Pediment

The so-called "Treasury" or Al-Khazneh, a 1st-century rock-cut tomb in Petra, Jordan, is a famously extreme example, with not merely the pediment, but the whole entablature, very "broken" and retreating into the cliff face.

The pediment is found in classical Greek temples, Etruscan, Roman, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, and Beaux-Arts architecture.

The large 2nd-century Market Gate of Miletus, now reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, has a pediment that retreats in the centre, so appears both broken and open, a feature also seen at the Al-Khazneh (so-called "Treasury") tomb at Petra in modern Jordan.

The broken pediments on each of the four sides of the Arch of Septimius Severus at Leptis Magna in Libya are very small elements, raking at an extremely steep angle, but not extending beyond the entablature for the columns below.

The Arch of Augustus in Rimini, Italy (27 BC), an early imperial monument, suggests that at this stage provincial Roman architects were not well practiced in the classical vocabulary; the base of the pediment ends close to, but not over, the capitals of the columns.

Here the whole temple front is decoration applied to a very solid wall, but the lack of respect for the conventions of Greek trabeated architecture remains rather disconcerting.

[17] Conventional Roman pediments have a slightly steeper pitch than classical Greek ones, perhaps because they ended tiled roofs that received heavier rainfall.

In Carolingian and Romanesque architecture pediments tended towards the equilateral triangle, and the enclosing cornice has little emphasis; they are often merely gable ends with some ornament.

In Gothic architecture pediments with a much more acute angle at the top were used, especially over doorways and windows, but while the rising sides of the cornice is elaborate, the horizontal bottom element was typically not very distinct.

When classical-style low triangular pediments returned in Italian Renaissance architecture, they were initially mostly used to top a relatively flat facade, with engaged elements rather than freestanding porticos supported by columns.

The main facade of his San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice (begun 1566) has "two interpenetrating temple fronts", a wider one being overlaid with a narrower and higher one, respectively following the roof lines of the aisles and nave.

[23] In St Peter's Basilica there is a conventional pediment over the main entrance, but the complicated facade stretches beyond it to both sides and above, and though large in absolute terms it makes a relatively small impression.

Variations using multiple pediments became very popular in Baroque architecture, and the central vertical line of church facades often ascended through several pediments of different sizes and shapes, in Rome five at the Church of the Gesù (Giacomo della Porta 1584) and six at Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio a Trevi (Martino Longhi the Younger, 1646), the top three folding into each other, using the same base line.

Large pediments with columns, often called the "temple front", became widely used for important public buildings such as stock exchanges, reserve banks, law courts, legislatures, and museums, where an impression of solidity, reliability, and respectability was desired.

He tried to include in his own buildings qualities that he described as 'inclusion, inconsistency, compromise, accommodation, adaptation, superadjacency, equivalence, multiple focus, juxtaposition, or good and bad space.

Multiple Postmodern architects and designers put simplified reinterpretations of the pediment found in Classical decoration at the top of their creations.