Lady Liberty under God

The National Park Service describes the seven spiked rays of the Statue of Liberty's crown as a nimbus, or halo: the ring of light that painters and glassmakers had set around holy figures for centuries. Bartholdi gave his Liberty the same sign, and she was dedicated in New York Harbor on October 28, 1886. The tablet in her left arm reads JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, the date of the Declaration.

American stained glass was changing in the same years. John La Farge patented opalescent glass in 1880, Louis Comfort Tiffany followed soon after, and their kind of window went into churches across the country.

This picture puts Liberty in one of those windows. She is set in the deep green of her patina, her robe cut into long folds of mottled glass, the torch flaring gold at upper left. Behind her head the crown's rays open into a full gold sunburst, the halo made literal, and the panes around her alternate cobalt blue with blocks of red and orange, like light through a church in late afternoon. It suits a stairwell, a landing or any wall that catches low sun.