








ct and connoisseur of that city, who immediately recognized Washington by his prominent nose.
Ceracchi's bust of Washington the terra cotta original is in the Nantes Museum in France shows that this sculptor
      is above all valuable as a portraitist, quick to seize the resemblance, to put in relief the characteristic traits of a person, capable of finesse in details, but unable to bring out completely the individuality of his models. The reason for this being that he put his gift of shrewd observer at the service of an aesthetic resolutely opposed to the portrait nd vivum. Having given life to his portraits, he then gives them lifeless eyes, a conventional posture, corresponding to a Greek-Roman type and with accessories from classical times. Faithful to reality at first, he then clothes his Portraits with conventional idealization. In this, he be-ongs to the spirit of the times, which demanded rhetoric.
is style which also corresponds to his own personality 0 Proud theoretician, imbued with republicanism.4
Born in Rome on July 5, 1751, son of Domenico, a 8  smith, Giuseppe Ceracchi studied at the Accademia 01 san Luca and received a prize in 1771. At this time he to have adopted Neoclassical aesthetics. He * * ^an' Florence, and London, where he exe-,e Several important monuments and portrait busts, sh Ud*g one Sir Joshua Reynolds. Ceracchi's work a combination of the nobility of Roman busts and expression suggested by his French conf POrar^; he was also extremely faithful to the model s Ter^V  Vienna, in 1779, he worked for Empress Maria Card $ i to Rome, he did the portrait busts of Meta t S	and Rinunaldi, as well as one of the poet
but n 10' ^ginally destined for the Pantheon in Rome  W the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome. In Berlin
36.	Early Italian Sculptors he did the portrait bust of Frederick II and in Amsterdam began the monument to Baron Van der Capellen, which, unpaid for, was to end up at the Pincio Garden in Rome' Ceracchi arrived in America with his family in 1791. He brought with him a project for an equestrian monument to George Washington. This monument was to be a group sculpture sixty feet high with a base circumference of eleven colossal statues, six smaller statues of animals and other ornaments, the whole in marble together with a bronze equestrian statue of the hero set on a large pedestal. The model of this monument was publicly exhibited in Philadelphia. Since the Continental Congress had voted for the erection of a monument to Washington, Ceracchi had come to bid for the commission. However, the sum of $30,000 was considered too large, and private subscriptions were not successful in raising the sum. The project was put off until after the death of the General.
It was left to another Italian, Enrico Causid, to execute the first Washington Monument in Baltimore in 1829. The commission for the Washington Monument in Raleigh, North Carolina, was given to Antonio Canova, who used the Ceracchi portrait bust for his larger-than-life Washington, portrayed in the dress of a Roman General and writing on a tablet; the inscription read: "Giorgio Washington al popolo degli Stati Uniti 1796 Amici e Concittadini."
Canova's statue arrived in November 1821 and was placed in the Raleigh State House. According to Craven, it was one of the most famous works of art in America, and "it played a large role in establishing monumental marble statuary in America."5 Unfortunately it was destroyed by fire in 1830.
Ceracchi had brought art objects to present prominent Americans, induding Washington, who felt obliged to refuse the gift because of his public office.
Ceracchi is considered, with the exception of Houdon, to be the greatest sculptor ever to have visited America. He modeled about two dozen busts of American founding fathers. Leaving America at the end of 1792 with his terra cotta casts as well as the model for the equestrian statue, he planned to carve them in marble in Italy. Ulysse Desportes, Ceracchi's biographer, wrote:
A treasure trove of extraordinary interest to students of early American art and history may wait unrecognized in some storeroom in Florence. Over two dozen life portrait busts of America's founding fathers were left m the Tuscan capital by their author, Giuseppe Ceracchi, Roman sculptor and political exUe. The busts, m terra cotta, were madded in the United States in T791-1792. Among the distinguished subjects represented were the first four presidents of the Republic, as weU as Alexander Hamilton Sal Henry Knox and David Rittenhouse. Ceracchi hadbeen obliged to abandon them in Florence when he S from the city under pressure from the local authon-  X left& Us to model to   monument to George Washington.6
ceracchi returned to the United States in 1794, bringing X 2 marble busts of Washington and some of hrs other American portraits.
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7. THE ETHNIC LEGACY
Ceracchi next began a project for a colossal group honoring the goddess Liberty. In his Prospectus, he wrote that Liberty was to be represented
. . . descending in a chariot drawn by four horses, darting through a volume of clouds which conceal the summi of a rainbow. Her form is at once expressive of dignity and peace. In her right hand she brandishes a flaming dart, which dispels the mists of error and ffluminates the universe; her left is extended in the attitude of calling upon the people of America to listen to her voice.
The project was dismissed, however, only to be realized about a century later, with a number of attempts made during the interval.
Meanwhile, Ceracchi became very busy doing busts of Jefferson, Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Alexander Hamilton. Desportes said of the Hamilton bust: "probably no example of neoclassical portrait sculpture ever proved to be as successful as this one." After Hamilton's tragic death in 1801, this bust enjoyed great commercial success, with hundreds of copies being executed. A thirty-cent U.S. stamp of 1870 carried Hamilton's bust by Ceracchi; in fact the bust has served as a modd for most, if not all, the effigies of Hamilton. The painter John Trumbull, who had known Ceracchi and done his portrait, painted his Hamilton from Ceracchi's bust, and an engraving based on that portrait can be seen on our ten-dollar bill.7
On December 29, 1794, Ceracchi attended a meeting arranged by Charles Willson Peale to plan for the establishment of an academy in Philadelphia, then the foremost artistic center, where the arrival of a number of experienced painters and engravers (mostly from England) made the idea of an American academy seem possible. The agreement, adopted and signed by sixty-two artists, expressed the desire "to do our utmost effort to establish a school or academy within the U.S. to be called the Columbianum, or American Academy of Fine Arts." However, here the agreement faltered. The group split between the newly arrived artists from England, who proposed to offer honorary leadership to George Washington, thereby putting him in the same position as the King of England in regard to the Royal Academy, and the native artists, who felt the idea abhorrent. Ggrarrhi, "disputatious, sharp, uncompromising, heart and soul for freedom and democracy/'8 was among the most vehement in protest.
Upon his return to France, Ceracchi became a very good friend of Napoleon, then a young general, of whom he did the first portrait bust, now known only in an engraving. He hoped that Napoleon would help him in his dream of freeing the Papal states and eventually the whole of Italy from foreign rule and bring about a democratic Italian republic. However, when Napoleon proclaimed himself first consul-obviously betraying the democratic ideal Ceracchi cherished above art and life-he took part in a conspiracy against him. By a strange coincidence, John Vanderlyn, one of the first native Amer ican artists to go to Europe to study, was in Paris on his
way to Rome when Ceracchi, "the celebrated set and his three companions were publicly guillotii January 31,1801. Vanderlyn witnessed the executi was greatly moved, describing deaths in a tribute bravery of these lovers of freedom.9
We have seen Ceracchi at home in America, wl found his dream of freedom a reality. Eager to port founding fathers, he applied his ideals of Neoc purity and severity to his portrait busts and mont plans. But America, into which he brought a st; was to last for the next seventy years, was not r give its financial support to the artist and his large Even those who posed for their portraits found it that they should pay for them.
Ceracchi, so celebrated during his life and cor second only to Canova, sank into oblivion. Foi century he was remembered chiefly because of h death, or else he was dismissed rather contemptu unstable. Some art historians even were in error a birthplace; as late as 1970, he was said to have be in Corsica. A general confusion has existed regar works. Only recently, the art historian Desportes historian, De Felice,10 have told the full story. We Ceracchi as an extraordinary product of that era o nate ideals of democracy and freedom.
The parallels between Ceracchi and Vittork (1749-1803), Italy's foremost tragic playwright, v almost an exact contemporary of Ceracchi, are irn Like Ceracchi, Alfieri was an enthusiastic ad: George Washington, to whom, in 1787, he dedic tragedy Brute Primo:
To the illustrious and free man, General Washington: Only the name of the liberator of America can stand before the tragedy of the liberator of Rome.
A presentation copy of the play, bearing Was! signature on the page on which the dedication I in the Boston Athenaeum. Alfieri had already h American Revolution with a group of five odes, 1 Libera (1781-1783).
However, it is the Brute Secondo, the play 2 conspiracy against Caesar, which might have Ceracchi. "I believe firmly that in the theater mf learn to be free, strong, generous, zealous fol true virtue . . . devoted to their country . .     their emotions and enthusiasms ardent, upri magnanimous,"11 Alfieri had written. We do i whether these two great Italians, both restless c lious against the foreign rulers of their country, travelled extensively around Europe, ever met. 1 ble, however, that on fearlessly climbing the Ceracchi's thoughts were on Alfieri's Brutus.
Ceracchi was not the first Italian sculpto national monuments in the United States. Th' Montgomery in St. Paul Church, New York cuted in 17//, is considered the first national n
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in this country, and it is the work of Caffieri. Other Italians who did Washington portraits (though not from life) were Trentanove, from the Stuart portrait, and Antonio Capellano, in 1828. Capellano also did the marble sculpture for the Battle Monument by Godefroy in Baltimore and probably many other works, not yet identified, for he was able to retire in wealth to a "small palace" in Florence, where his friend Rembrandt Peale, the painter, visited him in 1831.
Had Ceracchi stayed in the United States, he would surely have been called to decorate the U.S. Cap
