104. George Washington. Jean-Antoine Houdon. 1788-1792 CE Marble.

• Form and Content
  • Washington is dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman with a Revolutionary War uniform
  • Military associations minimized: he wears only epaulets on his shoulders; the sword is cast to the side.
  • Naturalistic details: the missing button on his jacket and the tightly buttoned vest around a protruding stomach
  • Seen as a man of vision and enlightenment
  • Stance inspired by Polykleitos’s Doryphoros linking Washington with the great sculptures of the Renaissance and the ancient world.
• Materials
  • Marble, appreciated for its durability and luster, was used to associate the figure of Washington with the great sculptures of the Renaissance and the ancient world
• Function and Patronage
  • Commissioned by the Virginia legislature to stand at the center of the state capitol in Richmond, which was designed by Jefferson
  • Meant to commemorate the central position of Washington in the founding of American independence.
  • Installed in 1796, the year Washington published his farewell address
• Symbolism
  • The badge of Cincinnatus is on his belt: Washington was a gentleman farmer who left Mount Vernon to take up the American cause much as Cincinnatus from the Roman Republic left his farm to command Roman armies and then returned to the farm.
  • Washington leans on the Roman fasces: a group of rods bound together on the top and the bottom; the 13 rods symbolize 13 colonies united in a cause
  • Washington leans on the 13 colonies, from which he gets his support
  • Arrows between the rods likely refer to Native Americans or the idea of America as wild frontier
  • Plow behind Washington symbolizes his plantation as well as the plating of a new world order