Here's a detail of the wall, where you can
see its curvature and also see that opus incertum worked.
And here is a detail of the capitals.
The Corinthian capitals that are used here, what's characteristic of
Corinthian capitals is that they have like, like like the
ionic they have volutes. These spiral volutes.
But they are much more, they are much smaller and much more
delicate and they are in a sense incorporated into the flowering plant.
This is called an acanthus plant, a-c-a-n-t-h-u-s plants grow all over Italy.
You see them everywhere so they are just emit they
are just copying a plant that is indigenous to Italy.
They used those acanthus leaves that seemed to
grow out of the column to incorporate the
spirals, and there's always a, a, a prominent
central flower that is also part of this motif.
It's important to note at the beginning that while
the Greeks used the Doric and the Ionic order
almost exclusively, the Greeks did invent the Corinthian order,
they used it very late Hellenistic times, but quite infrequently.
The Romans used all three but were going to see very quickly that
they decide pretty early on that the Ion, that the Corinthian capital is
their capital and almost every building,
we'll see some exceptions, but almost every
building we'll see in the course of this semester uses the Corinthian capital.
Why did they take to the Corinthian capital in particular?
This is something we can think about in the course of the semester and debate.
I think it has to do probably
with two major reasons.
One, it was particularly decorative, very
highly decorative, more so than the others.
But maybe even more important than that is the
fact, that the Corinthian capitol, at least in my
opinion, looks the best from the most vantage points,
because it's pretty much the same all the way around.
the, the Doric is pretty severe.
Here ionic looks best from certain angles, where you can
really see the volutes well, less well from other angles.
But this
looks pretty much the same where ever you see it, so it's a very flexible and, and
easily, easy to use capital type. We see also here I referred to this last
time that I want to describe it for you just in a second we see here the the
coffering, the coffering of the ceiling which is basically
placing placing a series of receding square elements
there to give the sense of depth or, in, in the in the ceiling.
And then in the center, you see these flowers that match up
nicely with those in the Corinthian
capitals, which are called rosettes, rosettes.
And we'll see coffering and the use
of rosettes quite extensively in Roman architecture.
I mentioned the restaurant.
The Sibilla used to be a horrendous restaurant.
I was, when I started taking pictures of Roman
buildings I guess was a little more timid than I am today.
So I always thought, well, gee, if I'm going to go in to the terrace and
want to take a picture of the temple, I'm kind of going to have to eat there.
I would never do that now, but I did that at one point.
And I made the mistake of eating in
this restaurant twice and I never went back again.
But when I went just a couple years ago to see the temple once again, I
saw that they had really, some new owners
must have come along, they really expanded the restaurant.
It looks very pretty now and this is the terrace on which
one can eat.
I haven't tried it, but I might, actually, next time I go.
I want to just end with a couple of remarks.
One is that, one of the interesting things is that although the
temples that we talked about today were in part made on stone
in all cases travertine, we do know that already in the year
146 B.C., so earlier than the couple of the temples we looked
at just now.
In 146 BC, they had, the Romans had already put up a temple, another temple to
Jupiter near the Tiber river that was made entirely of marble, entirely of marble.
So they were already beginning to think, not just of their own local stone
or stones that were from local place,
close places in Italy, but, but imported marble.
A and so I want to you to know that so that we can talk
about it in the future and we also know that in
142 the ceiling of the temple of Juipter OMC was guilded
and we also know that not long after that they repaved
the temple of Jupiter OMC and gave it a multicolored stone.
So what this is telling us, is a lot of people in Rome, we're beginning
to think of, of temples that were more
ornate than anything had become, had come before,
anything that had come before.
There are some very conservative individuals who did some writing at this
particular time, who bemoaned the fact that they had, that the Romans
had moved away from the Etruscan temples made out of wood and
mud brick and so on and were becoming too ostentatious in their taste.
But I think these new Greek-style temples were definitely here to stay.
And I just wanted to end up with a quote from Cicero, after one of
these fires, these fires that so often raged in Rome, the Great Fire of 83 B.C.
Cicero, talks about the, the rebuilding still again of the Temple of Jupiter OMC.
And I quote from Cicero when he says, let
us feel, let us feel that conflagration to have been
the will of heaven, and it's purpose not to
destroy the temple of almighty Jupiter, but to demand of
us one more splendid and magnificent. What did that mean?
More Greek.
More Greek looking.
More marble and last comment I'm going to make is to make
the temple of Jupiter OMC even more magnificent, the Roman general
Sulla, who was sacking Athens at this particular time, goes into
Athens and after he sacks it, takes it over, conquers it.
He goes up to the biggest temple
in town, the temple of Olympian Zeus, Zeus, the Greek counterpart of Jupiter.
And he takes some of the columns, actually steals
some of the columns from that temple, has them
shipped back to Rome, and he incorporates them into
the temple of Jupiter OMC on the Capitoline hill.
These columns, my last point, these columns were 55 and one half feet tall.
So that, and they were made of solid marble.
So that gives you some sense of the objectives of
the Romans vis-à-vis temple building in the first century BC.
