Monticello
Thomas Jefferson’s home on a hill in Virginia is his own work as an architect. He drew inspiration from Palladio and from Roman temples, and the house was given a portico and a low dome. It was built and rebuilt over more than forty years, and enslaved labour was part of both its construction and life there.
Jefferson began building in 1768 to his own designs, based on Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture. After his years as envoy in Paris in the 1780s, where he had seen new French architecture and the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, he tore down parts of the house and rebuilt it with a dome, inspired by the Hôtel de Salm. He called it his “essay in architecture”.
Monticello is also a place where the history of slavery is visible. Jefferson owned more than six hundred people in the course of his life, and around a hundred worked here at any one time. Their labour made the house and the plantation possible, and today the museum tells their stories, among them those of Sally Hemings and her children. The house is a World Heritage Site together with Jefferson’s University of Virginia and appears on the back of the five-cent coin.