TIME, basically, is a word magazine, but we also take pride in our pictures, most particularly our cover paintings--such as Robert Vickrey's portrait of Senator William Fulbright on this week's cover. Now look beyond the Senator's right ear. The scrollwork of flowers and birds that decorates the wall panel by the door of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee room is the creation of still another artist whom millions of Americans know by style, if not always by name.

He was Constantino Brumidi, and although he was 47 before he came to the U.S. as a political refugee from Italy, he was as American as Plymouth Rock. Native artists protested bitterly when he was commissioned to decorate the U.S. Capitol in 1855, but Brumidi answered: "I have no longer any desire for fame or fortune. My one ambition and daily prayer is that I may live long enough to make beautiful the Capitol of the one country where there is liberty."

In the committee rooms of Congress, he painted frescoes of Washington at Valley Forge and The Battle of Lexington, and he adorned the corridors with landscapes, studies of wildlife and signs of the zodiac. His crowning achievement was the Capitol dome: 4,664 sq. ft. of concave fresco, with figures 15 ft. high, purposely distorted so that they would appear natural to spectators below. It took him eleven months to finish, lying on his back on a scaffold, 180 ft. above the floor.

MORE people have probably seen Brumidi's Washington than the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. He has even been called the "Michelangelo of the U.S." But Michelangelo, at least, had rich patrons. Brumidi was paid $8 to $10 a day--the same wage that Congress allotted to the plasterers and stone masons who worked on the Capitol. His average salary, for 25 years of labor, was $3,200 a year. And he took on his last job with no assurance of payment at all.

Brumidi's grand dream was to paint a 9-ft.-wide frieze around the Capitol Rotunda, below the dome, illustrating the history of the New World from the landing of Columbus to the Great Gold Rush. He was 72 when he started, and he had finished six of the 15 panels when, in 1879, he fell from his scaffold chair, grasped at the ropes and hung for 15 minutes before being rescued. Brumidi never fully recovered from the shock of the experience, spent the last few months of his life working in the seclusion of his studio, while other artists finished the work that he had begun. He died in 1880, was buried in an unmarked grave in Washington's Glenwood Cemetery.

It took the U.S. 72 years to acknowledge its debt. In 1952 Congress passed a law that provided a "suitable" monument for Brumidi's grave, and an endowment for its upkeep. That was the least it could do for the immigrant artist who signed his name simply: "C. Brumidi, artist, citizen of the U.S."

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