The portico of the Croome Court in Croome D'Abitot (England)Temple diagram with location of the pronaos highlighted
A portico is a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls. This idea was widely used in ancient Greece and has influenced many cultures, including most Western cultures.
Porticos are sometimes topped with pediments. Palladio was a pioneer of using temple-fronts for secular buildings. In the UK, the temple-front applied to The Vyne, Hampshire, was the first portico applied to an English country house.
A pronaos (UK: /proʊˈneɪ.ɒs/ or US: /proʊˈneɪ.əs/) is the inner area of the portico of a Greek or Roman temple, situated between the portico's colonnade or walls and the entrance to the cella, or shrine. Roman temples commonly had an open pronaos, usually with only columns and no walls, and the pronaos could be as long as the cella. The word pronaos (πρόναος) is Greek for "before a temple". In Latin, a pronaos is also referred to as an anticum or prodomus. The pronaos of a Greek and Roman temple is typically topped with a pediment.
Types
The different variants of porticos are named by the number of columns they have. The "style" suffix comes from the Greek στῦλος, "column".[1] In Greek and Roman architecture, the pronaos of a temple is typically topped with a pediment.[2]
The tetrastyle has four columns; it was commonly employed by the Greeks and the Etruscans for small structures such as public buildings and amphiprostyles.
The North Portico of the White House is perhaps the most notable four-columned portico in the United States.
Hexastyle
Hexastyle buildings had six columns and were the standard façade in canonical Greek Doric architecture between the archaic period 600–550BCE up to the Age of Pericles 450–430BCE.
Some well-known examples of classical Doric hexastyle Greek temples:
The group at Paestum comprising the Temple of Hera (c. 550BCE), the Temple of Apollo (c. 450BCE), the first Temple of Athena ("Basilica") (c. 500BCE) and the second Temple of Hera (460–440BCE)
The Temple of Hephaestus below the Acropolis at Athens, long known as the "Theseum" (449–444BCE), also one of the most intact Greek temples surviving from antiquity
Hexastyle was also applied to Ionic temples, such as the prostyle porch of the sanctuary of Athena on the Erechtheum, at the Acropolis of Athens.
Roman hexastyle
With the colonization by the Greeks of Southern Italy, hexastyle was adopted by the Etruscans and subsequently acquired by the ancient Romans. Roman taste favoured narrow pseudoperipteral and amphiprostyle buildings with tall columns, raised on podiums for the added pomp and grandeur conferred by considerable height. The Maison Carrée at Nîmes, France, is the best-preserved Roman hexastyle temple surviving from antiquity.
Octastyle
The western side of the octastyle Parthenon in Athens
Octastyle buildings had eight columns; they were considerably rarer than the hexastyle ones in the classical Greek architectural canon. The best-known octastyle buildings surviving from antiquity are the Parthenon in Athens, built during the Age of Pericles (450–430BCE), and the Pantheon in Rome (125CE). The destroyed Temple of Divus Augustus in Rome, the centre of the Augustan cult, is shown on Roman coins of the 2ndcenturyCE as having been built in octastyle.
↑ Gates, Charles (2013). Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece and Rome. New York: Taylor and Francis. p.209. ISBN9781134676620.
↑ Sturgis, Russell (1901). "Decastyle". A Dictionary of Architecture and Building: Biographical, Historical and Descriptive. Vol.1. Macmillan. p.755. ISBN978-0-7222-2967-5.
Stierlin, Henri (2002). Silvia Kinkle (ed.). The Roman Empire: From the Etruscans to the Decline of the Roman Empire. Cologne: Taschen. ISBN3-8228-1778-3.
External links
Look up portico in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Ancient Greek architecture came from the Greeks, or Hellenes, whose culture flourished on the Greek mainland, the Peloponnese, the Aegean Islands, and in colonies in Anatolia and Italy for a period from about 900 BC until the 1st century AD, with the earliest remaining architectural works dating from around 600 BC.
The Maison carrée is an ancient Roman temple in Nîmes, southern France; it is one of the best-preserved Roman temples to survive in the territory of the former Roman Empire. It is a mid-sized Augustan provincial temple of the Imperial cult, a caesareum.
The Temple of Hephaestus or Hephaisteion, is a well-preserved Greek temple dedicated to Hephaestus; it remains standing largely intact today. It is a Doric peripteral temple, and is located at the north-west side of the Agora of Athens, on top of the Agoraios Kolonos hill. From the 7th century until 1834, it served as the Greek Orthodox church of Saint George Akamates. The building's condition has been maintained due to its history of varied use.
The Temple of Athena Nike is a temple on the Acropolis of Athens, dedicated to the goddesses Athena and Nike. Built around 420 BC, the temple is the earliest fully Ionic temple on the Acropolis. It has a prominent position on a steep bastion at the south west corner of the Acropolis to the right of the entrance, the Propylaea. In contrast to the Acropolis proper, a walled sanctuary entered through the Propylaea, the Victory Sanctuary was open, entered from the Propylaea's southwest wing and from a narrow stair on the north. The sheer walls of its bastion were protected on the north, west, and south by the Nike Parapet, named for its frieze of Nikai celebrating victory and sacrificing to their patroness, Athena and Nike.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to classical architecture:
Ancient Roman temples were among the most important buildings in Roman culture, and some of the richest buildings in Roman architecture, though only a few survive in any sort of complete state. Today they remain "the most obvious symbol of Roman architecture". 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. Behind the cella was a room, or rooms, used by temple attendants for storage of equipment and offerings. The ordinary worshiper rarely entered the cella, and most public ceremonies were performed outside of the cella where the sacrificial altar was located, on the portico, with a crowd gathered in the temple precinct.
Greek temples were structures built to house deity statues within Greek sanctuaries in ancient Greek religion. The temple interiors did not serve as meeting places, since the sacrifices and rituals dedicated to the deity took place outside them, within the wider precinct of the sanctuary, which might be large. Temples were frequently used to store votive offerings. They are the most important and most widespread surviving building type in Greek architecture. In the Hellenistic kingdoms of Southwest Asia and of North Africa, buildings erected to fulfill the functions of a temple often continued to follow the local traditions. Even where a Greek influence is visible, such structures are not normally considered as Greek temples. This applies, for example, to the Graeco-Parthian and Bactrian temples, or to the Ptolemaic examples, which follow Egyptian tradition. Most Greek temples were oriented astronomically.
In Classical architecture, a cella or naos is the inner chamber of an ancient Greek or Roman temple. Its enclosure within walls has given rise to extended meanings, of a hermit's or monk's cell, and since the 17th century, of a biological cell in plants or animals.
A pseudoperipteros is a building with engaged columns embedded in the outer walls, except the front of the building. The form is found in classical architecture in ancient Greek temples, especially in the Hellenistic period. In Roman temples, the pseudoperipteral form became usual, where there were columns behind the portico as well. Typically the front has a portico with free-standing columns, but columns on the other three sides of the walls are engaged.
Prostyle and Prostylos, literally meaning “with columns in front”, is an architectural term designating temples featuring a row of columns on the front. The term is often used as an adjective when referring to the portico of a classical building, which projects from the main structure. First used in Etruscan and Greek temples, this motif was later incorporated by the Romans into their temples.
Bassae is an archaeological site in Oichalia, a municipality in the northeastern part of Messenia, Greece. In classical antiquity, it was part of Arcadia. Bassae lies near the village of Skliros, northeast of Figaleia, south of Andritsaina and west of Megalopolis. It is famous for the well-preserved mid- to late-5th century BC Temple of Apollo Epicurius.
In classical architecture, amphiprostyle denotes an ancient temple with a portico both at the front and the rear, where the columns on the narrow sides are not between antae. The number of columns rarely exceeded four in the front and four in the rear. The best-known example is the tetrastyle small Temple of Athena Nike at Athens. Other known examples are the Temple of Artemis Agrotera outside Athens, and the hexastyle Temple of the Athenians at Delos.
An engaged column is an architectural element in which a column is embedded in a wall and partly projecting from the surface of the wall, which may or may not carry a partial structural load. Sometimes defined as semi- or three-quarter detached, engaged columns are rarely found in classical Greek architecture, and then only in exceptional cases, but in Roman architecture they exist in abundance, most commonly embedded in the cella walls of pseudoperipteral Roman temples and other buildings.
Peltuinum was a Roman town of the Vestini, on the ancient Via Claudia Nova, 20 km east of L'Aquila, Italy, between the modern-day settlements of Prata d'Ansidonia and Castelnuovo.
In Classical architecture, a peripteros is a type of ancient Greek or Roman temple surrounded by a portico with columns. It is surrounded by a colonnade (pteron) on all four sides of the cella (naos), creating a four-sided arcade, or peristyle (peristasis). By extension, it also means simply the perimeter of a building, when that perimeter is made up of columns. The term is frequently used of buildings in the Doric order.
The Valle dei Templi, or Valley of the Temples, is an archaeological site in Agrigento, Sicily. It is one of the most outstanding examples of ancient Greek art and architecture of Magna Graecia, and is one of the main attractions of Sicily. The term "valley" is a misnomer, the site being located on a ridge outside the town of Agrigento.
In classical architecture, distyle in antis denotes a temple with the side walls extending to the front of the porch and terminating with two antae, the pediment being supported by two columns or sometimes caryatids. This is the earliest type of temple structure in the ancient Greek world. An example is the Siphnian Treasury in Delphi, built around 525 BCE.
The Southeast Temple is the modern name for an Ionic octastyle prostyle temple located in the southeast corner of the Ancient Agora of Athens. Architectural fragments from the temple enable a full, if tentative, reconstruction of its appearance.These fragments originally belonged to the Temple of Athena at Sounion at the southern tip of Attica, but they were spoliated to build the temple in the Agora in the first half of the second century AD. It was thus the last of several "itinerant temples," relocated from the Attic countryside to the Athenian Agora in the Imperial period. It is unknown which god or hero it was dedicated to. It was heavily damaged during the Herulian Sack of Athens in 267 AD and then spoliated to build the post-Herulian fortification wall.
The so-called Temple of "Hera", otherwise known as Temple D, is a Greek temple in the Valle dei Templi, a section of the ancient city of Agrigentum in Sicily.
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