Monticello Soup

Once I finished writing the Monticello post, I had some "leftovers." So, Monticello soup.

Not only did Thomas Jefferson design (and, after seeing European and classical architecture,) redesign Monticello himself, he built in a few ingenious things to make life easier. A hideaway bed. A revolving clothes horse with 48 arms, sort of like a spiral dry cleaner's rack hung vertically. A revolving book stand for five open books at a time, which folds up into a cube for storage.

And the first dome in America. Although beautiful and stately, the room under the dome proved to be impractical as a ladies' drawing room, its original purpose, and was rarely used. It is about 26 feet in diameter, with eight circular windows and a skylight, and it is difficult to heat in winter or cool in summer.

With his son-in-law the plantation manager, Jefferson invented the mouldboard plow for the hilly ground of Albemarle County. As you plow a furrow, the topsoil lifts up and over the mouldboard, falling in a strip to one side only. The mouldboard plow made faster work of plowing a field on a hill and left ridges deep enough to help drain off snowmelt and heavy winter rain.

Jefferson maintained experimental gardens in an effort to determine which fruit and vegetables were best grown in the Virginia climate. During his time in Paris, he shipped European plants to Monticello and American plants to Paris. And he both collected and distributed seeds from friends and neighbors in America, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and European gardeners as well.

Most of Monticello was in cultivation. Jefferson grew fruit, vegetables, and flowers for the main house and cash crops, tobacco and later wheat, to enable the purchase of other goods. However, the plantation was not successful, in part because of debt inherited from his wife's family, in part due to crop failure, and Jefferson died in debt.

Notre-Dame Cathedral

I love words.

The word cathedral is from the Greek καθέδρα, transliterated kathedra and meaning seat, in this case denoting the church where the bishop or archbishop has his throne.  The Romans borrowed the word from the Greek and made it into cathedra, because there is no k in the Latin alphabet. Hence, cathedral.

When I was in Paris (me! I was in Paris!), we went to Notre-Dame de Paris. Even though I was over sixty, I climbed all 387 stairs to the roof. If you've done the climb, you know that this is the only way to see the gargoyles up close and you can guess that, yes, even though I am in pretty good shape, I had to rest a few minutes on the way up and was winded when I got there.

Turns out the gargoyles are part of the run-off system; troughs cut in their backs and mouths like spouts drain rainwater off the roof and away from the walls. The English borrowed gargoyle from the French gargouille, in turn from the Latin word for throat, gula (an onomatapoeic--or "sounds like"--word). Believers may have seen the gargoyles as grotesque beings who scared evil spirits away.

833 years later, in the feature-length cartoon Hunchback of Notre Dame (Walt Disney Animated Classics, 1996, Film) we find that gargoyles are like any other scary creature from the past, kind of funny and a carrier of cultural knowledge of sorts, with the gargoyles Victor and Hugo paying homage to the author of the 1831 novel of the same name.

While gargoyles were part of the original design, flying buttresses (arched exterior supports) were not. Some time between ground-breaking in 1163 and the turn of that century, the choir walls began to show stress fractures and the flying buttresses provided an elegant solution to an inelegant problem. The phrase flying buttress dates from this time and may have had a Frankish, and ultimately proto-Germanic, origin in bouter, to push against.

NOVA recently aired "Building the Great Cathedrals," PBS, December 26, 2012, Television. We are still adding flying buttresses today to shore up Gothic cathedrals with stress fractures in walls that are too tall for the weight they must bear.