Space, Place, and Performance: The Cultural Poetics of Italic Temple Decoration (20 min)

Presenters

Gregory Warden, Southern Methodist University

Abstract

Italic temples were constructed as spaces that were meant to be experienced through ritual and performance. They were also meaningfully decorated, and the elaborate decoration would have been a fundamental part of the sensory and religious experience. How did these spaces work as places through which a participant connected to the divine? We know that sacrifices took place in front of the temple, that the podium was a vantage point for divination, and that the space in front of the temple was structured to reflect a spatial order that was divine, a place for ritual enactment that connected the viewer to the sacred. The treatment of the pediment would have been fundamental to this performance. In some instances, for instance at Talamone, the carefully constructed pedimental narrative mirrored the corporeal reality of the ritual enactment. In other cases, where the pediment was constructed in Italic manner with pedimental plaques, as for instance at Pyrgi, the focused mythological narrative figured prominently as a backdrop to the performance. Additionally, the symbolism of the roof as a sacred space in central Italic context, whether a “pedimental roof” or the decorated actual roof of the temple, held particular significance; the decoration itself would have been considered sacred and eventually ritually treated, as at the Portonaccio temple at Veii. Thus, narrative choices as well as the materiality of the decoration itself were fundamental to the religious experience.

The evidence indicates that temples functioned literally as a machine for ritual. Every element was connected to the belief system and to the performance of ritual that literally embodied belief. In this sense we can discern a system of cultural poetics, that is, the construction of broad meanings that manifest themselves through a very specific theological moment.

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