The transformation of European society and its material shell that took place during the period we call the Renaissance is associated with the break-up of the town economy and its replacement by a mercantile economy devoted to the advantage of the State. Along with this goes the destruction of the village community, and the predominance in social affairs of a landholding oligarchy who have thrown off feudal responsibilities while they have retained most of the feudal privileges, and a merchant class, buttressed by riches derived from war, piracy, and sharp trade.
America reproduced in miniature the changes that were taking place in Europe. Because of its isolation and the absence of an established social order, it showed these changes without the blur and confusion that attended them abroad.
It is sometimes a little difficult to tell whether the classical modes of building were a result of these changes in society or, among other things, an incentive to them; whether the classical frame fitted the needs of the time, or whether men’s activities expanded to occupy the idolum that had seized their imagination. At any rate, the notion that the classical taste in architecture developed mainly through technical interests in design will not hold; for the severely classical shell arose only in regions where the social conditions had laid a foundation for the classical myth.
The first development of the grand style in the American renaissance was in the manors of Virginia and Maryland. It came originally through an imitation of the country houses of England, and then, after the Revolutionary War, it led to a direct adaptation of the Roman villa and the Greek temple. One does not have to go very deep to fetch up the obvious parallel between the land-monopoly and slavery that prevailed in the American manors and the conditions that permitted the Roman villa itself to assume its stately proportions; nor need one dwell too long upon the natural subordination, in this regime, of the carpenter-builder to the gentleman-architect. “In the town palaces and churches,” as Mr. Fiske Kimball justly says, “there was a strong contradiction between modern conditions and ancient forms, so that it was only in the country that Palladio’s ideas of domestic architecture could come to a clear and successful expression. These monuments, since so much neglected, served in Palladio’s book expressly to represent the ‘Antients’ designs of country-houses....’”