AA-2026-06FAA5
On the image
Somewhere in the 1950s, a tourist pointed a camera upward at a large allegorical marble figure — the kind that nineteenth-century civic institutions commissioned to make visitors feel they were in the presence of something permanent and serious, usually Justice or Victory or the Nation Herself, dressed in Roman costume to signal that the ideals on display had been around since antiquity. The statue holds a shield and a spear and wears a plumed helmet, which was the standard equipment for conveying that abstract virtues were also, when necessary, willing to fight. A small cluster of visitors sits in the background beneath the arched alcove, dwarfed in precisely the way the building's architect intended, because the whole point of putting a twelve-foot allegorical woman in your lobby was to make the human beings filing past feel appropriately modest. The sconce lighting flanking the niche was added at some point in the electric era, doing its best to make gaslit grandeur look like it had always been this convenient. What the tourists in the background made of the experience is not recorded, but they sat down, which is the universal signal that a building has successfully made its point.
Visually related — by likeness
Classical Marble Figure, Plumed Helmet and Shield, Public Interior, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-06FAA5. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/classical-marble-figure-plumed-helmet-and-shield-public-interior-1950s.
@misc{aaAA202606FAA5,
title = {Classical Marble Figure, Plumed Helmet and Shield, Public Interior, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-06FAA5},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/classical-marble-figure-plumed-helmet-and-shield-public-interior-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Classical Marble Figure, Plumed Helmet and Shield, Public Interior, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-06FAA5 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/classical-marble-figure-plumed-helmet-and-shield-public-interior-1950s ER -
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