Bare-Chested Lincoln.

I was walking down the street the other day in Newark, when in the window I noticed a faux-marble mini-bust of Abraham Lincoln. The curious thing was that he was presented shirt-less, in classical style. I almost didn't recognize Lincoln, because I expected one of the members of the framing generation. While a bare-chested, neoclassical scuplture of Washington or Jefferson is par for the course, Lincoln is never presented in this manner, and it is very jarring to see him thus. This is largely do, of course, to changing aesthetics in the hundred years from the Framers' era to Lincoln's. But, in a larger sense, does not the (minor) offense of a bare-chested Lincoln speak also to very different constructions of "the nation's leader" in the myth and psyche of the United States? (A neo-classical Jackson would like-wise be just as bizarre.) Pushing further, the question "Why does a bare-chested Lincoln bust seem so strange?" illuminates a shift in how the white, male elite in the United States imaged its heroes - and therefore itself - in the hundred years from Revolution to Reconstruction. And not only this elite's self-image, but also this elite's understanding of the relationship between the United States and European civilization is also implicated.