Revolutionary governments in the US, France, Haiti and throughout Latin America faced a similar set of dilemmas about how to represent themselves in the absence of the familiar trappings of monarchy and aristocracy. Each unsteady new republic had to strike the right balance between simplicity and grandeur, to seem authoritative but not tyrannical, prosperous but not decadent, enlightened and modern, yet rooted in venerable tradition. When revolutionaries searched the past for non-monarchical models of civic life, the ancient Greek city-states and, to an even greater extent, the Roman Republic seemed like the only political legacy worth hearkening back to.
Much like the socialist realism of the 20th century, the neoclassicism of the Age of Revolution was an international political aesthetic that prized reason, humanism and universalism, while disdaining luxury, decadence and baroque abstraction. Like Marxism, with which it shares a great deal of its intellectual genealogy, the ideology of civic republicanism provided a secular, materialist, conflict-driven theory of history. It emphasised the drive of human beings to pursue their own self-interest, and saw the task of politics as balancing the interests of various classes and factions of society in order to achieve a common good. The associated artworks might appear either inspiring or thuddingly didactic, depending on one’s personal preferences. (Marble statues of Washington’s head on the buff body of Zeus and portraits of the Venezuelan revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar receiving a crown of laurel from the winged goddess of victory certainly have about the same level of subtlety as a Soviet propaganda poster.) But, for the civic republicans of the late-18th and early 19th centuries, a shared neoclassical aesthetic helped to render ideological abstractions such as ‘popular sovereignty’ or the ‘common good’ in a rich visual language of columned temples, urban masses, togaed senators and laurelled heroes. Neoclassicism lent the emerging democratic nation-state its first distinctive symbolic vocabulary – the public spectacle of the agora, updated for the age of print media and popular opinion.
One important example of such borrowed spectacle was the Roman triumph. In ancient Rome, a returning general would parade through the city with his spoils and captives in order to receive his ceremonial crown of laurel, a symbol of victory dating back to King Romulus. Upon his election to the presidency in 1789, Washington received a triumph as he passed through Philadelphia on the way to his inauguration in the temporary US capital of New York City. Designed by the portrait artist Charles Willson Peale, the ceremony featured Washington riding on horseback through a series of triumphal arches, with Peale’s own daughter waiting to drop the crown of laurel onto his head from above as he passed underneath.