by Francis Morrone
excerpted from: City Journal, Summer 1999, Vol. 9, No. 3

Almost from the time that cities first arose, their inhabitants have filled them with statues and monuments, as if such adornments were an essential ingredient of civilized urban life. The pages of Homer explain why: the Homeric heroes do noble deeds in the hope of winning honor and glory, the praise of their fellows and of posterity, which for the greatest actions will take the form of "a marble monument," in The Iliad's constantly recurring phrase. For the ancients, statues are the repository of civic memory, commemorating the great and good deeds that built the society. For every new generation, they spur the ambitious to emulate such deeds, and they define the virtues that the community thinks worthy of honor.

For millennia after the Homeric heroes vanished, leaving only their immortal memory, the Western world - New York included - carried on the tradition of monument making in this spirit. But in the years since World War II, the knack seems to have disappeared. The modernist aesthetic doesn't think much of decoration or of figurative sculpture. More important, today it is unfashionable, almost politically incorrect, to honor people so grandly. In our age of equality, we don't like the idea of heroes: we dwell more on the imperfections of our great men than on their uniqueness, and we believe that vast impersonal forces, rather than extraordinary individuals, are the makers of history. The spirit of the age, we like to think, called forth our historical personages; had it not happened to call George Washington, it would have called George Bloggs. And where our ancestors saw virtue, we tend to see hypocrisy: for example, was not Jefferson merely the man who, as a British poet sneered long ago, dreamt of freedom in a slave's embrace?

Yet when you consider that figurative, commemorative sculpture in public spaces goes back at least five millennia, and that the classical tradition of public statuary from which New York once so successfully drew goes back about two and a half millennia, you can't help thinking that the traditional forms are bound to reassert themselves someday. In the long run, a society can't flourish without vibrant public ideals and reverence for its heroes. New York's public life has greatly improved in the last few years in so many respects; in this climate, perhaps it's not too much to hope for a revival of the tradition of placing memorials and monuments in our streets and parks, to fill out the picture our forebears began... click here for more