both they and the beams spanning between them were timber. These temples were quite small in size, and the timber and mud-bricks were perishable, whereas the Greek temples, by the time the Romans came into contact with them, were monumental in scale and built of stone. Not only that, but they had developed a very precisely codified system of sculpting the columns and beams, which developed over a long time and became an exacting set of proportions and adjustments, so that for example the columns were modelled with ridges in them (flutes) that were cut on site so that they would not be damaged in transport, and the columns and flutings tapered so the top of the column was narrower than its base. What is not obvious at first is that the taper does not follow a perfectly straight line, but bulges out very slightly from where that straight line would have taken it. This bulging (which is called ‘entasis’) was carefully worked out, and was supposed to make the columns look right when seen by eye – without it there is apparently a tendency for the columns to look as if they grow slightly thinner than they should be in the middle. The Greeks, it can be seen, lavished attention on their temples, or at least on the important ones such as the Parthenon, which was decorated discreetly with fine sculpture. There was not only the cult statue inside the temple, cast in bronze and covered in gold and ivory as was traditional. It was made by Phidias, who was also responsible for the celebrated statue of Zeus at Olympia (which is always listed, along with the Pyramids, as one of ‘the wonders’ of the ancient world). These statues are now lost, but most of the marble sculptures that decorated the Parthenon survive (many of them in the British Museum, where they are known as the Elgin Marbles). It was a building of enormous prestige, and it impressed the Romans, who adopted the Greek architectural language, simplified it, and applied it to the buildings that they built across the whole of their vast empire, making this classical language the most widely used system of decorating buildings across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
17. Model of Temple of Juno Sospita, Lanuvium – Etruscan temple, according to Vitruvius (5th century BC). The building shown here is a model made following the description of an Etruscan temple given by Vitruvius in section 7 of the fourth of his Ten Books of Architecture. It is therefore a Roman architect’s idea of the ancient type of Roman temple, before the days of the empire. The walls of the cella were made of sun-dried mud-brick, which is vulnerable to water. Therefore the building was raised up on a stone base, to keep the walls clear of ground water. The columns were of timber, and the buildings were not large by later standards, and the spacing between the columns is shown as much wider than would become characteristic later on. Then the building would have been in stone, which needs sturdier proportions because although it is very strong when downward pressure is applied, it will crumble easily if it is pushed sideways or bent. The roof was given a wide overhang, again to protect the walls from water – this time from falling rain. There are three rooms in the cella, arranged across the podium. This is the type of temple that the Romans built before they had learnt to emulate the Greeks’ masonry and artistry in making monumental buildings.
So, going back to the Maison Carrée at Nîmes (Figure 13) which is the best preserved of the typical Roman temples, we can see a cultural memory of the old Etruscan temple, overlaid with the sophisticated architecture of the Greek temple. There is an enclosed room at one end of the platform in which the cult statue would have been, looking out through the doorway to the public altar where sacrifices were made. The outside of the wall of this room (called the ‘cella’) however is sculpted to remind one of the row of columns that runs right the way round a Greek temple.
Memory
Buildings can carry in them cultural memories of the architecture of the past,