Pedimental sculptures in the United States

Genius of America Pediment | Architect of the Capitol | United ...

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Pedimental sculptures in the United States - sculptures within the frame of a pediment on the exterior of a building. Pedimental sculptures pose special challenges to sculptors: the triangular composition limits the choices for figures or ornament at the ends, and the sculpture must be designed to be viewed both from below and from a distance.

Video Pedimental sculptures in the United States

History

Pedimental sculptures in the United States were rare prior to the 1880s, most surviving examples in cities along the east coast. The earliest seems to be Whitehall (1765), outside Annapolis, Maryland, attributed to English architect Joseph Horatio Anderson and English-born carver William Buckland. Greek Revival architecture was dominant throughout the first half of the 19th century, but almost always with chaste, blank pediments. It was only post-Civil War, with the advent of the American Renaissance and the City Beautiful movement - especially the architectural vision of "The White City" presented at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 - that the use of sculpture in pediments increased dramatically. The advent of the Great Depression of the 1930s largely brought the use of pediment sculpture to a halt, with the exception of federal government buildings in Washington, D.C.

Compositionally, the restrictions imposed by both the physical triangular shape of a pediment, and the traditional themes that are usually employed for the subject matter, are, according to Professor Gardner of Oxford University, "as exactly regulated as that of a sonnet or a Spencerian stanza:the artist has liberty only in certain directions and must not violate the laws of rhythm."

As with the ancient Greeks, and the Roman architects and sculptors who followed them, American artists had two different structural approaches creating pedimental sculpture. They are either freestanding statues that stand on the bed (the ledge or cornice that creates the bottom of the pediment), or they can be relief sculpture, attached to the back wall of the pediment.