ABSTRACT
On the shore where the colony of Virginia had its rst beginnings stands a monument to the tenacity and achievements of those early British settlers. Yet the pagan obelisk and Roman wreaths with which their seventeenth-century society is symbolized and celebrated re ect not their own understanding and representations of their community, but a vocabulary associated with the wider American achievement, and in particular the politics and political theory that in the late eighteenth century produced the modern American republic. Across the continent of America and around the Atlantic world, a similar classical vocabulary symbolizes legitimacy, civilization, learning and achievement. In the federal and state capitals of the United States, neo-classical buildings house the various branches of government, a connection between the ancient and modern world for which Thomas Jefferson, through his deliberate choice of the temple at Nîmes as the model for the post-Independence Virginian Capitol building, is in part responsible. Familiarity has perhaps dulled modern observers to some of the original impact of such buildings, but their original and striking impression can be glimpsed in the art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A watercolour by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, ‘View of the City of Richmond From the Bank of the James River’ painted in 1798 and now in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society, shows the newly constructed, unmistakably classical, capitol building rising above the modestly constructed houses of contemporary Richmond. Latrobe would go on to work on many important public buildings in America, not least of which is the national Capitol Building in Washington D.C., and he was important in promoting a style of Greek Revival architecture that has proved enduring and in uential.
