Sentinel Quotes

“He might have addressed the same criticism to Billing's Monument to the Forefathers, which depicted a woman too severe and polite to be American. For the country - Bartholdi had realized on his journeys - was 'an adorable woman chewing tobacco.' America was a paradox; a beautiful woman with no manners; a filthy place filled with diabolic images of death and fire; but also one of pristine primordial nature and technological perfection; a place of moralism, but also of transgression. Eventually Bartholdi would have to confront this interpretation with Laboulaye's more idealistic portrait of the New World. But in the end, the Statue of Liberty, masculine and feminine, devilish and saintly at the same time, would be a close rendering of Bartholdi's original impression. She would not chew tobacco or smoke, but her build, her resolute face, her pose, and, as soon will be evident, her hidden weapon, would still betray much of the roughness that qualified and even characterized his vision of America as an 'adorable woman.”
― Francesca Lidia Viano, Sentinel: The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty