The pride of Jefferson regarding Monticello was the cupola, or dome, over the top of the building. The building of the cupola was a massive architectural problem, needing intense calculations and measurements just to keep the dome upright. Jefferson placed his own study in the cupola, as it also provided the best light and airflow of any room.

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The Great London Fire of 1666 destroyed many of the buildings in the city, including the original St. Paul's Cathedral, and necessitated massive architectural projects. The largest beneficiary of this was Sir Christopher Wren, a mathematician as well as an architect, who created over fifty churches and rebuilt St. Paul's. Wren's legacy found its way throughout baroque architecture, and his St. Paul's design influenced the Pantheon in Paris, the U.S. Capitol, and many other buildings.

When Inigo Jones, who created this plan of a new Palace at Whitehall in 1638, first became an architect, the field was only newly springing up as a separate artistic discipline. There was no training in architecture or building design, and many seventeenth-century architects were self-taught artisans who came from related fields. Jones began as a stage designer, where he built sets and costumes for shows at the English court, and was typical of his era of architects for starting off in an artistic field that required knowledge of structures and fabrication.

Image: Plan for A New Palace at Whitehall by Inigo Jones (1638). <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ingo_Jones_plan_for_a_new_palace_at_Whitehall_1638.jpg>

The Federal style of architecture refers to the buildings designed and constructed in the first few decades of the United States' independence, roughly 1785 to 1815. The Federal style was closely related to the "Regency style" in Britain, which took place under the Regency of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) during 1811 to 1820. Both styles were developments of Neoclassicism, which borrowed elements from Roman architecture like columns, domes, and white marble.

The term neoclassicism can be broken down into two parts: "Neo" and "Classic." This refers to the fact that is a new ("neo") interpretation of classic architectural and artistic concepts pioneered by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Art Deco and Art Nouveau are movements firmly planted in the twentieth century, and Mannerism and the Renaissance are much too far in the past to even be considered for a question that is about an eighteenth-through-twenty-first-century artistic movement.

The Rococo artistic and architectural movement and style, also known as "Late Baroque," surged in the late 18th century as a more intricate, delicate, light and asymmetrical approach to architecture than the Baroque style that came before it. Neoclassicism, which came as a direct opposition to Rococo, had replaced the asymmetrical, graceful architecture and art of the Rococo with its own focus on symmetry and simplicity by the end of the 18th century.

Thomas Jefferson was the principal designer, architect, and builder of Monticello, but his plans and designs were heavily influenced by the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Palladio not only built a number of impressive works of his own, but also wrote an influential treatise on architecture, The Four Books of Architecture. Jefferson was self-taught as an architect, largely from the writings of Palladio.

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The building pictured in the drawing is Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in then rural Virginia, which he began building in the late eighteenth century. The location of Monticello is at the top of a hill, on the relative frontier of the continent, making it a building challenge. Nonetheless, Jefferson largely succeeded at building a European inspired grand home that still fit into the American landscape.

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The Baroque movement was superseded by the artistic and architectural movement Rococo in the eighteenth century. Rococo was a deviation from the grandeur and strict symmetry of the Baroque movement, which dominated western and central Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some describe Rococo as delicate and intricate.

Neoclassicism was inspired by both ancient Greek and ancient Roman civilizations. This can be seen in its use of columns and other characteristics commonly associated with Greek and Roman art and architecture. Neoclassical sculptures also greatly resemble ancient Greek and ancient Roman sculptures.