Maison Carrée
The so-called Maison Carrée, often known as the "square house" is a former Roman temple that may be seen in Nîmes, southern France. During the first century B.C.E., Nimes was established as a Roman colony. The Maison Carrée is an incredibly well-preserved ancient Roman structure that serves as a nearly perfect illustration of a Roman temple according to the architectural historian Vitruvius.
The neoclassical Église de la Madeleine in Paris, the Cathedral of St. Marcellinus in Rogalin, Poland, and the Virginia State Capitol in the United States, which was designed by Thomas Jefferson, who had a stucco model of the Maison carrée made while he was minister of France in 1785, served as inspiration for the Maison Carrée.
The Maison Carrée is a well-known example of Vitruvian architecture, which is almost an identical duplicate of a Roman temple in Tuscan style as described in the writings of the eminent architect Vitruvius. The temple of the Roman city of Nîmes, located in what is now southern France, was elevated on a 2.85 m high podium and measured 26.42 m by 13.54 m, making a rectangle that is nearly twice as long as it is broad. Nearly a third of the building's length is taken up by a deep portico, or pronaos, on the façade. Its columns and capitals are lavishly adorned. This substantial porch emphasizes the temple's front and sets the design apart from the Greek temples of the past. It has a pseudoperipteral hexastyle design with twenty engaged columns embedded along the cella's walls and six Corinthian columns beneath the pediments at either end. The architrave is divided into three levels with a ratio of 1:2:3 above the columns. The frieze and architrave are divided by egg-and-dart ornamentation. Under a row of extremely fine dentils, the frieze is embellished on three sides with excellent ornamental relief carvings of rosettes and acanthus leaves. However, compared to the decoration on the Parthenon or other Greek temples, the building's ornate carvings are not nearly as refined or mathematically flawless.