The last set of buildings that I want to show you are in many respects the most interesting of all. And this is a group of buildings that are a part of a complex in what is now Lebanon the city of Baalbek. The so-called sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek. Which was constructed over a 200 year period, from the mid first century AD to the third century AD. The location of Baalbek is right over here, as I said, in modern Lebanon. And the remains are incredible, the remains are incredible. Every so often there's you know often fighting. This is in the Bekaa Valley so there's often fighting that breaks out in this particular part of the world. And one worries about these monuments but so far they seem to have withstood some of the, of the the difficulties that that area has experienced in recent years. And you see some of them here in the, nicely silhouetted against the landscape. But this gives you a better idea of what the complex looked like in antiquity. And I show it to you here. Again it was built over a series of years but let's just talk about it as a whole and then I'll break down the chronology for you. It had a grand entrance way with a single staircase facade orientation with a arcu, an arcuated lintel here contained within a pediment. Then, interestingly enough you went from that entrance way into a hexagonal court. Open to the sky, from the hexagonal court into this great open rectangular space, surrounded by columns. A very large altar right here, to Jupiter, because the main temple in this complex was the temple to Jupiter, and you see it also in the restored view at the back. So the alter to Jupiter, the temple to Jupiter. If you look at the temple to Jupiter you will see it's very similar to the temples that we've been looking at in the course of this semester. Very tall podium, single staircase, facade orientation. Deep porch freestanding columns in that porch and the like. And you can also see that there is another temple right outside the walls of this one. This is so-called temple of Bacchus which is one of the three that was part of this complex that also seems to have its own little courtyard. And then down here out of the picture a round temple to Venus that we're also going to look at. This is a restored view of the same showing you the entrance way, the hexagonal court, the large temple to Jupiter. The smaller temple to Bacchus. And the forecourt that it too would have had as well as this much less elaborate entrance way into the temple of Bacchus. This is perhaps the most spectacular view I've shown you all semester of anything. This is really an awesome photograph I think taken from the air. Needless to say I can't lay credit to this since it was taken from the air. But you see it here, and it is amazing amazing photograph, that really gives you a better sense than anything else might of the current remains. Where you can see the entrance gate you can see that the, the staircase is, is a shadow of what it once was. It was once much wider. You can see the hexagonal court from above. You can see the open rectangular space. You can see the bare remains of the altar. And you can see the temple of Jupiter which has its podium not much of its staircase and only six columns still surviving. But the temple of Bacchus outside the walls, much better preserved. And gives us a very good sense of these temples as a whole. A plan over here showing the same. The entrance for the hexagonal entrance way, the open rectangular space. At A, the Temple of Jupiter, B, the Temple of Bacchus, and here an engraving showing the entrance way with this with this arcuated lintel, just as we saw popular in the Hadrianic period, on the pediment. Now, the chronology is that the Temple of Jupiter was built first, in the mid first century A.D. That's way back. That's like, the time of Claudius and Nero. Mid first century AD then in the second century, there were other additions, and it was in the third century that the propylon and the hexagonal court. The second century, actually, was the open rectangular space was added in the second century, and then in the third century, they added the hexagonal court and the entrance way. So moving from the back toward the front. These are the six columns that are preserved of the temple of Jupiter at Baalbek. They are incredibly, the whole structure is incredibly large, and this is, this is the biggest building we've seen thus far. We know there were ten columns in the front, 19 on the sides. They're again made out of honey colored local limestone, I think as you can see so well, in both of these views. In this case the podium was 44 feet tall. 44 feet tall. The podium at the temple of Ju, the temple of the diety. At the forum at Leptis Magna was 19 feet tall and we thought that was big. This is 44 feet tall and the columns were 65 feet tall. And remember those columns that Sulla stole from Greece, 55 feet tall for the Temple of Jupiter OMC. See these are ten, ten, you know, are much taller than that. So, it gives you some sense of the incredible scale of this structure. Here's a plan of the Temple of Bacchus, the second temple that I want to show you that dates to the mid second century AD we see it here. You can get a very good sense of its structure, and you can see the way in which it combines typical Roman with Greek features. Single staircase facade orientation, deep porch, free standing columns in the porch, single cella, but it has a peripteral colonnade as one finds in in Greek architecture but it doesn't have a peripteral staircase as I'll show you in a moment. It has a rather a high podium. Here you see it. It is very well preserved, you can see the columns encircling the whole building but you can see there is no staircase circling the whole building but a very high podium. A few people here for scale. This is a big building and this building is much smaller than the Temple of Jupiter. These buildings are so bi, big that someone, I guess tongue in cheek, wrote an article at one point suggesting that this could not have been built by human beings, Romans or otherwise. And was definitely built by Martians who came down in a spaceship and built it and then left, but left us with something quite extraordinary if that was indeed the case. Once again, overly decorative. Overly decorative. If you look at, we can look at a whole host of details, but if you look at them you will see extraordinary things. We're looking up in one of the vaults and you can see how it's been nearly, pretty much eaten away by this excessive decoration. The same here with this wonderful Medusa head in the center. No no, no inch is left undecorated by these architects. This is one of the best preserved interiors of a Roman temple that we have, the Temple of Bacchus. We are looking through the doorway. If you look at the jams of the doorway you will see how, how, how, how decorated they are and ag, again the way in which they have been dematerialized through that ornamentation, looking into the the interior and I can show you a better view here. You get a very good sense of what this structure looked like in antiquity. The truly colossal Corinthian columns in this particular case. The niches on two stories with arcuated pediments and the triangular pediments up above the extraordinary scale of, of this highly decorative interior. And I can show you a restored view of what we think this looked like in antiquity. At first glance, it doesn't look so different from, you know, the sort of Basilica Ulpia idea in Rome with the, with the flat ceiling, the coffered ceiling, the giant columns and so on. But of course, it has not aisles and since, I mean, it has, it does. I'm sorry, it does have aisles here but you can see the arcuations. You can see the pediments with the sculpture inside. You can see the Corinthian capitals and you can see no clerestory here, but you can see a very interesting feature at the at the end, the focus of everyone who came into this temple was the so-called adyton. A d y t o n. Adyton, which is a kind of a shrine in which the cult statue of Bacchus would have been presented. You can see it well here. And you can see the use of the broken triangular pediment but one, it is very similar to that market gate in that the central element with its triangle, still preserved, but preserved in a plane that is further back. So that kind of zigzag motion that we see here. The great archivolt underneath the paired columns on either side. The shrine in the center. A very elaborate motif done in the style that we have described as Baroque for this incredible structure. I want to end today by showing you the my favorite of, of all the buildings that I've shown you today because it's so eccentric. And that is the temple of Venus at Baalbek. It's the small temple that lies outside the complex to the left of the complex in the front. And it's the latest of the three temples. Probably dates to early to mid third century A.D. And also by far the smallest. It's very small in relationship to the others. It is also a round temple unlike them which are the traditional rectangular temples, a round temple. But a round temple with the difference. If we look at the plan we will see it has a single staircase, a facade orientation, deep porch, free standing columns in that porch it also is peripteral. It has columns that go all the way around. It is a round structure with a round cella but you can see in plan that the architect has scalloped the outside of the structure in a very interesting way. And you can see that also in these restored views over here. That scalloping both on the base and also in the area of the entablature above the columns. You can also see that the architect has dec, has placed niches on the outside of the sur, of the structure. With with statues in them. Which is another example of this desire to decorate every surface that one possibly could. There's a great deal of controversy as to what the porch actually looked like, whether the porch had what we see here, which is an arcuated lintel inside a triangular pediment. That's possible. It may not have had that. We're not absolutely sure, but at the very least we have this combination of what seems like a relatively traditional porch with an innovative body. It is in a sense a small version and a very eccentric version of the Pantheon in Rome with that traditional porch and revolutionary body. But this is not made out of concrete, it is made entirely out of local stone. And again it has these wonderful features like the scalloped base, and I show you a detail that's very well preserved today as are the other buildings, or at least the temple of Bacchus at Baalbek. We see it here, you can see it's stone construction, unfortunately it's black and white. But you can get sense as the same honey colored stone as the others. You can see the way looks it here. You can see the scallop base, the scallop, the wonderful scalloped entablature and the overly decorative nature of that entablature above, in this case Corinthian capitals as you can see. Some traditional motifs like this hanging garlands, the niches here with the statuary, making the hall into a kind of decorative motif. Even the outside of the cella becomes decorative. But look very carefully and you will see that the bases of the columns are five sided, to make them work better with the scalloped wall. This is the second time we've seen bases like this. We saw them in the tomb of Annia Regilla in Rome. A base that had multiple, more sides than was usual. We see that here, and it's a testimony again to the ec, eccentricity of this particular designer but also to the sort of anything goes approach that we see in so much of this Roman Baroque architecture. And I just, in closing, the last two images that I'd like to show you are a detail of the Temple of Venus at Baalbek, with a temple, with a detail of a Borromini structure. This one is the Borromini structure. This one is the Temple of Venus. But I think when you look at views like this, you can see the close asso, you can see what I mean by defining these as Baroque buildings already in Roman antiquity. But you can see the extraordinary impact that these amazing Roman creations had on the minds and on the oeuvre of great architects like Bernini and Borromini in the 17th century in Italy. Thank you very much.
