Angel Holding the Globe in Columbus Circle

                                             Angel Holding the Globe in Columbus Circle

                                                               By: Agata Sobczak

                  

As a commuting student, every day for the past four years, I walk through Columbus Circle to get to Fordham University. The beauty of the area became almost mundane to me as I hurry through the streets to get to class. In the search for a blog item, I found myself paying more attention to my surroundings, and it was on my way to school when I saw something which I previously not given any attention to. Underneath the Columbus statue in Columbus Circle, there is an angel examining a globe. The angel is made out of marble and is placed at the bottom of the statue of Columbus looking out onto downtown Manhattan. I found the incorporation of the divine creature, usually associated with Christianity, with Christopher Columbus, whose crimes against the native population of the Americas has been notorious, quite puzzling. It is only once I reflected upon the history of the conquest of the Americas and the way God was used to justify the subjection of native people that it all started to make sense,

 

        The incorporation of the angel into the statue of 

Columbus can be viewed as representing the idea of Christian exceptionalism. The angel holding the globe gives new meaning to not only the statue of Columbus but also the exploration and the conquest of the Americas. As angels are usually associated with Christianity and the Divine, the conquest of the Americas is represented here as ordained by God. The angel has its hand placed on top of the globe as if about to turn the globe to admire the spread of Christianity. The cloth, which shields the body of the angel from view, is entwined with the globe itself as if to suggest that the world too is part of the divine fabric created by God. The intertwining of cloth and globe may also suggest the spreading of the divine spirit as the fabric seems to be almost climbing up the base of the globe as if to cover it. The divine approval has been used as a justifying force for the conquest of the Americas from the very beginnings of the conquest, and it is still a metaphor often used to justify it even now as can be seen from the statue.

The use of marble to form the angel is itself fascinating. Marble is made from limestone by pressure and heat in the earth crust. In the formation of marble, a noble stone is created from something weaker and lesser in beauty which is limestone. It maybe reading too much into it, but it is almost a metaphor of what happened to the Americas with the conquest. After studying the history of early modern Spain and the conquest of the Americas, I noticed that the indigenous people were usually portrayed as savage and uncivilized. That was mainly because of their practice of polytheisms and their lack of adherence to Christianity, which at the time was through to represent civility. Like the marble, through pressure and heat exerted by the Christian conquers and the ideals they represented, the Americas were transformed into these civil nations, because of their now adherence to Christianity. Even the material used to construct the statue of the angel emphasizes Christian exceptionalism and the role it played in the conquest of the Americas.