MixedSpectator USAAlthough Sentinel is based more in biography than aesthetics, Viano has done impressive art historical research. She suggests several iconographic sources of Liberty with her conversation-piece helmet and raised arm clutching a torch ... But while Liberty is a fine plastic example of the French conception of grandeur, Viano’s thesis is that, so far from being a cheerful present from one nation to another, she is, in fact, a subversive and occult statement. Liberty is an ‘ambivalent icon of colonial domination’. Indeed, beyond the easy-to-read symbolism, Liberty is exotic, even infernal. And as much anti-British in sentiment as she is pro-American, because Liberty represents competitive French interests ... This is superb scholarship, interpreted with an elegant touch and beautifully produced. Maybe it is a little overlong: Viano sometimes lets her erudition get the better of her taste for précis: so crowded into a single sentence are Pico della Mirandola, G.F. Creuzer, the Virgin Mary, Venus and Dionysus. I was almost disappointed not to find Huysmans, Donald Duck and Ronald Reagan involved as well.
