Aviation

Arching over the lunette Man and Science, three octagonal panels celebrate the technological innovations that were shaping the new century.

In Communion through Space, two female muses flank a man on a wireless who resembles the American painter and inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse. It is inscribed “the soul between the material and spiritual theory of light.”

In The Search for Light, a scientist leans into his book, like the Prophet Daniel in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The glowing cathode tube on the table suggests that he may be the English scientist Michael Faraday trying to understand the invisible source of light.

Aviation is inscribed, “They mount up with wings as eagles.” An aviator who has flown into the stars leans away from an eagle like Michelangelo’s Prophet Jonah shrinking from the whale. It was noted at the time that although Leonardo da Vinci had attempted flight in the Italian Renaissance, it was the Wright Brothers who achieved the first manned flight with their biplane in 1903, during the American Renaissance.

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