Tours of the United States Capitol begin in the rotunda between the chambers of the house and senate, where the guide first requests that visitors crane their necks toward the ceiling. What you see is a fresco called The Apotheosis of Washington (above), painted by the Greek-Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. The image consists of figures arrayed in two distinct and roughly concentric circles: the outer circle depicts labor in six domains—war, science, seafaring, commerce, industry, and agriculture—that include stout workers going about their business around a single god or goddess. The workers are ordinary Americans, but the gods and goddesses are classical, with the notable exception of “Freedom,” who is also the most prominent. The inner circle, separated from the outer circle by pastel clouds and a conspicuous rainbow, consists of sixteen additional figures. Thirteen are anonymous women, nymph-like, draped in as many shades of Roman cloth. They stand for the original colonies; a couple of them hold a banner that says E pluribus unum. The last two are goddesses of victory and liberty, between whom, outfit in military garb, bearing a sword in one hand and pointing to an open book with the other, is the first President of the United States. 

1. The Apotheosis is Kitsch

Abraham Lincoln commissioned Brumidi’s work in 1865 with the intention that it would be the crowning achievement for the Capitol’s new dome. Because he regarded the painting as a powerful symbol of federal democracy, Lincoln insisted that construction continue during the Civil War, and today promotional material suggests that you’re meant to look at the painting much as Lincoln hoped we would. But when Brumidi’s work is juxtaposed with the grand art-historical tradition to which it responds, it’s clear that The Apotheosis of Washington is strange. The painting has a baroque pedigree: the word “apotheosis” is Greek, meaning to become a god or godlike, and it was often translated into English, via Latin, as deification. Apotheoses were common for much of the early modern period, when paintings of miraculous events from biblical history tended to adopt deification as a trope. One such event is the transfiguration, the scene from the synoptic gospels where Christ appears with Moses and Elijah basked in rays of light. Another is the assumption, the doctrine which claims that Mary’s body (in addition to her soul) ascended to heaven upon her death. Many examples in this genre are extant, including altarpieces by Bellini, Vecchio, and Titian. 

Baroque artists tend to organize such images around the instant that deification occurs, as if to capture the god-to-be at the very moment of his or her departure for the heavens. Raphael produces the effect in Christ’s levitation, the way he floats above (but ever so close to) the ground; Titian does it with Mary’s partition of an otherwise continuous space, the way she seems to transcend her own scene, with clouds obscuring her body from the apostles who helplessly grasp for her robes. With outstretched arms and tilted heads, they lament that she has gone and covet the possibility that they might meet her in another realm. The scene generates a desire that is alluring precisely because it is impossible to satisfy: we are affected by such paintings to the extent that we are held at a tantalizing distance—often an arm’s length—from the gods we would worship. 

Apotheoses were admired by monarchs across the Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment, and you can see why: royalty needs the awe of its subjects, and Raphael’s and Titian’s paintings are nothing if not sublime. No surprise then that there were apotheoses for figures like James I, depicted by Rubens on the ceiling of Banqueting House at Whitehall. According to the political theory of the divine right of kings, monarchs derived their authority neither from the people nor from their representatives but rather from God Himself, who situated the king at the top of a natural order. If the emotional power of deification is that we learn to desire figures who stand above us along the great chain of being, then apotheoses could play a valuable role in making the political order seem inevitable and just. The perspective of the apotheosis—in which the viewer is situated among the disciples, and bears witness just as they do—gives itself to submission. Such iconography was a powerful tool for the ideological program of absolutism.

While apotheoses suit the hierarchical relationship between king and subject, they would seem inappropriate for the democratic relationship between citizen and citizen. There is an obvious conflict between the ideals of American politics and the story in The Apotheosis of Washington. The occasion calls for a deification of the people, and Brumidi gives us a deification of the President, balanced comfortably atop the clouds like the very king he was supposed to have banished. Just as the form is wrong for the content, the content is wrong for the form. No baroque artist would have mixed the sacred and secular so carelessly. An apotheosis demands a subject like a king or a saint; it’s a violation of decorum to deify someone of lesser status. As if to compound his own errors, Brumidi’s characters are dressed in an assortment of classical and colonial paraphernalia; its colors are bright and depthless; and the painting itself is a baroque fixture at the heart of a neoclassical city. Above and beyond any political agenda, then, the painting is simply confused. Washington presides over a scene that is sentimental and miscellaneaous. He’s a local deity of bad taste. The painting is kitsch.

Yet to acknowlede that The Apotheosis is kitsch may be to rally behind Brumidi. As a category of analysis, kitsch takes root in the modernist’s disdain for the emotions that people like to feel, and for the art—many wouldn’t even call it “art”—that makes people feel them. Even if the appeal of images like The Apotheosis lies in its elision of the office of the Presidency with that of the King, it nevertheless allows people to desire the unglamarous republic to which they belong. Whatever its flirtations with absolutism or monarchy, the Apotheosis seems to avail a mass audience of aesthetic experience. Faced with the challenge of reinventing the republic in the wake of the Civil War, the tastlessness of Brumidi’s Apotheosis may well be its value. If the painting is degenerative with respect to the European tradition, it may be generative of an American one, in which art is democratic to the extent that it provokes sentiments that everyone can access. 

2. The Apotheosis is Anti-Kitsch

Then again, if you tilt your head at the art-historical evidence, a different pattern begins to emerge. Two generations before Brumidi devised his plan for the rotunda, there was already a market for cheap hagiography of Washington. After his abdication of the office in 1796 and his death in 1799, Gilbert Stuart’s portrait—memorialized on the one-dollar bill—was used as a template for several popular prints. The simplest image was made by David Edwin in 1800 (next page, left). Washington rests on billowing clouds, an oddly muscular cherub poised to crown him. The president’s right hand graces his chest, his left hand opens skyward behind. Washington wears classical robes, meant to look Roman; he’s young, and his face has been elongated to connote valor and dignity. He appears to sit, but to sit unnaturally; if you look closely, his posture may be less relaxed than it is braced. 

More sophisticated and even more popular was the apotheosis of John James Barralet (above right) in 1802. In this image, Washington sits somewhat askew from center. Both arms jut out, like Christ on the cross. The problem of his motion has been resolved by the presence of angels, who bear him up and gesture toward a beam of light that appears from the opposite corner as their guide. You’ll notice that Barralet preserves what Edwin had omitted from the art-historical sources, that is the spatial bifurcation between the deified and the merely human. A mass of shrouded pilgrims, pastoral shepherds, and patriotic artifacts clutter the ground near Washington’s sepulcher. The posture and frame of the figure nearest Washington resemble the central figures in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego. There’s a sense in Barralet’s image, as in Poussin’s, that death is an augury of some kind. But Poussin’s painting is unnerving. There’s a dramatic irony in seeing paradise on the verge of being lost: when the kneeling shepherd attempts to read what’s on the tomb, it’s unclear that he’s able to make it out; he seems to see only his own shadow. Barralet’s sentiment, by contrast, is not so difficult to express. The figures who huddle around Washington are sad but resolute; they seem to take an uncomplicated comfort in the fact that Washington is graduating from president to patron saint. If this print is more art-historically literate than Edwin’s, it nevertheless falls short of what we might call self-consciousness. 

The taste for hagiography did not dissipate between 1800 and 1865. You can find countless examples of Washington’s apotheosis in popular culture throughout the century. Cheap prints hung in homes up and down the coast and deep in the territories, in schoolhouses and government offices. Evidently referring to this civil iconography, Gustave de Beaumont, who accompanied Alexis de Tocqueville to America, wrote that “Washington, in America, is not a man but a God.” Thus Brumidi’s Apotheosis of Washington is hardly a sui generis invention. If anything, Brumidi’s painting is an effort to remove an image from wide circulation and consecrate it on the Capitol ceiling. We can’t straightforwardly call this kitsch, but we obviously can’t call this the avant-garde either. How then to talk about the relationship between this painting and the print iconography from which it emerged?

While Brumidi’s unmistakable homage to a European tradition can’t help but fall into kitsch, his relationship to the American tradition is quite the opposite. According to Clement Greenberg, in his seminal essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” from 1939, the purpose of kitsch is to reduce the vexed or difficult expressions of high art into forms that are easily consummable. Although kitsch appeals to the lower and middle classes, it is distinct from folk art in that it’s reproduced on a mass scale. Greenberg tells us that we should expect to find kitsch where a market for commodified art has replaced the folk art that previously appealed to the lower and middle classes. That’s a compelling story, but it’s a story that’s native to Europe. In order for Greenberg’s analysis to hold water, it would have to be true that kitsch had leeched on like a parasite to a cultural history that began long before industrial capitalism. To shift your focus from Europe to America is to see kitsch in a different light. In the colonial settlements of Anglophone North America, what could conceivably be called a “national culture” matured alongside a market for cheap popular print. A consequence of this is that it’s difficult to find art that meaningfully predates the capacity for mass reproduction. As often as not, public art like The Apotheosis makes its claim on us not by degenerating into the commodity form, as Greenberg worried, but by pretending to have risen above it. What we find in the United States Capitol is something like anti-kitsch: a process of reverse appropriation, the removal of cultural artifacts from iconography endogenous to the marketplace. When Brumidi set himself the task of deifying George Washington on the renovated Capitol, his task was less the academic imitation of high art than it was the consecration, the elevation, of a genre with mass appeal. The painting is an apotheosis of Washington; in another sense, an apotheosis of popular culture. 

At least kitsch makes possible a felt connection to a suite of icons that amount to a civil religion. It has a value, and that’s a value that looks especially harmless in a time when our civil religion has already lost so much of its purchase. Anti-kitsch responds to a different need, and makes possible a different effect. It has no value, apart from that which accrues to the governing class, which asserts itself by claiming the authority to decide what of popular culture is good and what is not. And of course, popular culture that’s been lifted above the people is not popular culture at all. 

3. Iconography in the Age of Capture

There is a reason no one bothers with The Apotheosis of Washington today. For those who care about aesthetics, the painting is boring, just one more datum in the sociology of American culturelessness; for those care about politics, it fails to stir any emotion at all, apart from anger at the ease with which the resources of psychic life are seized and stripped bare. Brumidi’s fresco is degenerative with respect to baroque art, and it’s degenerative with respect to civil religion.

In recent years, right wing circles have given rise to an iconography that promises to thwart the kind of reification that I’ve called “anti-kitsch.” Representative of this new iconography is the painter Jon McNaughton, who came to prominence with The Forgotten Man, a depiction of the white male’s despondency at the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act. It is no exaggeration to say that McNaughton is the best-known contemporary painter in America: his images circulate widely online and also on cable television, where they reach an audience usually ignored by the microtargeted advertisements of the culture industry. (I first saw The Forgotten Man while watching Fox News with my grandparents.)

The greatest entry in McNaughton’s oeuvre may be his most recent, Crossing the Swamp, which is a pastiche of Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. Leutze, who came from the same generation of artists as Brumidi, painted Washington as an ideal of the soldier-prince. His rendition of the scene indexes Washington’s fitness for the role he was about to play in American history at the level of composition. Even the future President’s stance is heroic: given the icy water through which his retinue was traveling, it would have been impossible for him to stand with one foot lodged at the bottom of the rowboat and the other propped up near the bow. Otherwise he is poised and attractive: the position of his arms mirrors that of his legs, the limb nearest the viewer locked at a right angle in order that his velvet glove can clutch his velvet cape, and his hips open toward the viewer, a sword hanging suggestively from his coat. Meanwhile Washington himself seems entirely indifferent to his own appeal, for his gaze is directed straight ahead. His face appears in perfect profile, turned precisely ninety degrees from us, such that we see nothing more or less than his left eye and the outline of his brow, nose, and chin. Behind him, the future president James Monroe bears a faded, oversized flag that threatens to blow away in the blustery weather. Around him, a crew of boyish and handsome oarsmen, diverse as the original colonies, propels the boat toward Trenton, where Washington and his forces would turn the tide of the Revolutionary War.

Even at his most hagiographic, McNaughton doesn’t project such confidence in his subjects. Crossing the Swamp lacks the verisimilitude that a good historical painter like Leutze would have required. Leaving aside the fact that McNaughton has introduced a swamp along the mall in Washington, D.C., the painting suffers from a notable lack of depth. Whereas Leutze centers Washington by a fleet of rowboats that extend behind him and toward the horizon, McNaughton’s composition is flat, and Trump has none of Washington’s vigor or resolve. Although the president is conspicuously fit, having traded his oversized suit for a bomber jacket and baseball cap—the same faux-military paraphranelia he wears to speak with troops in combat zones—Trump is far from heroic. He is too rigid to pull off a passable imitation of Washington’s posture: with one hand he holds a lantern that illuminates nothing, while the other floats aimlessly nearby, as if ready to grasp what the first hand might be expected to drop. Trump’s insecurity registers in the expressions of the crew as well. Rather than Leutze’s determined and ambitious oarsmen, McNaughton gives us select members of Trump’s administration and family, dressed in camouflage and armed with shotguns, like the yokels they are. They don’t look forward, toward some destination, but at the alligators that have circled the boat from all sides. In the painting’s curiously dimensionless space, threats to the crew are everywhere. There is no particular shore the boat needs to reach because there is no particular space where Trump will be safe from danger. McNaughton’s painting is not a scene of heroism but a scene of horror. 

The difference between McNaughton’s depiction of Trump and Leutze’s of Washington doesn’t come down to ability alone. Crossing the Swamp is an exemplary representation of the conservative mind at work. No Apotheosis could come from the right wing these days, and especially not from popular conservatives like McNaughton. In the past few years, faith in the goodness (indeed the virility) of federal institutions has been the sole prerogative of liberals. Although conservatives hold power, it is liberals who trust the organs of government; although conservatives have shaped the past forty years of American history, it is liberals who insist that its arc bends toward justice. In order to find something as triumphant as Brumidi’s fresco, you’d have to look at figures like Ed and Brian Krassenstein, darlings of the #resistance, who recently published a children’s book with a shirtless Robert Mueller as its protagonist. (Mueller was the special counsel for the investigation of Russian interference of the 2016 election. He’s also a registered Republican, having served as director of the FBI under George W. Bush, in which capacity he testified before congress on the eve of the Iraq War that his “particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material.”) 

The right wing, meanwhile, has grown obsessed with increasingly arcane fantasies of persecution. Conservative media tells its audience that their world is under siege from threats both invisible and pervasive. Against the patriotic triumphalism we tend to associate with Ronald Reagan, conservatives have turned toward despair and abjection. The difference between Washington and Trump, then—or between Leutze and McNaughton—is their sense of destination. Leutze is the same artist who gave us Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, after all; it would have been natural for him to imagine Washington’s victory at Trenton as one step in the continual march toward an inevitable end: first independence, then expansion, and finally imperium. But today’s reactionary base is no longer interested in the exercise of power; they are interested in the forces (real or imaginary) that make their exercise of power so desperately unsatisfying. Trump is not the President because conservatives think he’s strong or tough; he’s the President because he compulsively performs the same paranoia as his voters. 

Beleaguered and contemptible, conservative artists have ushered in a new stage of the dialectic between kitsch and anti-kitsch. In earlier times, it was easy for politicos in D.C. to appropriate the stock patriotism that appeals to the lower and middle classes and use it to win support for policies that otherwise would have fallen flat outside the beltway. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were made possible by omnipresent images of New York City’s firefighters searching through the rubble of the twin towers; Obama’s bailout of Wall Street was made possible by a media that treats its richest financial institutions as a synonym for its entire economy. It goes without saying that D.C.’s appropriation of stock patriotism is only ever meant to disenfranchise the already disenfranchised. The process of turning kitsch into anti-kitsch humiliates the very people who are moved by such things. What painters like McNaughton have discovered is that it’s impossible to be humiliated when you perform that humiliation from the start. Conservatives have invented an iconography that’s difficult to appropriate precisely because it anticipates the way it will be turned against them. The paradox of contemporary politics is that reactionary forces have been mobilized in the United States not despite but rather because of their hatred for the same institutions they lead.

In his funny and poignant travelogue, American Notes, Charles Dickens wrote that Washington, D.C. “is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances”—because of the width and breadth of its planned boulevards and town squares and traffic circles—“but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions.” Dickens reserves a lot of his book for censure of popular culture in America, particularly the middlebrow sentimentalization of slavery. But in this passage he has a different target in mind, not the folk prejudices of a lumpenproletariat but the elite pretensions of a city that would set itself above them. To walk in and around the Capitol, across the Mall, up through the new apartment buildings and luxury shopping centers funded by oil money from the Gulf, to rub shoulders with lawyers and consultants and hill staffers, is to confirm Dickens’s assessment. What’s intolerable about Washington, D.C. is the persistent idea that in order for American culture to carry on, it is the residents of this city—which holds so much of America in contempt—that will have to save it. The most magnificent distances in Washington, D.C. are those between its stated intentions and its ability to fulfill them.