Turnings in the Wind

Weather vanes have a high-blown tradition. In the 1st century B.C., Greek Architect Andronicus capped his Tower of Winds in Athens with a mighty bronze Triton. The rooster atop the church steeple got its official sanction in the 9th century A.D. when the Pope decreed that every church should mount a weathercock to recall the chanticleer that crowed the night Peter thrice denied his Lord. Vane making reached the peak of its popularity as an art form when American settlers took it up. To record their triumphs of style and ingenuity, Manhattan's Museum of Early American Folk Arts has assembled a summer-long exhibition of weather vanes and whirligigs.

Paul Revere hooked a wooden codfish above his coppersmith shop. In early Boston, children crowded around on Saturdays in hopes that the gilded Indian gleaming on the Province House cupola would, as superstition had it, shoot his arrow at high noon. In Pennsylvania, a weather vane in the shape of an Indian was meant as an offer of friendship--and hence protection from rampaging redskins. Soon every back-porch whittler and crackerjack craftsman was getting into the act. Weather vanes popped up in the shapes of Uncle Sam, butterflies, locomotives, Gabriel tooting on a trumpet, a haggard country doctor astraddle a haggard horse, even a modest metal mermaid.

Strict Sabbaths kept by the Pennsylvania Dutch led to "Sabbath toys" or whirligigs. To entertain the children when boisterous play was banned, soldiers, firemen, Indians and, one suspects, parodies of the neighbors, were carved in wood with paddles for arms, painted and propped on the front porch or fence posts to whirl and jiggle at the slightest whiff of a breeze. They were often intricately animated. One, called Farm Industry, made about 1880, shows a long-skirted woman churning butter while her farmer husband, in the doorway of a barn, sharpens his tools on a grindstone. It doubled as a weather vane, churning and sharpening away furiously when the wind rose before a storm. What its anonymous carpenter did not know was that in time he would be looked upon as the artistic ancestor of much more sophisticated turnings in the wind--contemporary mobiles.

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