Picture a white marble rotunda modeled on the Roman Pantheon, open to the air above the Tidal Basin's cherry blossoms. Cherry blossom trees ring the water below you, gifts from Japan in 1912.
Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia's Rotunda after the Pantheon. He loved Palladian classicism — the idea that democratic values and classical architecture went hand in hand. This memorial, completed in 1943, honors him with the style he loved.
Step inside and look up: a nineteen-foot bronze statue of Jefferson gazes toward the White House, which he helped to design — he submitted his own architectural drawings anonymously in the competition and came in second. He also helped design the Capitol building.
The panels inscribed on the rotunda walls are selections from Jefferson's writings. The most famous: words from the Declaration of Independence. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' Jefferson wrote those words in 1776. He owned over six hundred enslaved people during his lifetime. That contradiction — between the soaring language of equality and the brutal reality of American slavery — is the central tension of Jefferson's legacy, and of American history itself.
Jefferson was the third president, the author of the Declaration, founder of the University of Virginia, architect, inventor, wine collector, and amateur paleontologist. He was also a man whose ideals he could not, or would not, extend to the people who served him.