The Maison carrée inspired the neoclassical Église de la Madeleine in Paris, St. Marcellinus Church in Rogalin, Poland, and in the United States the Virginia State Capitol,[3] which was designed by Thomas Jefferson, who had a stucco model made of the Maison carrée while he was minister to France in 1785.

[5][6] In about 4–7 AD,[7] the Maison carrée was dedicated or rededicated to Gaius and Lucius Caesar, grandsons and adopted heirs of Augustus who both died young.

However, a local scholar, Jean-François Séguier, was able to reconstruct the inscription in 1758 from the order and number of the holes on the front frieze and architrave, to which the bronze letters had been affixed by projecting tines.

Raised on a 2.85 m high podium, and at 26.42 m by 13.54 m forming a rectangle almost twice as long as it is wide, the temple dominated the forum of the Roman city of Nîmes, in what is now southern France.

These were demolished when the Maison carrée housed what is now the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes (from 1821 to 1907), restoring it to the isolation it would have enjoyed in Roman times.

Sir Norman Foster was commissioned to build a modern art gallery and public library, known as the Carré d'Art, on the far side of the square, to replace the city theater of Nîmes, which had burnt down in 1952.