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| HEMICYCLE OF THE ELECTRICITY BUILDING - This pylon,
which fronted on the Administration plaza, was the one relieving
feature of a building that perhaps failed to meet the requirements of
its surroundings. But, in itself, it is quite likely that there was
nowhere else on the grounds a portal so grand and beautiful. By far
the best statue in the park - the heroic effigy of Benjamin Franklin,
looking toward heaven ere he set loose his kite to catch the
lightnings - stood on a high pedestal, a monument not only of the
great father of the republic whom it counterfeited, but a testimony
as well of the genius of Carl Rohl-Smith, the Danish sculptor, whose
other Chicago work, The Indian Massacre, may be seen in bronze near
the Pullman residence, at Eighteenth street. The colors in the vault
of the Hemistyle were yellow and greenish-blue. Corinthian pillars
and pilasters may be seen, and over them part of the Latin epgram of
Mirabeau, the French orator, on Franklin: "Eripuit caelo fulmen
sceptrumque tyrannis" - that he had wrenched the thunderbolt from
heaven and the sceptre from tyrants, thus referring at once to his
genius and patriotism, and offering the most remarkable encomium ever
bestowed on man by man. Of the statuary, beside the pedimental
group, the figures above the consoles and on the sides of the pylon
are fifteen feet high, and represent Electricity in its applied form. |
