Diana of the Upper Air

F or ​ a short while the highest point of the New York skyline was marked by a girl standing on tiptoe. At night she was also the brightest point, the focus of 66 incandescent lamps and ten spotlights, at a time when there was little electric light in the city. During the day, the sun detonated her gilded surface and she ‘flashed against a green-blue sky’, as Willa Cather described it in My Mortal Enemy.

She was no girl but a thirteen-foot-high goddess: Diana, the hunter, holding a bow and arrow, the string tautly drawn. The figure was commissioned by the architect Stanford White for his redesigned Madison Square Garden. It was the largest amphitheatre in America, the setting for sporting events, dog shows, political conventions and all-round spectaculars. White topped the building with a lavish tower and asked the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a weathervane to crown it: he needed the extra height to trump a skyscraper that had recently been built nearby. Saint-Gaudens’s first attempt, installed in 1891, was eighteen feet tall and too cumbersome to turn in the wind, so he replaced it in 1893 with a version that was shorter, lighter and more lithe. Diana was at once intensely visible and way out of reach. At night, according to a visitors’ guide, ‘the graceful lines of the tower are half-disclosed and half-suggested, and Diana reveals herself to us in the radiance of electric light.’

When the first Diana was installed, White marked the occasion with a festival of light: 6600 electric bulbs were strung along Madison Square Garden and another 1400 on the tower. Unlike the goddess in her dappled shade, this Diana was bathed in the brilliance of ten arc lights. How could anyone have seen anything? Actaeon makes his way towards Diana because he too has been dazzled. The day is at its brightest. ‘Midday had contracted every shadow’ and he wants to rest after a morning’s hunting. He ‘strays with aimless steps through the strange wood’. If he is drawn to anything it is to a gentle intensification of light, the suggestion of a clearing or water. When he approaches the naked goddess, she is bathing in a pool, surrounded by nymphs who immediately move to conceal her. In Ovid’s version, there is no moment when Actaeon actually catches sight of Diana. Instead he is described as being seen to be about to see her: ‘the naked nymphs, seeing a man’s face’. He becomes the subject of a desire he barely registers and is torn apart by it, turned into a stag and killed by his own hounds.

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