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Abstract
George Washington liked to shape his own circumstances. Over the years he carefully crafted both his inner self and his public persona, as well as many aspects of his aesthetic world. Washington's life formed a unity, and his morality formed part of the backdrop to his designs at Mount Vernon. His house, gardens, and art collection-and his own writings about them-were a major part of the public face of his virtue. Washington usually acted with conscious moral purpose. "Moral" is meant here in the broadest possible sense, including such ethical matters as maintaining a public reputation, using one's time wisely, fulfilling one's duties to society, and living without luxuries. In the eighteenth century, the conception of morality also included the achievement of individual perfection, such as living a rational, tranquil, and harmonious life. Washington was obsessed, perhaps even more keenly than his contemporaries, with matters of honor, appearance, dignity, and duty to society. As a schoolboy, Washington copied down the maxim that "every action one takes should be in consideration of all of those present," and indeed his lifelong actions as architect, collector, and landscape gardener were done in consideration of the public's valuation of his moral worth. -from Chapter 1: George Washington: Morality and the Crafting of Self On the banks of the Potomac River, Mount Vernon stands, with its iconic portico boasting breathtaking views and with a landscape to rival the great gardens of Europe, as a monument to George Washington's artistic and creative efforts. More than one million people visit Mount Vernon each year-drawn to the stature and beauty of Washington's family estate. Art historian Joseph Manca systematically examines Mount Vernon-its stylistic, moral, and historical dimensions-offering a complete picture of this national treasure and the man behind its enduring design. Manca brings to light a Washington deeply influenced by his wide travels in colonial America, with a broader architectural knowledge than previously suspected, and with a philosophy that informed his aesthetic sensibility. Washington believed that design choices and personal character mesh to form an ethic of virtue and fulfillment and that art is inextricably linked with moral and social concerns. Manca examines how these ideas shaped the material culture of Mount Vernon. Based on careful study of Washington's personal diaries and correspondence and on the lively accounts of visitors to his estate, this richly illustrated book introduces a George Washington unfamiliar to many readers-an avid art collector, amateur architect, and leading landscape designer of his time. © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
... По подобен начин свободните зидари основават нови селища със специфична архитектура (Вашингтон, окр. Колумбия) или променят облика на градове със старинен произход ("османизацията" на Париж) (Curl 2011(Curl , 2014Wasserman 2008;Manca 2012: Frescura 2017. Такъв подход би могъл да се забележи и в урбанизацията на българската столица. ...
... American lawn was originally a symbol of high status. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were two elite landowners who had enormous public and symbolic stature, and their designed images of their private properties have contributed to the status of the American lawn for the individual homeowner in the later period when people were more affordable (Harch, 1971;Manca, 2012). A well-maintained lawn is seen as a symbol of conformity to social norms (Nassauer, 1988). ...
Lawn has been used for landscaping, gardening, and beautification of homes and cities for a long time. The evo-lution of the lawn reflects important cultural and biophysical interactions between humans and nature. The Amer-ican lawn, which was from Europe and has been a part of the American dream for home ownership and culture, has become an area going against nature for its extensively using chemicals and generated pollutions. Tracing how the lawn is becoming an important part of culture, this article focuses on more recent pollution and other Environmental problems resulted from the lawn culture. It is argued, that awareness, education and changing culture of taste and preference can serve additional measures together with law and technological advancement toward sustainable lawn in the United States and the world.
Although various national traditions have been given credit for establishing the porch in early America, the role of the Hudson Valley Dutch has been neglected. There is every reason to believe that the Dutch were in the forefront in the application of the porch, especially the extended domestic porch. They did so in a region surrounded by the culture of the Anglo population, who had found only a limited role for the portico in their domestic architecture. Rather than being a response to New World conditions, and far from appearing only in the later colonial and post-Revolutionary periods, the Dutch likely built porches early on in colonial America, carrying forward a useful tradition already well-established in Old World Dutch culture. © 2005 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved.
Attempts by evangelical Christians to claim Washington and other founders as their own, and scholars' ongoing attempts to contradict these claims, are nothing new. Particularly after Washington was no longer around to refute them, legends of his Baptist baptism or secret conversion to Catholicism began to proliferate. Mount Vernon researcher Mary Thompson endeavors to get beyond the current preoccupation with whether Washington and other founders were or were not evangelical Christians to ask what place religion had in their lives. Thompson follows Washington and his family over several generations, situating her inquiry in the context of new work on the place of religion in colonial and postrevolutionary Virginia and the Chesapeake.Thompson considers Washington's active participation as a vestryman and church warden as well as a generous donor to his parish prior to the Revolution, and how his attendance declined after the war. He would attend special ceremonies, and stood as godparent to the children of family and friends, but he stopped taking communion and resigned his church office. Something had changed, but was it Washington, the church, or both? Thompson concludes that he was a devout Anglican, of a Latitudinarian bent, rather than either an evangelical Christian or a Deist. The meaning of this description, Thompson allows, when applied to eighteenth-century Virginia gentlemen, is far from self-evident, leaving ample room for speculation. © 2008 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
Twentieth-century English garden historians have long praised Robert Castell's Villas of the Ancients Illustrated as conferring classical authority and providing form and direction to the newly fashionable appreciation of naturalistic scenery in the early eighteenth century. Challenging this reading, this essay strives to show that Castell's Pliny represents an ingenious rewriting of the past for the present and that as such it is valuable above anything else as a revealing pointer to the very different gardening ideas which were transplanted from China to England and which played a most decisive inspirational role in the diversely significant English landscaping revolution.
Abstract This study discusses the shifting reception of Italian Catholic religious paintings in the private chapels of English country houses. It first investigates how the practice of art collecting and patronage informs the strategies deployed by the English aristocracy to expunge from these pictures all Catholic overtones. It moves on to assess the impact of this ideological reinterpretation on works of art, whose original religious message was thus gradually displaced. The article concludes that these paintings came, effectively, to extol a religiosity of splendour, representative of a desire to glorify both the host's good taste and God's greatness.