The “colossal” in the title of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal refers to the size of the monumental objects she examines, as well as to the scale of their production, the range of their reproduction in images and models, and the scope of their reception over time and across the Atlantic Ocean. This book is about big things as much as it is about the broad visual culture of those big things.

In six chapters, the reader travels from Egypt to France to the United States and Panama through the long nineteenth century (and a little beyond with references to the 1930s). The introduction and coda provide contemporary references ranging from the World Trade Center and the skylines of Dubai that are meant to link present-day global capitalist ambitions with the drive of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel to build big. In the extension, however, François Mitterand’s Grands Projets are strangely absent from the timeframe. Moreover, the text’s uncharacteristically blunt connection to the present dulls the sharp analyses of the specific nineteenth-century processes and political stakes involved in the colossal works and their images.

This study is held together by several geographies constituted by the circulation of objects mediated through visual representations and supported by an emergent capitalist-imperialist system. In chronology, methodology, and geography, Grigsby expands on the themes of engineering and construction practices found in Chandra Mukerji’s research on the Canal royale en Languedoc (Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Yet, while transatlantic connections are traced, the now classic postcolonial arguments of scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty are not well engaged (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Although Chakrabarty’s focus is on European and South Asian intellectual and cultural intersections, his contention that capitalist modernity is not merely an issue of historical transition but of translation would have bolstered her concepts of circulation. Ultimately, however, she succeeds in not allowing the text’s ambitious scale to overwhelm the details of practice and material involved in the making of the colossal text, statue, tower, and canals.

It is also perhaps important to recognize that there is another geography undergirding this project: Grigsby’s intellectual and personal narrative weaves in and out of the text, explicitly mentioned in the sixth chapter where she even includes a photograph of herself as a child standing on a newly paved path in Panama. The danger may have been to force links that the materials would not make themselves, but the author walks the methodological line with rhetorical balance while simultaneously arguing that the writing of art history is always political and personal. Like the engineers who feature throughout the study, she, too, forged links across the Atlantic, and in both instances there was a need to comprehend work as an outcome of professional and personal journeys.

Accordingly, the study offers a significant methodological intervention for art and architectural historians. The narrative is concerned with neither a particular artist or engineer, nor a specific medium or type, and instead offers the concept of “colossal” as an analytical category. Grigsby’s focus on engineering practices and engineered objects examines critically the basic assumption of modernity that technical endeavors were inherently devoid of politics. She questions the material conditions of technological development, i.e., modernization, through the visual culture of their production and reception, i.e., modernity. Normally, we expect the opposite from social historians of art: modernization as the given and visual culture as its result. This intervention also allows her to pose the question of labor, and not necessarily that of the head engineers or artists: who labored? Yet, it remains an unresolved question, and the faces and bodies of the workers occasionally captured in the images are left unknown. This is a colossal methodological problem, as the archives often do not lend themselves to their names and histories. Grigsby’s well-taken point is that there are certain kinds of labor that are privileged over others through representational practices in drawing, painting, and photography.

In addition to labor, three other themes run through each chapter––medium, scale, and networks––creating a complex web of comparisons and connections among the diverse objects. The starting point is Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt where 151 savants, mainly engineers, composed and gathered their knowledge of the terrain and the ancient monuments for the Description de l’Egypte (1809–29). The issue at hand is measurement, drawing, and their standardization for the advancement of French imperialism through visual strategies. Applying important arguments made by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison about the construction of objectivity through autonomous systems (Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books, 2007), Grigsby brings their analysis to bear on the Description as a scientific atlas and then extends it by introducing the matter of material and its stakes. New methods of measuring the ancient monuments, techniques of engraving, and the standardization of drawing by different men for the compilation of a single cohesive text functioned to further its standing as descriptive when in fact those practices were epistemologically generative. She writes, “The system of knowledge governing the Description is self-corroborating; therein lies its ideological efficacy” (29).

Continuing the analysis of medium specificity, the second chapter focuses on Bartholdi’s photographic practice in Egypt for his designs of a lighthouse intended to illuminate the Suez Canal. Grigsby traces a fascinating shift in media that hinged on the value and practice of precision. If drawing had served as an exact method for engineers to describe Egypt, by 1849 when Maxime Du Camp and Gustave Flaubert traveled to Egypt to record those same monuments, it was deemed too imprecise. For Bartholdi, photography replaced castmaking in his sculptural production, and because of the long exposure times, forced the living models to become sculptures in their stillness. Grigsby’s analysis again reverses the expected narrative of artistic production from sculpture to image.

The electric lighthouse was never realized but did inform the designs of the Statue of Liberty discussed in the third chapter. The issue of translation between photography and sculpture raised previously is placed in the context of transatlantic circulation and its concomitant pressures of unhindered mobility and large-scale production. The chapter begins with an anecdote describing Bartholdi carrying a small calotype of a clay model of the general Jean Rapp to the mayor of Colmar in order to persuade him to imagine big. The important counterpoint of the chapter is that the very immensity of the Statue of Liberty made it difficult for the Gaget and Gauthier atelier where it was built to picture its totality. Instead, the enormous pieces were photographed individually, and unlike the Description, these images were not meant to be compiled into a cohesive whole, but to enhance the sculpture’s spectacular fragmentation. Similar to the calotype of the small whole, Bartholdi’s promotional photographs of the large fragments stand in, albeit synecdochically, for the object itself.

Issues of labor and the means of its visibility are addressed in the fourth chapter through an examination of Eiffel’s involvement in the construction of the Statue of Liberty and his tower for the 1889 Universal Exposition. Unlike the Statue of Liberty whose unique parts were custom cast and assembled, the drawings for the Eiffel Tower were produced for the reproduction of identical parts. Circling back to the ancient pyramids, Grigsby cites Émile Cheysson who linked the fellaheen’s sacrifice of ancient Egypt to the laborers of the Universal Exhibition, and who called for the expansion of engineering practice to include the price of labor. A response from the diplomat and critic Eugène-Melchoir de Vogüé seemed to answer a different question in which new mathematical and geometric methods of design “required little physical exertion” (107) and, significantly, whose drawing and geometry allowed Eiffel to “[divert] labor to drafting tables and to off-site factories” (112). The implication is that greater precision and geometric clarity on paper allowed for the visual (and ultimately historiographic) erasure of the men who labored to click those mass-produced industrial pieces into place.

The fifth chapter on the construction of the Panama Canal is the strongest and most exhilarating of the entire study. Here all of the themes converge into a careful and complex analysis of the excavation of the canal and how the digging of its route was mediated through visual representations. As with the Suez Canal, there was a debate about using the “direct trace” or straight line as the design. In Panama, the Americans carved out tons of earth following a meandering path across mountains, lakes, and the Chagres River. The intense work involved in cutting through a tectonic mass was captured in stereoscopic images that are beautifully reproduced. The contention is that if the engineer’s geometric drawings had increased the distance between his idea and the worker’s sweat as well as between two and three dimensions, the stereoviews decreased that span by reproducing the sense of depth in two dimensions and picturing if not the humans then at least the massive results of their labor. Even the panorama of the Culebra Cut painted by William Bradley Van Ingen in the circular rotunda of the Panama Canal Administration Building serves to provide a volumetric experience over the linear logic of the canal.

The concluding chapter focuses on the miniatures made and reproduced for publicity. While the reduction in scale of these colossal monuments and their mass reproduction were intended to raise money, Grigsby contends that it was primarily about possession through circulation: “Miniaturization turned the public monument into a mere thing, yet a thing that is mobile and a commodity” (154). The capacity to reduce or increase the scale of these monuments was only possible through the mediation and reproduction of images. Here the thematic lines of mediation, network, labor, and scale intersect in the work’s commodification.

This rich text and the diversity of its material will resonate not only with scholars of the nineteenth century but also with those generally interested in the “global turn” in art history. The study is also valuable for historians of science who are keen to understand the role of visual materials and the specific practices of their reproduction to mediate the production of knowledge. Architectural historians will also find parts to be relevant to research in the relations between drawing and building, even though the architectural literature on the subject is not well engaged. The book is generously illustrated and significant for the different kinds of images reproduced. Some of them, however, are formatted incoherently, often cropped strangely to the edge of the page or to the gutter, and no original dimensions are given when many are compared and have been clearly reduced or enlarged for emphasis. Yet, the skilled manner in which Grigsby moves through these varied images, many of them technical, guiding art historians through equations and geometric diagrams, makes evident the critical methodological contribution of visual culture to understanding the processes and practices of modernization, and more broadly about which objects and how they—even a colossal ravine—can be taken up by the field.