gathering galaxy of institutions. Of that galaxy's top tier only the new Boston Symphony Orchestra (perhaps because thought of as more an affair of the ear than the eye), and the more scientific than artistic Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital, got away from Sargent. The three that didn't, all of which erected vast becolumned landmarks in this period, were Widener Library, the largest university library in the world, symbolic of Harvard's new ambitions to world rank; the new Museum of Fine Arts, an outgrowth of the venerable Boston Athenaeum and the first to be founded of America's great city art museums; and the new building of the Boston Public Library, itself the first library supported by direct taxation in any major city of Europe or America.