Classical

On this cast

• CellaThe windowless room behind the porch that housed the cult statue. Its wall is built of squared stone in level courses: ashlar.
• Temple doorOne great doorway on the central axis, framed by mouldings and crowned by a cornice on two brackets.
• PodiumRoman temples stand on a high platform with a base and a cornice of their own. Greek ones sit on low steps all round instead.
• Frontal stairThe only way up is from the front, so the temple has a clear face and a back. A Roman idea.
• Corinthian columnThe slender, fluted column of the richest order, about ten diameters tall.
• Attic baseTwo convex rings (tori) with a hollow between them, on a square plinth.
• Corinthian capitalA bell wrapped in two rows of acanthus leaves, with little volutes curling out under the corners of the abacus.
• ArchitraveThe beam laid across the columns, stepped into three flat bands called fasciae.
• FriezeThe band between architrave and cornice. Here it carries a running scroll of acanthus.
• CorniceThe overhanging crown: dentils (little blocks), an egg-and-dart moulding, and scrolled brackets called modillions.
• PedimentThe low triangle closing the end of the pitched roof, outlined by raking cornices.
• TympanumThe recessed field inside the pediment, here with a wreath and hanging garlands.
• AcroteriaOrnaments set on the apex and the two corners of the pediment, here palmettes.

How to spot it from the street

1. Columns carry a straight beam, the entablature
2. A low triangular pediment over the front
3. Mouldings run in horizontal bands
4. Strict symmetry about the door

Where it came from

Greek builders turned the timber temple into stone and fixed its parts into orders: the sturdy Doric of the mainland, the Ionic with its scrolls from the Aegean coast, and later the leafy Corinthian. Each order is a whole kit with its own column, capital, beam and cornice, and its own proportions.

Rome kept the orders and added what the Greeks had barely used: the arch, the vault, the dome and concrete. A Roman temple stands on a tall podium with steps only at the front. Vitruvius wrote it all down around 25 BC, in the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, and Renaissance architects would study it line by line.