The ancient Roman buildings outside of Rome

Concerning ancient Roman buildings outside of Rome, Jefferson owned Charles-Louis Clerisseau's Antiquites de la France: Monuments de Nimes (Paris, 1778). This valuable work should be considered one of the most important archaeological books published between 1750 and 1780, and the only to be concerned with the classical architecture of France. The Antiquites is composed of a short text and a limited number of illustrations of monuments in Nimes: the Temple of Cayus (the Maison Carree), the Amphitheater, and the Temple of Diana. Jefferson bought this book from Clerisseau himself on 2 June 1786, a year before his famous visit to Nimes. But Jefferson had known about the Maison Carree as early as 20 September 1785 when he wrote in a letter to James Madison: "We took for our model what is called the Maison-quarree of Nismes, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity." In another letter, written in 1786 to the Directors of Public Buildings for whom he designed the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia (Figs. 7-9), Jefferson reiterated his comments:

   There is in Nismes in the South of France a building, called the
   Maison quarree, erected in the time of the Caesars, and which is
   allowed without contradiction to be the most perfect and precious
   remain of antiquity in existence. Its superiority over any thing in
   Rome, in Greece, at Balbec or Palmyra is allowed on all hands; and
   this single object had placed Nismes in the general tour of
   travelers. Having not yet had leisure to visit it, I could only
   judge of it from drawings, and from the relation of numbers who had
   been to see it.


Similar comments were also made by Clerisseau in his Antiquites: "... artists and men of letters all agreed that Rome never had a more perfect monument than the Maison-quarree". Jefferson and Clerisseau's statements may reflect some of the rationalist ideas expounded in Marc'Antoine Laugier's Essai sur I'architecture (Paris, 1755). Laugier also considered the ancient Roman monument in Nimes to be one of the most beautiful classical buildings because its essential parts and trabeated design are close to primitive wooden buildings from which classical architecture originated.

Another important archaeological publication in Jefferson's catalogue that offered descriptions of Roman architecture outside of Rome is Robert Wood's The Ruins of Balbec (London, 1757). This book includes a history of Balbec, an account of the author's journey from Palmyra to the site, and an analysis of the inscriptions he found. There are fifty-seven plates of the site and its architecture, and five perspective views engraved by Thomas Major. Two views of the Temple of Bacchus and three of the circular Temple of Venus along with plans, sections, and building details are by P. Fourdrinier. In England in the 1760s, the newly discovered late Roman buildings of Balbec were quite popular. The Circular Temple was twice replicated in 1761 by William Chambers at Kew, and used as inspiration by Henry Flitcroft, a few years later, at Stourhead. The Notes explicatives des plans du Capitole pour l'etat de la Virginie, instructions written by Jefferson for Clerisseau who assisted him in the design of the Virginia Capitol, makes clear that Jefferson looked to ancient temples in "fixing the proportions of length, breath and height" of the building. Jefferson not only named the temples, but he also cited the books of his library and their specific plates: Plate 41 in Wood's Ruins of Balbec representing the Temple of Bacchus, "the temple of Erectheus [sic] in Athens (Le Roy, part 2, p. 16), a Peripter of Vitruvius (Perrault edition, p. 67) and a temple of Mars (Palladio, Book 4)". He also cited these ancient temples in his "An Account of the Capitol of Virginia:"

   The Capitol in the city of Richmond ... is the model of the Temples
   of Erectheus at Athens, of Balbec and the Maison quarree of Nismes.
   All of which are nearly of the same form and proportions, and are
   considered as the most perfect examples of cubic architecture, as
   the Pantheon of Rome is of the spherical.

Here the words "cubic" and "spherical" stand for the modern classification of ancient architectural forms into trabeated and arcuated structures. Jefferson's choice of the former type for the Virginia Capitol may well reflect current French rationalism, disseminated in the mid-eighteenth century by Laugier.

Rome's public monuments stood in various stages of decay

By the beginning of the empire, many of Rome's public monuments stood in various stages of decay. As the Mediterranean's newest power, Rome demanded a public image that would rival the famed cities of the Attalids and the Ptolemies. Augustus' political strategy as the new leader in the capital city included not only new construction, but rebuilding of Rome's infrastructure and renovations of its older structures. These typically were reattributed to their Augustan patrons as older patronal affiliations took second stage. Such was the case with Octavia's portico. Metellus' structure was razed and its foundations re-used for a grand rebuilding. Reconstruction began contemporaneously with other projects by Augustus and various members or the imperial retinue in the Campus Martius: In the north, the emperor began his mausoleum and its associated monuments; Agrippa, Augustus' son-in-law and military comrade, built his bathing complex, completed the Saepta lulia, and erected the Pantheon. To the south, Augustus' ally Sosianus restored the Temple of Apollo Medicus while Augustus took over construction (begun by Julius Caesar) of a large theater, later dedicated to the late Marcellus. The whole of the region, previously characterized by victory monuments built by rivaling republican generals, began to emerge as a center of Augustan civic beneficence specifically tied to the imperial family. Octavia's portico was the principal contribution by a woman.

In its refurbished state, the colonnaded complex provided the Roman people with a splendid, enclosed quadriportico set off from the bustle of the nearby forum Boarium (Rome's cattle market), the Campus Martius, river traffic, and urban life in general (Fig. 5).  A large portal centered along the building's southwest facade provided access to the interior court. Inside, the portico's walls and floors were covered in colorful marbles and, according to Pliny the Elder, other famous statues and sculptural ensembles joined the Granikos monument and Cornelia's portrait. To the restored temple's inside, Octavia added a curia (a meeting hall) and two libraries for Greek and Latin literature inside the precinct.

The Porticus Octaviae's Significance in Augustan Politics and Propaganda. It seems that the impact of the portico and of Octavia as its patron has been overlooked in past scholarship primarily because its reconstruction occurred at a time when other building projects by men of note were just beginning. However, careful analysis of the complex will reveal that Octavia and her monument were critical links in the developing dynastic ideology focused on women and family. Her beneficence, not only represented a highly generous outlay of capital, but a virtuous selflessness that characterized the ideal Augustan woman. It was this facet of her persona that had garnered her fame as Antony's beleaguered wife. From this perspective, the Porticus Octaviae emerges as both a part of a larger Augustan initiative to rebuild Rome, thereby promoting the emperor's political hegemony and social legislation, and as a unique monument that spoke to the life of its patron. Octavia, a woman--albeit of high standing--had gained access to this predominantly masculine region, thereby also gaining placement among some of Rome's most powerful men. Her access to the region can be seen in the context of political transformations taking place in Rome.

With a shift to dynastic rule from a republic came a contemporaneous shift in the importance of women as producers of heirs. It is for this reason, as Natalie Kampen has contended, that mortal women began to be represented in the visual arts of the imperial era, specifically in Roman historical reliefs. Kampen has argued that women appear in visual arts at moments when they were ideologically most central to the dynastic or hegemonic claims of a regime. We might consider Octavia's entrance into the male-dominated world of architectural patronage in the Campus Martius analogously. Octavia's prominence in Augustan politics after the Battle of Actium was largely due to her role as mother to Augustus' heir apparent and as a figure with the potential for fecundity. In this position she provided in her son a link in the new dynastic line of succession. Her architectural patronage in the Campus Martius must be seen as a logical extension of her role in the imperial family dynamics.

The opportunities for assimilation offered

Thus the opportunities for assimilation offered by these avant-garde dresses, the sartorial emblems of an elite high culture, were complicated by the simple fact that the items appealed to a very small clientele. The complex phenomenon of assimilation depended on strategies of disappearance, invisibility, and naturalization, which modernist fashion would not have facilitated. To display a Floge or Werkstatte dress would have been perceived as an unusual act in obvious conflict with typical vestimentary practices. The woman who purchased and wore one of these radical designs would have been viewed as avant-garde, but she would not have blended in and, consequently, would not identify or be identified with the secular, non-Jewish cultural community. We might be tempted to interpret this attempt at non-conformity as an articulation of the wearer's irreducible and anarchic singularity, conjecturing that the display of exceptional clothing functioned as a solitary gesture of self-definition. Certainly the decision to assume garments so recognizably unlike other dresses seen in the Viennese urban landscape would have seemed an act of defiance, a bold rejection of conventional norms. However, if actually donning modernist designs marked the wearer as visibly different from most Viennese women, it is significant that she would also be perceived as similar to those women who did wear these clothes. While she may not have adhered to the fashions worn by most Viennese, nonetheless she exhibited a taste in clothing that was, importantly, shared by other women. Wearing a design created by the Floge salon or the Wiener Werkstatte created ties to a group that existed alongside and in opposition to the normative fashion world, a realm populated primarily by the Jewish bourgeois women who chose to promote modernist art practices. From this perspective, the use of avant-garde fashion would enable an identification with like-minded, similarly situated Jewish women, an anti-assimilationist strategy that would seem not to have facilitated acculturation but to have promoted a Jewish collective identity.

This communal strategy can perhaps be better understood if one remembers that the dream of assimilation was at its best a flawed one and, around 1910, the Viennese Jewish community was beginning to doubt its benefits. This loss of faith stemmed in part from the unanticipated effects of assimilation itself. Often, bourgeois Jews were so eager to meld with the dominant culture that they began to be perceived as more Viennese than the Viennese and, therefore, as different. Furthermore, towards the turn of the century, Jews began to dominate the very liberal, elite culture into which they had hoped to disappear. By 1914, Jewish participation in this realm eclipsed that of non-Jews; Jews were assimilating into a Jewish world. The failure of assimilation, however, was not brought on simply by the paradoxical nature of skillful acculturation. Jews had always struggled with persistent antisemitic sentiments, even after the liberal reforms of 1867. Nonetheless the Jewish bourgeoisie had remained hopeful that they could not only integrate, but fully assimilate into Viennese society. Faith in assimilation became increasingly difficult to sustain, however, as antisemitism strengthened towards the end of the century, and it began to rapidly disintegrate when the explicitly antisemitic Christian Socialist government came to power in 1897. Religious identity could no longer be casually suppressed under an administration in which classification as a Jew or non-Jew became a mandatory and public process.