A Hero, A Mascot, A Work of Art?
“Sir Walter Raleigh,” a sculpture by Bruno Lucchesi, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Visited on May 19, 2022.
Imagine a giant inflatable holiday decoration, the kind that people set on their lawns – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny – and how they’re pumped with air and how that makes them swell until they almost burst.
That’s the impression here. That is what unsettles and mesmerizes me about this sculpture of Sir Walter Raleigh situated in a plaza outside the city’s convention center.
His head is thick. His hair is thick. The brim of his hat is like an inner tube. His lapels are thick as hardcover books. The cape draped over his arm looks heavy as a tapestry. The folds in his pants are billowy and thick. His boots rise to his crotch. Nothing about this sculpture is light and feathery. And everything is exaggerated, swollen, yet barely so.
Even his expression—it’s a serious look, the look from a man who takes himself seriously but is not thought of highly by his peers, a fop in a comedy of manners, an aristocrat who yearns to be a wit but fails.
In his failure, he sends a message …
“[The fops] like all other caricature, help to confirm the value of the wits. The aberrations serve but to vindicate and assert the strength and validity of the norm.”[1]
In other words, he is not the clown or the fool. This is not a joke. To civic-minded administrators, I imagine he expresses nobility, elegance, honor, local pride, etc., but as I stand here in the heat, stomach cramped from hunger, back aching from hours of driving and walking, that is not all there is to see.
There’s something “more” to this sculpture than ideology. But I can’t say that the “more” is good or bad, only that it makes me want to contemplate what I’m experiencing.
Even more so because someone draped a Canes jersey over his chest, tied a hockey stick to his left hand, and wrapped a banner around the plinth. Is he a hero or a mascot?
In other words, I want to hate this sculpture (the way I wanted to hate “Sharing”) but I’m drawn to it, impulsively, in a way that’s irritating. And I feel happy about that. I feel animated.
References
[1] Sharma, R.C. Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of Manners. London. Asia Publishing House, 1965.