George Washington's Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Joseph Manca is the Nina J. Cullinan Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He is author and editor of a number of books, including The Art of Ercole de' Roberti, Titian 500, and Andrea Mantegna and the Italian Renaissance.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

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