Les décors tympanaux des temples de Rome

Temples were omnipresent in the City of Rome during Antiquity, and they dominated the surrounding spaces by virtue of both their status as sacred buildings and their imposing, richly decorated architecture. This book leads us through the sculptural decoration of Rome’s temples and, especially, the tympana’s imagery that dominated their facades and conveyed important political messages through representations related to the divine sphere.

Although hardly ever preserved in original form, the tympana decorations of temples in the Roman capital can be studied thanks to their faithful reproductions on historical reliefs and some rare imperial coins; descriptions by ancient authors complete the picture.

This study is based on iconographic analysis of each known figurative pediment of the Urbs, thereby inscribing the images in their proper architectural, artistic and historical context. The opening chapter is however focused on the architecture and ornamentation of Greek and Etruscan temples which helps us identify, further in the book, the cultural and artistic transfers within the realm of ancient sacred architecture.