Andrea Palladio · The Fourth Book
Chapter XXXI. Of the temple of Neptune
OPPOSITE to the temple of Mars the Avenger, of which the designs have been already given, in the place that is called in Pantano, which is behind Morforio, was antiently the following temple, the foundations of which were discovered in digging to build a house; and there was also found a very great quantity of marbles, all of them most excellently wrought.
It is not known by whom it was built, nor to what god it had been consecrated. But because in the fragments of the gola diritta of its cornice, one sees dolphins carved, and in some places between each dolphin there are tridents, I believe that it was dedicated to Neptune. The aspect of it is winged round. Its manner thick of columns. The intercolumniations were one twelfth part of the diameter of the columns less than a diameter and an half, which I judge worthy to be observed, as I have never seen intercolumniations so small in any other antient edifice. Of this temple not the least part is to be seen standing; but from its remains, which are many, it is that one has come to the knowledge of the whole, that is, of the plan, and of the elevation, and of its particular members, which are all wrought with wonderful artifice. I have made five plates of it.
In the first is the plan.
In the second is the elevation of half the front without the portico.
In the third is the elevation of half the front, under the portico, that is, the first columns being taken away.
In the fourth are the particular members, that is, the ornaments.
In the fifth are the compartments, and the intaglia’s of the soffits of the portico’s which were round the cella.
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). The whole text has then been proofread against the page images, page by page, and the OCR’s misreadings corrected (some 1,200 corrections, among them the italic prefaces, the Latin of Caesar in Book III and the inscriptions), and the corrections in Ware’s own list of errata have been made. 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.