cture were highly subjective. In his first public building as an architect, for example, Jefferson modeled the State Capitol at Richmond on the lines of the so-called Maison Carrée at Nîmes. The idea of a public building modeled on a Roman temple (and an imperial rather than a republican temple at that) seemed like an anomaly to some. But in the simplicity, grandeur, rationality, and distance of the Roman model from the styles of modern European tyrants, Jefferson saw a style that would speak to people about these same qualities in American government.
Roman civic virtue and representative government (as modern viewers chose to see it) was, therefore, the key to Jefferson's approval of William Thornton's design for the U.S. Capitol (1792). Thornton had gone to Vitruvius for inspiration--even if Palladio and Georgian architecture were just as influential for him. As can be seen in such works as Benjamin Latrobe's design for the porticoes added to the White House (1824) and his redesign of the Capitol (1815), so lon
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