Amor Caritas

In their highest achievements the arts are not so much the instruments and expression of the solitary individual artist as the means which the nation adopts, creates, inspires for the expression of its faith, its loftiness of spirit. They are the embodiment of its ideals; the permanent form of its poetic moods. When the nation is great enough to require great art there will be artists ready for its need.

– American historian Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), in a lecture on "American Culture," 1867

In the decades following the U.S. Civil War, American artists consciously allied their own creations with the great art traditions of ancient Greece and Rome in order to advance a proud national sense of the high aspirations of American culture. In every area of American society and thought—from politics to finance, from city planning to architecture and every other manner of artistic production—this period was the American Renaissance. By 1876, the United States was, in the minds of many, on the verge of becoming a new Athens or a modern Florence, such was the perceived economic, intellectual and artistic potential of the young New World republic. Art was created in the service of high ideals.

One of the greatest exemplars of the Renaissance spirit in America was the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. He lent his talents to extraordinary civic projects; collaborated with artists, designers, craftsmen and architects in the spirit of artistic brotherhood that characterized this new Golden Age; and selected subjects that might ennoble his audience.

For this bronze sculpture, one of his most important monuments, Saint-Gaudens chose feminine beauty as a symbol of what he considered to be the greatest measure of humankind: our potential for selfless giving to others. Or, to put it as Saint-Gaudens did in the Latin language of ancient Rome, our exalted capacity for amor (love) and caritas (charity).