Andrea Palladio · The Fourth Book
Chapter XXVI. Of the temple of Scisi
THE following temple is upon the piazza of Scifi, a city of Umbria, and is of the Co
rinthian order. The pedestals placed under the columns of the portico are well worthy notice; because, as I have said before, in all the other antient temples, the columns of the portico’s are seen to come down to the ground; neither have I seen any other that had pedestals. Beneath one pedestal and the other are the steps that ascend from the piazza to the portico. The pedestals are as high as the middle intercolumniation is broad, which is two inches broader than the others. The manner of this temple is that which Vitruvius calls sistilos, that is, of two diameters.
The architrave, the frize and cornice together are the fifth part and a little more of the height of the columns. The cornice, which makes the frontispiece instead of modilions, has some leaves, and in the remainder it is entirely like that which goes directly over the columns, The cella of the temple is in length the fourth part more than its breadth,
I have made three plates of it.
In the fust is the plan, Plate In the second is the elevation of the front forward, Plate In the third are the ornaments, Plate 77,
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.