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.