Roman temple

[1] Their construction and maintenance was a major part of ancient Roman religion, and all towns of any importance had at least one main temple, as well as smaller shrines.

The main room (cella) housed the cult image of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated, and often a table for supplementary offerings or libations and a small altar for incense.

[2][3] The most common architectural plan had a rectangular temple raised on a high podium, with a clear front with a portico at the top of steps, and a triangular pediment above columns.

Some ceremonies were processions that started at, visited, or ended with a temple or shrine, where a ritual object might be stored and brought out for use, or where an offering would be deposited.

The best known is the Pantheon, Rome, which, however, is highly untypical, being a very large circular temple with a magnificent concrete roof, behind a conventional portico front.

[5] The English word "temple" derives from the Latin templum, which was originally not the building itself, but a sacred space surveyed and plotted ritually.

[7][8] Surviving temples (both Greek and Roman) lack the extensive painted statuary that decorated the rooflines, and the elaborate revetments and antefixes, in colourful terracotta in earlier examples, that enlivened the entablature.

However, unlike the Greek models, which generally gave equal treatment to all sides of the temple, which could be viewed and approached from all directions, the side and rear walls of Roman temples might be largely undecorated (as in the Pantheon, Rome and Vic), inaccessible by steps (as in the Maison Carrée and Vic), and even back on to other buildings.

For example, the "Temple of Dionysus" on the terrace by the theatre at Pergamon (Ionic, 2nd century BC, on a hillside), had many steps in front, and no columns beyond the portico.

Like the Temple of Hercules Victor in Rome, which was perhaps by a Greek architect, these survivors had an unbroken colonnade encircling the building, and a low, Greek-style podium.

It was begun by Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, to honour her dead lover Julius Caesar, then converted by Augustus to his own cult.

For the first temple Etruscan specialists were brought in for various aspects of the building, including making and painting the extensive terracotta elements of the entablature or upper parts, such as antefixes.

[26] The sculptor Flaminio Vacca (d 1605) claimed that the life-size Medici lion he carved to match a Roman survival, now in Florence, was made from a single capital from the temple.

[27] The Etruscan-Roman adaptation of the Greek temple model to place the main emphasis on the front façade and let the other sides of the building harmonize with it only as much as circumstances and budget allow has generally been adopted in Neoclassical architecture, and other classically derived styles.

In these temple fronts with columns and a pediment are very common for the main entrance of grand buildings, but often flanked by large wings or set in courtyards.

Among thousands of examples are the White House, Buckingham Palace, and St Peters, Rome; in recent years the temple front has become fashionable in China.

[28] Renaissance and later architects worked out ways of harmoniously adding high raised domes, towers and spires above a colonnaded temple portico front, something the Romans would have found odd.

Variations on the theme, mostly Italian in origin, include: San Andrea, Mantua, 1462 by Leon Battista Alberti, which took a four-columned Roman triumphal arch and added a pediment above; San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, begun 1566, by Andrea Palladio, which has two superimposed temple fronts, one low and wide, the other tall and narrow; the Villa Capra "La Rotonda", 1567 on, also by Palladio, with four isolated temple fronts on each side of a rectangle, with a large central dome.

In Baroque architecture two temple fronts, often of different orders, superimposed one above the other, became extremely common for Catholic churches, often with the uppermost one supported by huge volutes to each side.

This formula shocked purists and foreigners, but became accepted and was very widely copied, at home and in the colonies,[31] for example at St Andrew's Church, Chennai in India and St. Paul's Chapel in New York City (1766).

[33] Though the Pantheon's large circular domed cella, with a conventional portico front, is "unique" in Roman architecture, it has been copied many times by modern architects.

Versions include the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Ariccia by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1664), which followed his work restoring the Roman original,[34] Belle Isle House (1774) in England, and Thomas Jefferson's library at the University of Virginia, The Rotunda (1817–26).

The Maison Carrée in Nîmes , one of the best-preserved Roman temples. It is a mid-sized Augustan provincial temple of the Imperial cult .
The Temple of Hercules Victor , in the Forum Boarium in Rome, 2nd century BC; the entablature is lost and the roof later.
Roman temple of Alcántara , in Spain, a tiny votive temple built with an important bridge under Trajan
Temple of Augustus in Pula , Croatia , an early temple of the Imperial cult
Roman temple of Vic , part original, with parts restored
Ceiling of Temple of Jupiter, Diocletian's Palace , Split
Small stone building surrounded by half-walls and columns with elaborate capitals.
A Roman mammisi or chapel added to Dendera Temple , using the traditional Egyptian temple style.
"Temple of Venus", Baalbek , from the rear
Temple of the Imperial cult at Vienne
Relief of Marcus Aurelius sacrificing at the 4th temple (left)
St Martin-in-the-Fields , London (1720), James Gibbs
La Madeleine, Paris (1807), now a church
Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek , Lebanon
View of the Temple of Romulus , from the Palatine Hill .
Garni Temple , Armenia , the "easternmost building of the Graeco-Roman world"
The Temple of Apollo in Pompeii . Mount Vesuvius is to the far left.
Reconstruction of Pagans Hill Roman Temple , Somerset , a Romano-Celtic temple
Capitoleum of Dougga , Tunisia
Temple of Janus as seen in the present church of San Nicola in Carcere , in the Forum Holitorium of Rome, Italy, dedicated by Gaius Duilius after his naval victory at the Battle of Mylae in 260 BC [ 39 ]