Andrea Palladio · The Fourth Book
Chapter XXIV. Of the temple of Castor and Pollux
AT Naples, in a most beautiful part of the city; below the piazza de/ Cassello and the Vicaria, the portico of a temple is to be seen, built and consecrated to Castor and Pollux by Tiberius Julius Tarsus, and by Pelagon, a freedman of Acutus: as it appears by its inscription made with these Greek letters:
PP! y p
TIBEPI I0TAI0S TAP AI K0TP0IS KAI TH IT0AEI TON NON KAI TA EN TOI NAQL
TIEAATON SEBASTOT ATIEAETOEPOS KAI Eriitponos stnteae^as EX TON iaihn KAGIEPOSEN.
That is,
TIBERIUS IULIUS TARSUS JOVIS FILLS, ET VRBI, TEMPLUM, ET QVAE IN TEMPLE. PELAGON AVGVSTI LIBERTVS ET PROCVRATOR PLRFICIENS EX PROPRIIS CONSECRAVIT.
Which signify, that berius Julius Tarsus began to build this temple, and those things that are within, to the sons of Jupiter, (that is, to Castor and Pollux) and to the city; and that Pelagon, the freedman, and commissary of Augustus, finished it with his own money, and consecrated it.
This portico is of the Corinthian order. The intercolumniations are more than a diameter and an half, but do not reach to two diameters. The bases are made in the Attick manner. ‘The capitals are carved in the manner of olive leaves, and are most carefully wrought. The invention of the caulicoli is very beautiful, that are under the rosa, which bind one another together, and seem to spring out of the leaves which adorn the other caulicoli in the upper part, which support the horn of the capital. Hence, as well by this, asby many other examples scattered throughout this book, it 1s evident that an architect is not refrained from departing sometimes from the common custom, provided such a variation be graceful and natural. In the frontispiece Is carved a sacrifice in basso relievo, by the hand of an excellent sculptor.
Some say that in this place there were two temples, one round, and the other quadran-lar. No vestigia are to be seen of the round one, and the quadrangular is, in my opinion, modern; and therefore, leaving the body of the temple, I have only put the elevation of the 6g front of the portico in the first plate, and in the second its members.
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.