Information about portico

Under the portico of the Pantheon

Temple diagram with location of the pronaos highlighted

A portico is a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls. This idea first appeared in ancient Greece and has influenced many cultures, including most Western cultures.

Some famous examples of porticos are the East Portico of the United States Capitol, and the portico adorning the Pantheon in Rome.

Bologna, Italy, is very famous for its porticos. In total, there are over 45 kilometres of arcades, some 38 in the city center. The longest portico in the world, about 3.5 km, leads from the edge of the city up to Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca.

In the UK, the temple-front applied to The Vyne, Hampshire was the first portico applied to an English country house.

A pronaos is the inner area of the portico of a Greek or Roman Temple, situated between the portico's colonnade or walls and the entrance to the cella or shrine. Roman temples commonly had an open pronaos, usually with only columns and no walls, and the pronaos could be as long as the cella. The word pronaos is Greek for "before a temple". In Latin, a pronaos is also referred to as an anticum or prodomus.

Types of portico

The different variants of porticos are named by the number of columns they have.

Tetrastyle

Tetrastyle temple with its tetrastyle portico of four Ionic columns, The Temple of Portunus

The tetrastyle has four columns. Tetrastyle was commonly employed by the Greeks and the Etruscans for small structures such as public buildings and amphiprostyle altars devoted to the large Hexastyle temple in a sanctuary.

The Romans favoured the four columned portico for their pseudoperipteral temples like the Temple of Portunus, and for amphiprostyle temples such as the Temple of Venus and Roma, and for the prostyle entrance porticos of large public buildings like the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine.

Hexastyle

Hexastyle buildings had six columns and were the standard facade in canonical Greek Doric architecture between the archaic period 600–550 B.C up to the Age of Pericles 450–430 B.C.

Greek hexastyle

The hexastyle Temple of Concord at Agrigentum (c. 430 B.C)

Some well-known examples of classical Doric hexastyle Greek temples:

The group at Paestum comprising the Temple of Hera (c. 550 B.C), the Temple of Apollo (c. 450 B.C), the first Temple of Athena ("Basilica") (c. 500 B.C) and the second Temple of Hera (460–440 B.C)
The Temple of Athena Aphaia (the invisible) at Aegina c. 495 B.C
Temple E at Selinus (465–450 B.C) dedicated to Hera
The Temple of Zeus at Olympia, now a ruin
Temple F or the so-called "Temple of Concord" at Agrigentum (c. 430 B.C), one of the best preserved classical Greek temples, retaining almost all of its peristyle and entablature.
The "unfinished temple" at Segesta (c. 430 B.C)
The Hephaesteum below the Acropolis at Athens, long known as the "Theseum" (449–444 B.C), the most intact Greek temple surviving from antiquity)
The Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sunium (c. 449 B.C)

Hexastyle was also applied to Ionic temples, such as the prostyle porch of the Sanctuary of Athena on the Erechtheum at the Acropolis, Athens.

Roman hexastyle

With the colonization by the Greeks of southern Italy, hexastyle was adopted by the Etruscans and subsequently acquired by the ancient Romans. Roman taste favoured narrow pseudoperipteral and amphiprostyle buildings with tall columns, raised on podiums for the added pomp and grandeur conferred by considerable height. The Maison Carrée at Nîmes is the best-preserved Roman hexastyle temple surviving from antiquity.

Octostyle

The western side of the Parthenon.

Octostyle had eight columns. Octostyle buildings are rarer than Hexastyle in the classical Greek architectural canon. The best-known octostyle buildings surviving from antiquity are the Parthenon in Athens built during the Age of Pericles (450–430 B.C), and the Pantheon in Rome (125 A.D).

Decastyle

The decastyle has ten columns; as in the temple of Apollo Didymaeus at Miletus, and the portico of University College London.

References

Greek architecture Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968
Stierlin, Henri Greece: From Mycenae to the Parthenon, TASCHEN, 2004, Editor-in-chief Angelika Taschen, Cologne, ISBN 3-8228-1225-0
Stierlin, Henri The Roman Empire: From the Etruscans to the Decline of the Roman Empire, TASCHEN, 2002, Edited by Silvia Kinkle, Cologne, ISBN 3-8228-1778-3

porch is a platform structure attached at the front or back entrance of a building. It is external to the walls of the main building proper, but may be enclosed by screen, latticework, broad windows, or other light frame walls extending from the main structure.
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colonnade denotes a long sequence of columns joined by their entablature, often free-standing, as in the famous elliptically curving colonnades that Bernini added to the facade of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, which embrace and define the Piazza.
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A column in architecture and structural engineering is a vertical structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below.
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United States Capitol

The west face of the United States Capitol
Building information
Location Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.
Country United States of America

Architect William Thornton (first of many)
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The Pantheon (Latin Pantheon^[1], from Greek Πάνθεον Pantheon, meaning "Temple of all the gods") is a building in Rome which was originally built as a temple to the seven deities of the seven planets in the state
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Comune di Roma

Flag
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Nickname: "The Eternal City"
Motto: "Senatus Populusque Romanus" (SPQR) (Latin)
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Country Italy
Region Emilia-Romagna
Province Bologna (BO)
Mayor Sergio Cofferati

Area km
Population
- Total
- Density /km
Time zone CET, UTC+1
Coordinates
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Anthem
Il Canto degli Italiani
(also known as Fratelli d'Italia)

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Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca in Bologna is a basilica church sited atop Colle or Monte della Guardia, in a forested hill some 300 meters above the plain, just south-west of the historical center of Bologna. It is easily spotted from afar as one nears Bologna.
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The Vyne is a 16th-century country house in Sherborne St John, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England.

The Vyne was built for Lord Sandys, King Henry VIII's Lord Chamberlain. The house retains its Tudor chapel, with stained glass.
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English country house is generally accepted as a large house or mansion, once in the ownership of an individual who also most likely owned another great house in the West End of London. Hence one moved from one's town house to one's country house.
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A cella (from Latin for small chamber) or naos (from the Greek for temple), is the inner chamber of a temple in classical architecture, or a shop facing the street in domestic Roman architecture (see domus).
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Greek}}}
Writing system: Greek alphabet
Official status
Official language of: Greece
Cyprus
European Union
recognised as minority language in parts of:
European Union
Italy
Turkey
Regulated by:
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Latin}}}
Official status
Official language of: Vatican City
Used for official purposes, but not spoken in everyday speech
Regulated by: Opus Fundatum Latinitas
Roman Catholic Church
Language codes
ISO 639-1: la
ISO 639-2: lat
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17,000,000
Regions with significant populations
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Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to the culture and way of life of a people of ancient Italy and Corsica whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci or Tusci.
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In classical architecture, Amphiprostyle denotes a temple with a portico both at the front and the rear. This never exceeded the use of four columns in the front, and four in the rear. The best-known example is the tetrastyle small Temple of Athena Nike at Athens.
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Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew from a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula circa the 9th century BC to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea.
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pseudoperipteral building is one with free standing columns in the front (colonnaded portico), but the columns along the sides are engaged in the peripheral walls of the building.
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Temple of Portunus was the main temple dedicated to the god Portunus in Rome. It is in the Ionic order and is still more familiar by its erroneous designation, the Temple of Fortuna Virilis ("manly fortune") given it by antiquaries.
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Temple of Venus and Roma (Latin: Templum Veneris et Romae) was the largest known temple in Ancient Rome. Located at the far east side of the Forum Romanum near the Colosseum, it was dedicated to the goddesses Venus Felix (Venus the Bringer of Good Fortune) and Roma Aeterna
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Prostyle is an architectural term defining free standing columns that are widely spaced apart in a row. The term is often used as an adjective when referring to the portico of a classical building which projects from the main structure.
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Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine (sometimes known as the Basilica Nova 'new basilica' or Basilica Maxentius) was the largest building in the Roman Forum.
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facade or façade (IPA: /fəˈsɑːd/) is generally one side of the exterior of a building, especially the front, but also sometimes the sides and rear.
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The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of Ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.
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The Age of Pericles is the term used to denote the historical period in Ancient Greece lasting roughly from the end of the Persian Wars in 448 BCE to either the death of Pericles 429 BCE or the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE.
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Greek temples differed from their Roman counterparts in that the colonnade formed a peristyle around the whole structure, rather than merely a porch at the front; and also in that the Greek temple was not raised above ground level on a high podium, but rather stairs on either end.
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State Party Italy
Type Cultural
Criteria iii, iv
Reference 842
Region Europe and North America

Inscription History
Inscription 1998 (22nd Session)
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In the Olympian pantheon of classical Greek Mythology, Hera, (Greek Ήρα, IPA pronunciation [ˈhiːrə]; or Here (
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