The Birth of Columbia

Columbia was the name the colonies gave themselves before they had a better one. It appeared in print in the 1730s, and by 1775 Phillis Wheatley was addressing a poem to General Washington in which Columbia is a goddess with an army at her back. For the next century she stood in for the nation on coins, in cartoons, on the dome of the Capitol and at the head of parades: a young woman in classical dress, often in a liberty cap, arriving from elsewhere and belonging here at once.

Sandro Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus in Florence around 1485, and it hangs in the Uffizi. It shows the goddess carried to shore on a scallop shell by two wind gods, while an attendant runs to meet her with a cloak, blossoms falling through the air between them. It was the first monumental painting of a classical goddess in Tuscany since antiquity, and its subject is arrival.

Here the shell comes to rest on an American beach. Columbia stands on it in a white gown, a laurel wreath over her red liberty cap, hair streaming toward the land. Two winged figures at upper left blow her ashore through a shower of blossom and leaves, and a bald eagle rides the same wind. At right an attendant in blue runs down the sand holding out a cloak of red and white stripes. Three tall ships stand off the point, a steeple rises above the trees, and the light is early-morning gold.

Newly made, classical, and slightly improbable: that is how the country liked to see itself, and this is the picture it would have chosen.