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There is so much splendor in the renovated spaces that sometimes forgotten is a statue by Jean-Antoine Houdon of the 18th-century Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire.

Governors come and go — 14 in the past 52 years — but Brown is as constant as the rotunda’s Houdon statue of George Washington.

Representations of Washington include Jean-Antoine Houdon’s acclaimed sculpture of him as Cincinnatus as well as Junius Brutus Stearns’s “Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon,” the painting that graces the book’s cover.

But the legislature ultimately quelled Northern opposition by offering a twofer: It would also provide a statue of Washington, based on the Jean-Antoine Houdon masterpiece already installed in the state Capitol in Richmond.

The earliest purchases in “Making the Met” include a fine marble bust of Benjamin Franklin, by the Revolutionary-era French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon, but also misattributed old masters, replicas of European sculptures, and thousands of Cypriot antiquities that its first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, excavated with something less than scientific rigor.