Andrea Palladio · The Fourth Book
Chapter XII. Of the temple of Jupiter
UPON Monte Quirinale, now called Monte Cavallo, behind the houses of Signori Coon, the vestigia are to be seen of the following edifice, which is called the frontispiece of Nero. Some would have it that there stood the tower of Macenas, and that from this place Nero, with great delight, saw the city of Rome burnt: In which they are very much deceived, because the tower of Maecenas was upon Monte Efguilino, not very far from the baths of Dioclesian. There have been some others that have said, that the houses of the Cornelii were in this place.
For my part, I believe that this was a temple dedicated to Jupiter; because that when I was in Rome, I saw them dig where the body of the temple was, and some Ionick capitals were found, which served for the inward part of the temple, and were those of the an-les of the loggia’s; because the part in the middle, in my opinion, was uncovered.
The aspect of this temple was the false-wing’d, called by Vitruvius pseudodipteros. The manner was thick of columns. The columns of the outward portico’s were of the Corinthian order. ‘The architrave, the frize, and the cornice, were the fourth part of the height of the columns. The architrave had its cimacium of a very beautiful invention. The frize in the sides was carved with flowered work; but in the front, which is ruined, there must have been the letters of the inscription. The cornice has the modiglions squared, and one of these comes directly over the middle of the column. The modiglions that are in the cornice of the frontispiece are directly plumb; and so they ought to be made. In the inward part of the temple there mult have been portico’s, as I have design’d them. Round this temple there was a court, adorned with columns and statues; and forwards there were two horses, which are to be seen in the publick way; from which this mount has taken the name of Monte Cavallo. The one of them was made by Praxiteles, and the other by Phidias There were very commodious stairs, that ascended to the temple, and in my opinion this must have been the greatest and most adorned temple that was in Rome.
I have made six plates of it.
In the first is the plan of the whole edifice, with the back part where the stairs were, Plate which, ascending one over the other, led to the courts that were on the sides of the temple. The elevation of this manner of stairs, with the plan, in a large form, has been set down before in the first book, where I have treated of the different manners of stairs.
In the second is the flank of the temple outwardly. Plate In the third is half of the outward front of the temple. Plate In the fourth is the inward part; and in both these plates a small part of the ornaments of Plate the courts may be seen. In the fifth is the flank of the inward part. Plate In the sixth are the ornaments. Plate cornice. the columns. 12, the capital of the columns of the por- I, the acroteria.
© ice.
Public-domain text (London, published by Isaac Ware, 1738). Read from the Internet Archive’s scan (gri_33125011569684) of the copy in the Getty Research Institute, by way of Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked public domain. That scan’s text layer had lost the ends of the lines on every left-hand page, so the pages were read again from the scan’s images, the two readings compared word by word, and the text cleaned: the long s (ſ) is printed s and the ct and st ligatures as plain letters, words broken at the ends of lines are joined, and running heads, page numbers, signatures and catchwords are removed. Ware’s spelling, capitals and punctuation are otherwise kept (shew, publick, antient, compleat). Chapter titles and words the OCR misread were corrected against the page images. Some misreadings will remain, most of them in the italic prefaces and the Latin of Book III. Ware’s dedication, the list of subscribers, his table of terms, the errata and the bookseller’s advertisement are not reproduced. Nor are the 212 engraved plates, their inscriptions, or the keys to the letters on them that Ware prints in the text: where Palladio writes “as in the design” the figure is in the printed book.