Monticello

In 1764, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) turned 21 and came into his inheritance of 5,000 acres in Albermarle County, Virginia, his father having died about seven years earlier. Jefferson first used the name Monticello in a garden-book entry of 1767 and, in 1768, he cleared and leveled the 850-ft peak called Monticello ("Little Mountain" in Italian) on his property.

By this time, Jefferson's library included Andrea Palladio's 1570 I Quattro Libri dell' Architettura (Four Books of Architecture), which showed plans for villas based on classical Roman plans, James Gibbs's 1732 Rules for Drawing, and an Italian-English dictionary. From his studies of these (and other) works, Jefferson, acting as his own architect, designed and drew up plans for Monticello.

Now the Venetian Renaissance architect Palladio (1508-1580) had studied Vitruvius (ca. 80-15 BCE), the Roman architect and author of De architectura (Ten Books of Architecture), whose text and illustrations were both lost during the first collapse of European civilization in the fourth century CE. Vitruvius's text was rediscovered in a monastery library in the early Renaissance, 1414, the first illustrated version was published in 1511, and Palladio himself provided illustrations for a later version.

On the plantation, Jefferson grew tobacco and mixed crops and later changed over to wheat. The property comprised the house, a nailery and other outbuildings, slave quarters, gardens for flowers and produce, and experimental gardens. Around one-hundred-and-fifty slaves served in the house, on the grounds, and in the fields.

Jefferson brought his wife Martha home to Monticello in 1772. They enjoyed ten years of happy marriage and parented six children, two of whom survived to adulthood. His wife died in 1782, four months after the birth of her last child. At this time, the original Monticello was mostly complete.

Two years after the death of his wife, in 1784, Jefferson left Monticello and took a diplomatic post in Paris. While in Europe, Jefferson continued his amateur study of classical architecture and took note of the current trends as well.

Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1789 and began remodeling it in 1796 on the site of the original house. This time he wanted to go beyond the drawings in the books and bring home the true Enlightenment spirit of Monticello in a way that the original building had not.  He continued remodeling Monticello throughout his presidency (1801-1809).

Monticello is illustrated on the reverse (back) of the United States nickel.

A floor plan of Monticello.

Image credit: Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Copyright © Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. From the Monticello website at http://www.monticello.org.

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.