A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Cultural Studies of the United States)
by Charles Colbert
from The University of North Carolina Press
Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developments in the period. He goes on to reveal the links between the tenets of phrenology and the cultural ideals of Jacksonian democracy.
As Colbert demonstrates, virtually every important figure of the American Renaissance expressed some opinion of phrenology, whether or not they embraced it. Its proponents included many artists eager to support a cause that enhanced the status of their profession by endowing the human form with extraordinary significance.
Colbert reviews the careers of Hiram Powers, William Sidney Mount, Harriet Hosmer, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole, among others, in light of their responses to phrenology. Powers's Greek Slave, for example, can be seen as a model of the physical and moral perfection available to those who adopted the phrenological program, a series of dictates on everything from diet to mental and physical exercise. By creating portraits, genre scenes, ideal figures, and even landscapes that embodied the theory's teachings, Colbert shows, artists endeavored to enlist their audience in a crusade that would transform the nation.
A defence of Powers' statue of Webster;: Being the substance of remarks made on the 8th of June, 1859, at a meeting of the general Committee of One Hundred on the Webster Memorial
Hiram Powers' Paradise lost
REGIONALISM AND REFORM: ART AND CLASS FORMATION IN ANTEBELLUM CI (URBAN LIFE & URBAN LANDSCAPE)
by WENDY JEAN KATZ
from Ohio State University Press
The original and authentic Madonna dell'Impannata by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino has been in America since 1843: Is the celebrated "Impannata" in the Pitti Palace in Florence a copy?
Flowery A.L.S. to sculptor Hiram Powers.
Hiram Powers; The Last of the Tribes; October 5 Through 21, 2000.
Slavery in the territories: Speech of Hon. Hiram Warner, of Georgia, delivered in the House of Representatives, April 1, 1856, on the power of the general ... exclude slave property from the territories
The Greek slave (The Museum)
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