rom styles that did not fit its new democratic point of view. He was "anxious to distance the new nation from English origins as well as from the monarchical traditions of continental Europe" and for inspiration he looked to the ancient Greeks and Romans. It may seem ironic that Jefferson was looking for inspiration in the Roman Empire, a time when absolutism was the rule and the few shreds of democracy were systematically ignored by the ruling families. But Jefferson and others concentrated their ideological focus on the time of the Roman Republic and, by association, they also admired the art of the Empire. Jefferson believed that "Greek democracy and Roman republicanism offered the correct parameters for constructing a new society in America." Artistically, Jefferson believed, along with many other Enlightenment figures, that "the art of building had reached its final pinnacle in Rome; so that any building that did not pattern itself on the monuments of the classic past, both for proportion and ornament, was, to the very extent that it fell away from these standards, a debasement."
It was during his term as ambassador that Jefferson found his ideas validated by French practice and by the ideas in the air at the time. During this period Jefferson befriended many of the leading thinkers, artists and architects of the day. The people he was most drawn to were those who looked to ancient Rome for inspiration and examples. The painter Jacques-Louis David, for example, painted stories from the Roman Republic and furnished them with the architecture and artifacts of that time. In architecture he was fascinated by the work of Claude-Nicholas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis BoullTe who designed from the basis of "a Roman architecture purged of all anecdotal and iconographic ornamentation."
Up to this point Jefferson had derived most of his ideas about architecture from commentaries on ancient works written by generations of Euro...