Sacred Substantiations: Lincoln Casts and Statuary in the American Imagination

Authors

  • Ramey Mize University of Pennsylvania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2019.287

Abstract

On March 31, 1860, Abraham Lincoln waited in the studio of Leonard Wells Volk as a plaster mold hardened around his face and head. After one hour, Volk removed the mold; he later repeated the process for Lincoln’s hands. The resulting life casts elicited profound emotional reactions in those who saw them. Augustus Saint-Gaudens recognized and capitalized on their invaluable status as candid indexes of Lincoln’s likeness in his 1887 Chicago monument, Abraham Lincoln: The Man. In the words of sculptor Lorado Taft, “It does not seem like a bronze. . . . One stands before it and feels himself in the very presence of America’s soul.”

It was also Saint-Gaudens who amplified the casts’ influence through the manufacture of a prized series of thirty-three bronze replicas. The actual and imagined characteristics of these casts—their sense of possessing a “soul,” and their physical manifestation of Lincoln’s touch—all warrant consideration of their place within the larger tradition of holy relics. This paper posits the Lincoln casts as “contact relics” and establishes the generative potential of such a numinous categorization for American audiences, especially in the wake of the Civil War. Volk’s direct impressions of Lincoln’s visage and hands provided the “blueprints,” so to speak, for an astonishingly wide variety of sculptural manifestations—from the iconic Lincoln Memorial (1920) by Daniel Chester French to Abraham Lincoln (1917) by George Grey Barnard. This essay argues that the cultural impact of this sculptural genealogy is largely indebted to the casts’ material substantiations of Lincoln’s bodily presence and touch. Indeed, by situating these objects between medieval and modern modes of viewing, it will become clear that the casts, as progeny of the original life molds, afforded an affective, even remedial, authenticity for subsequent Lincoln monuments in the American imagination.

Author Biography

Ramey Mize, University of Pennsylvania

Ramey Mize is a doctoral student in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. From Atlanta, Georgia, she holds a BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The majority of her research and publications to date examine the intersection of nineteenth-century visual culture, war, and landscape across Europe and the Americas. Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Previously, she has served as the Anne Lunder Leland Curatorial Fellow at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, a Summer Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Center for American Art, and a Guest Curator and Curatorial Assistant at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

 

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Published

2019-10-30

How to Cite

Mize, R. . (2019). Sacred Substantiations: Lincoln Casts and Statuary in the American Imagination . Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 8, 39–56. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2019.287

Issue

Vol. 8 (2019): Yesterday's Contemporaneity: Finding Temporality in the Past

Section

Special Section: Motivating Monuments Symposium

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