TitleMichaelangelo
Artist
Paul Wayland Bartlett
(American, 1865 - 1925)
Daten.d.
MediumBronze
DimensionsOverall: 21 × 12 1/2 × 13 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, January 22, 1918
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number9-S
Label TextIn January 1894, John Q. A. Ward, Olin Warner, and Augustus Saint Gaudens met with General Thomas L. Casey, chief engineer of the United States Army, to discuss appropriate sculpture for the interior of the new Library of Congress building in Washington. Twenty-four full-length statues were decided upon, to be divided between eight allegorical female figures in staff representing Religion, Commerce, History, Art, Philosophy, Poetry, Law, and Science and sixteen bronze statues of men famous for their contributions in those fields. Paul Bartlett was initially assigned the figures of Columbus and Law but, when George Gray Barnard failed to agree on a contract, the figure of Michelangelo was also given to Bartlett.Michelangelo was destined for one of the gallery railings above the main reading room at the Library, paired with Theodore Baur's Beethoven. After some delay, Bartlett's figure was finally completed in 1898, and installed on Christmas Day that year. Edwin Blashfield, in the memorial to Bartlett entered into Academy minutes, remembered that the Michelangelo was "just a bit bigger than the other statues" done for the Library.
Bartlett was evidently proud of the work for he showed models or casts of it at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and at the Saint Louis Exposition in 1904. A plaster cast of the head alone was included in the Bartlett Memorial Exhibition of 1931. Royal Cortissoz noted in the catalogue of that exhibition that the work was "a really brilliant evocation of personality. There is something about the head to suggest, faintly, the seer, but chiefly I think Bartlett summons up the mundane presence of the great master, his originality and his terrific power."
n.d.
