Roman temple

• 1. Introduction

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  Roman temples have been called "the most obvious symbol of Roman architecture", yet only a few survive in anything like a complete state. Every town of any importance had at least one main temple, along with smaller shrines. Building and maintaining these places formed a major part of ancient Roman religion, and they ranked among the richest buildings the Romans ever made. So what went on at a Roman temple, and where exactly did it happen? Why did builders care so much about one face of the building and so little about the rest? And how did a form tied to one religion outlive that religion by centuries?

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• 2. Sacred Ground

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  The Latin word templum, which gives English its word temple, originally meant no building at all. It described a sacred space, surveyed and plotted out through ritual. The architect Vitruvius always used it for the precinct rather than the structure. Romans had other words for the buildings themselves, including sacellum for a small shrine or chapel, and aedes, delubrum and fanum.

  At the heart of each building lay the cella, the main room, which housed the cult image of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated. Many cellae also held a table for supplementary offerings or libations, and a small altar for incense. Rooms behind the cella let temple attendants store their equipment and offerings.

  Most public ceremonies skipped the cella entirely. The ordinary worshiper rarely went in. A crowd gathered in the temple precinct while rites took place at the sacrificial altar or on the portico. Sacrifices, chiefly of animals, were made at an open-air altar within the templum, often on one of the narrow extensions of the podium beside the steps.

  Public processions of the official Roman religion often began at, visited, or ended at a temple or shrine. A ritual object might be kept inside and brought out for use, or an offering might be deposited there.

  Under the Empire, exotic foreign cults won followers in Rome and became the local religions across large parts of the expanded Empire. Some preferred underground places of worship. The Early Christians, who met in houses, would later inherit many of the official temples.

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• 3. Fronts, Steps and Colour

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  The Temple of Claudius stood on a platform of twenty steps. Greek temples typically managed three, while Etruscan and Roman examples often climbed ten, twelve or more. The stairs normally rose only at the front, and usually spanned just part of its width.

  At the top of those steps waited a portico of columns, a pronaos, and usually a triangular pediment. In grand examples the pediment held statuary, made as often of terracotta as of stone. Only fragments of it survive. Greek temples gave all sides equal care, so that visitors could approach from any direction. Roman architects did not. At Vic and in the Pantheon, the side and rear walls were largely undecorated. At the Maison Carrée and at Vic, no steps reached them. Some temples even backed onto other buildings, and at the Maison Carrée the side columns were half columns emerging from the wall.

  The Etruscans, a people of northern Italy whose civilization peaked in the seventh century BC, supplied the original model. They had already absorbed early Greek influence, so Roman temples carried features of both. Around 200 BC, under the late Republic, Romans began adopting Greek models directly, and the classical orders were followed closely on temple façades. The Etruscan-Roman arrangement of steps and front stayed in place all the same.

  Vitruvius is the only significant Roman writer on architecture whose work survives, and his ideal proportions do not match real Roman practice. That practice varied widely, though it always aimed at balance and harmony. The Corinthian order and its variant the Composite were most common in surviving temples, following a Hellenistic trend. Small temples such as the one at Alcántara could use a plain Tuscan order. Vitruvius never recognised the Composite order and treated the Tuscan only as Etruscan. Renaissance writers formalized both after studying the surviving buildings.

  Scarlet or vermilion paint filled the V-shaped letters cut into the stone across a temple front, announcing who had built it. On major imperial monuments the letters were cast in lead and held in place with pegs, then painted or gilded. Most have long vanished. Archaeologists can generally reconstruct them from the peg-holes, and some have been re-created and set back in place.

  Terracotta antefixes and revetments made earlier temples far more colourful than the bare stone that survives. Painted statuary lined the rooflines, and bright ornament enlivened the entablature. None of it remains on surviving Greek or Roman temples. Exterior friezes with figures in relief were much less common than pedimental sculpture. In the early Empire, older Greek statues were apparently sometimes reused as roof ornaments called acroteria.

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• 4. Round and Provincial Temples

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  Temples of the goddess Vesta were usually small and typically circular, as the survivors at Rome and Tivoli show. Like the Temple of Hercules Victor in Rome, which was perhaps the work of a Greek architect, they had an unbroken colonnade all around and a low, Greek-style podium. Greek tholos shrines offered models for the round plan.

  The Pantheon and a small temple at Baalbek, usually called the Temple of Venus, both put the door behind a full portico, in very different ways. In the Pantheon only the portico has columns. Critics often fault the "thoroughly uncomfortable" meeting of that portico with the round cella. At Baalbek, a wide portico with a broken pediment is matched by four more columns around the building. Its architrave curves in scooped sections, each ending in a projection supported by a column.

  At Praeneste, modern Palestrina, a huge pilgrimage complex of the 1st century BC led visitors up several levels of a steep hillside. Large buildings lined the route. The goal waiting at the top was a much smaller circular building, the sanctuary itself.

  In Egypt and the Near East, traditions of large stone temples were already millennia old. Roman architects there often tried to include elements the local population expected in its sacred architecture.

  The Romano-Celtic temple, found in the Western Empire, was a simple style that made little use of stone. It was by far the most common type in Roman Britain, usually square with an ambulatory, though circular examples were also built. It often lacked classical features, and may have continued the temples of the Celtic religion that came before it.

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• 5. Temples for Emperors

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  Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt, began one of the earliest and most prominent caesarea, a temple type devoted to the Imperial cult. It stood on the harbour at Alexandria and honoured her dead lover Julius Caesar. Augustus then converted it to his own cult. In the 4th century, after the Empire had come under Christian rule, it became a church.

  Across the Empire, caesarea were often funded by the imperial government. They tended to replace state spending on new temples to other gods. In new provincial towns the caesareum became the main or only large temple. Évora, Vienne and Nîmes were all expanded by the Romans as coloniae from Celtic oppida soon after their conquest. Government-funded imperial temples used conventional Roman styles everywhere, whatever local styles appeared in smaller temples. In newly planned cities the temple normally stood centrally at one end of the forum, often facing the basilica at the other.

  In Rome, a caesareum stood within the religious precinct of the Arval Brothers. A document of 1570 recorded that it still held nine statues of Roman emperors in architectural niches. Most earlier emperors had their own very large temples in the city. A faltering economy meant that new imperial temples mostly stopped being built after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180.

  One exception stands in the Roman Forum. The Emperor Maxentius built and dedicated the Temple of Romulus to his son Valerius Romulus, who died in childhood in 309 and was deified. The building would eventually take on a very different role.

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• 6. Jupiter on the Capitol

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  In 509 BC, according to tradition, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was dedicated on the Capitoline Hill. It was a capitolium, devoted to the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter and his companion deities Juno and Minerva. It held a cathedral-like position in the official religion of Rome. Some have claimed the first building measured almost 60 by 60 metres, far larger than other Roman temples for centuries. Specialists heavily dispute that size. Whatever its dimensions, its influence on early Roman temples was significant and long-lasting.

  Etruscan specialists were brought in to work on the first temple, including the making and painting of terracotta parts of the upper structure such as antefixes. For the second building, craftsmen were summoned from Greece. Fire destroyed the temple three times, and each time it was rapidly rebuilt in contemporary styles. Rebuildings were completed in 69 BC, in 75 AD, and in the 80s AD under Domitian. That last version lasted only five years before it burned down again.

  The Vandals sacked the site in 455. Centuries later, in the Renaissance, builders removed its stone comprehensively. Today only foundations can be seen, in the basement of the Capitoline Museums. The sculptor Flaminio Vacca, who died in 1605, claimed that he carved a life-size Medici lion from a single capital of the temple. The lion, made to match a Roman survival, is now in Florence.

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• 7. Churches, Mosques and Ruins

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  In 415, a decree of the Emperor Honorius finally let the government take over the temples. The decline of Roman religion had been relatively slow. The few near-complete survivors were nearly all converted into Christian churches, and sometimes later mosques, usually long after Constantine's initial triumph of Christianity. Santi Cosma e Damiano, in the Roman Forum, began as the Temple of Romulus and was not dedicated as a church until 527.

  Conversion often came at a price. Builders walled in the porticos between the columns and largely removed the original front and side walls of the cella. The result was one large interior space.

  Spain produced remarkable finds in the 19th century, at Vic, Córdoba and Barcelona. Old buildings being reconstructed or demolished turned out to contain major temple remains encased inside them. The temple at Vic was found covered by a castle, and it has been substantially rebuilt. At Córdoba, a base and 11 Corinthian columns emerged from later buildings. Rural areas of the Islamic world also hold good remains that were largely left undisturbed.

  Squared-off blocks from temple walls were always attractive to later builders. Massive columns were harder to move, so the podium without its facing and a few columns are often all that remain. Loose stones such as capitals may sit in local museums, beside terracotta votive statuettes or amulets that turn up in large numbers. Very little of the large sculpture that decorated temples survives in place.

  The Pantheon in Rome keeps easily the most impressive and complete interior of any Roman temple. The Maison Carrée at Nîmes is one of the most complete survivals. In Split, a small temple of Jupiter within Diocletian's Palace dates from around 300 and, unusually, still has its barrel ceiling. The temple at Alcántara is tiny but complete. In Brescia, a landslide buried the capitolium of Brixia, which has since been partly reconstructed.

  The Garni Temple in Armenia is 1st-century and was reconstructed after an earthquake in 1679. It is the only extant Greco-Roman temple in Armenia and the former Soviet Union, and has been described as the "easternmost building of the Graeco-Roman world".

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• 8. The Temple Front Lives On

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  The White House, Buckingham Palace and St Peters in Rome are among thousands of buildings that borrow the Roman temple front. Columns and a pediment often mark the main entrance of a grand building, flanked by large wings or set in courtyards. That flexibility lets the form serve a wide variety of purposes. The colonnade may no longer be pushed forward or raised above the ground, but the essential shape remains. In recent years the temple front has become fashionable in China. Later versions usually lack the original colour, and they rarely copy the full Roman complement of sculpture above the roofline. Although very common on churches, the form has lost the specific link to religion that it had for the Romans.

  In 1462, Leon Battista Alberti designed San Andrea in Mantua by taking a four-columned Roman triumphal arch and adding a pediment above. Andrea Palladio began San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in 1566, with two superimposed temple fronts, one low and wide and the other tall and narrow. His Villa Capra, called La Rotonda, dates from 1567 and has four isolated temple fronts on the sides of a rectangle, with a large central dome. Renaissance and later architects learned to add high domes, towers and spires above a colonnaded portico, something the Romans would have found odd.

  In Baroque architecture, two temple fronts, often of different orders, were stacked one above the other on Catholic churches. The upper one was often supported by huge volutes at each side. The Gesù in Rome (1584), Santa Susanna in Rome (1597), Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio a Trevi (1646) and Val-de-Grâce in Paris (1645 on) show this pattern developing.

  St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, designed by James Gibbs in 1720, set an archetypal pattern for Georgian churches. Gibbs boldly added a large steeple on a tower to the west-end temple façade, set back slightly from the frontage. The formula shocked purists and foreigners, but it was accepted and very widely copied. St Andrew's Church in Chennai and St. Paul's Chapel in New York City (1766) are examples.

  Faithful copies of the rectangular temple block appear only from the 18th century onwards. La Madeleine in Paris (1807) is now a church, but Napoleon built it as a Temple de la Gloire de la Grande Armée, or "Temple to the Glory of the Great Army". The Virginia State Capitol, as originally built in 1785-88, and Birmingham Town Hall (1832-34) follow the same idea.

  Bramante's Tempietto, in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome, dates from about 1502 and is the great progenitor of small round temples used as models. Domes raised on drums at St Peters, St Paul's Cathedral in London and the United States Capitol descend from that tradition. The Pantheon's large domed cella behind a conventional portico is "unique" in Roman architecture, yet modern architects have copied it many times. Gian Lorenzo Bernini built Santa Maria Assunta in Ariccia in 1664, after restoring the Roman original. Belle Isle House in England followed in 1774. The Pantheon was by far the largest and most accessible complete classical temple front known to the Italian Renaissance. Thomas Jefferson's library at the University of Virginia, The Rotunda (1817-26), is another of its descendants.

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