Faith Works 11-11-22 & 11-18-22 & 11-25-22

Faith Works 11-11-22 & 11-18-22 & 11-25-22

Three columns, one story, and getting a bit ahead for Thanksgiving!

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Faith Works 11-11-22
Jeff Gill

Angels of thankfulness in Licking County
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My hope for you is that if you've seen the majestic West Courtroom of the Licking County Courthouse, it was on a tour, or a happy occasion to visit and reflect and learn

The reality is that probably the majority of people who've sat in the West Courtroom, up on the second floor of the 1876 county courthouse, have been there because of a trial. Maybe a jury member, perhaps a witness ready to give testimony, possibly even a defendant. I pray you found justice there, or at least peace.

Over the years I've been in that room in most of those roles (except defendant), watched inaugurations of public officials, shared occasions both joyous and painful as hearings ended and the gavel bangs down.

Judge Thomas Marcelain has presided in that room over many trials; i'd say too many to count, but if I hunted him up I suspect he'd have a precise answer for me. What he doesn't spend a great deal of time looking at (that I know of) is the pair of paintings right behind the judge's bench. He has an excellent view of the famous Tiffany stained glass windows around the upper edge of two walls, and some of the sculpture and bas-relief around the room, even the smoke darkened murals high on the south wall or on the ceiling around the coffered dome at the center.

Yet if you are in that courtroom for any reason, good times or bad, and spend time there, you really can't avoid noticing two angels and a few other figures on two paintings set neatly on either side of the judge's head, whether that was Samuel Hunter of sorrel horse fame, or Judge Marcelain these days. The jurist may change, but the two paintings flanking the judicial office holder have been there for over a century.

They don't date to 1876: the current courthouse, the fourth on the square since 1808 or so (log, brick, Greek Revival, and today's Second Empire rendition), had a bad fire not long after construction was completed, ruining most of the central tower and upper story. The splendors of the West Courtroom began to take shape after the 1880s, and as I will argue in subsequent installments, didn't finish until after 1901 for a reason staring you in the face from one panel of the artwork all around the room.

But it's those two paintings, each with an angel, that have gotten me thinking, and digging, and now writing. Often an escort with groups through the West Courtroom will refer to them as "The Angel of the Harvest" and "The Angel of Death." That's certainly one way of looking at them; those are surely bracing images for a defendant, or a prosector, to face as they work through our legal system towards justice.

I think there's a wider story, and perhaps even a more coherent one, than you get from a pair of angels, proclaiming respectively harvest-time and the sacrifice of death, in this case death in defense of freedom. The parallel of harvest and death have been enough for a few generations, but I think we can try to trace a higher, wider arc, and it starts with a name dimly painted into the corner: "L. Bang" was his name, and he's thankful for something, and wants us to know it.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been curious about our Licking County angels for some time. Tell him about angels you've seen out and about in the area at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

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Faith Works 11-18-22
Jeff Gill

Angels from over the ocean and across our nation
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What can I tell you about Ludwig Bang?

Or perhaps I should use his full name: Ludwig Friedrich Karl Bang, born in Germany, state of Mecklenburg, and the town of Doberan in 1857.

His friends called him Luden, and Luden Bang was already as a schoolboy noted for his drawing skill. His father was a humble forester, and it's not clear to me yet what sponsors or supporters arranged it, but he ended up in Lübeck and Düsseldorf and finally in Munich for his art training.

What he painted gained Luden enough income and fame to be able to travel, and he visited and studied in Lucerne, Switzerland, on to Italy, and in Paris, France.

At the age of 35 he crossed the pond and ended up in Chicago, Illinois for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where he had paintings on display and may have helped with the decorations of the Germany pavilion for that early world's fair. He spent some time in Chicago, which had a large German community, and shows up later in the 1890s in Toledo, Ohio, also hosting a vibrant German cultural enclave. Bang painted murals in the lobby of the Hotel Kaiserhof, and as I loosely translate out of the pages of Mecklenburg's tourist magazine, "There he created a new sphere of activity and became known in the city and in the surrounding region for his dramatic and lyrical paintings, again murals… [his] topics ranged from Ascension Day to German fairy tales to historical topics."

Somewhere in here, he was invited to Newark, Ohio.

Let's be clear: I'm simply arguing that the Ludwig Bang I've hunted up online is the artist in our West Courtroom who signed his name "L. Bang." I have no other direct linkage, other than he's up the road in Toledo at the right time, and his specialty is what we see our L. Bang at work on. Good enough?

The historic Luden Bang returns to Mecklenburg somewhere in the next decade, and lives out his life in his hometown. The 2018 article I found online says "What he had ended up doing in the USA, he began with at home – with landscapes and historical themes depicted in pictures. But this time with regional motifs…" filled, apparently, with symbolism and allusions to other well-known artistic works.

You can today visit the Möckelhaus, the central building of Bad Doberan and see his works on display; sadly, he ended up living in the municipal poorhouse, sitting afternoons in the park his father once tended, dying during World War II at the age of 87. His memory is still honored there as a "history painter" or "historienmaler," which is his epitaph on a civic monument to Ludwig Bang.

If you accept my assumption that their Luden Bang is Licking County's "L. Bang," then what can the story of this German artist tell us about the central images of two angels in our courthouse? What are they up to in the heart of our modern quest for justice and community, sitting there behind our senior Common Pleas Court judge, inviting the defense and the prosection, plaintiffs and defendants, lawyers and laity, to meditate upon as justice is served?

The artist Bang clearly was noted for taking monks and emperors, religious festivals and nature's turnings, common folk and regal processions, and making out of familiar motifs a story to illuminate the present day. I think whether those who hired him knew it or not, that's what he was doing here in 1901. Sacrifice, yes, and hope, and thankfulness for victories past and triumphs yet to come.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hoping you're getting curious yourself about what these angels are up to. Tell him about how visual images shape your faith at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

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Faith Works 11-25-22
Jeff Gill

Angels of harvest, death, and victory
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Ludwig Bang, as I've proposed over the last two weeks here, is a German born artist classically trained in Europe, hired to come complete the decoration of Licking County's 1876 courthouse in the now famous West Courtroom, intended as the completion of this centerpiece of Newark.

Since a fire shortly after completion ruined the upper portion, we know the detail work now visible in the West Courtroom is dated to after 1880, and there's reason to believe it was done piecemeal. The Tiffany windows up high went in to start, then the fine plasterwork creating frames and pilasters inside. There's additional stained glass that's not Tiffany, and portrait busts to accent the depictions of leading figures from American history in the windows. And then there are the paintings.

This has been debated elsewhere, but I would argue the choice to put William McKinley in one of the roundels along with the martyred Lincoln, and by-that-date deceased Grant, means these paintings (plus the Great Seal above a currently defunct water fountain) were done after his death in the fall of 1901. I think it's clear the portraits are also by the artist of the two angel paintings behind the judge's bench. The murals up high I would definitely credit to Bang, and once cleaned and conserved we're likely to find a signature we can't see under decades of cigar smoke today.

Then two angel paintings, at the heart of my speculation this Thanksgiving. They've been called "The Angel of the Harvest" and "The Angel of Death."

What I believe the "historienmaler" or history painter Ludwig Bang was after, though, was a bit more subtle. There is a harvest scene, and an angel hovering, in one. A woman is seated with a nursing child to one side; it's not hard to connect the newborn and the new harvest being gathered in by the figure with a scythe facing away from us.

Taken in isolation, the harvester looks quite like the then famous work by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field" of 1865. As was well-known, it showed a man returned from the Civil War, some of his surplus military garb and canteen gently obscured in the foreground. Our harvest scene has a humble earthenware jug in the place where Homer nods to the veteran's status. The spouse and child and of course angel are additions, but the tribute and meaning in the center of the painting seems quite clear as referring back to the earlier work, in a time when the role of veterans in American politics was changing - McKinley was the last Civil War veteran, as it turns out, to serve as President. **

Hovering over the counterpart painting, where a similarly dressed figure is now carrying a musket and heading into battle, is the image often called "the angel of death." Its face is obscured, and the robes are shadowed versus the brightly lit harvest angel, though I think cleaning might show them not as dark as we see now.

What I do see is a shape that Bang would have seen, freshly placed in the main staircase of the Louvre when he first visited Paris: the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Like the scythe-bearer in the harvest picture, it's not a precise copy, but Bang would not have been so obvious.

Yet I think it's fair to say that while death and battle may be in the shadows, the message of the second angel is beckoning the central figure not towards his doom, but to victory. In this life, as well as the next.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's enjoyed getting to know Luden Bang and hopes you've found his story interesting as well. Tell him what you see in these paintings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.