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Scale Models

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

As we have seen, in all ancient civilizations the scale models made part of the architectural projects. We find them cited in the ancient sources and some of them have arrived unto us, but the large majority of what we find in the museums are not scale models, only miniatures of different buildings and consist of simple structures of nearly no importance, as the one of a stable found in the Euphrates’ plain, or the amusing models of ancient Egypt in which we see the 4000/3000 years ago common people’s simple houses with their little porches and their gardens including trees and flowerbeds, and aside them their Nile farms with the animals, the stables and all the rest. Those kind of Egyptian ceramic molds are often found in the tombs and are certainly connected with the burying rituals of the times: to complete all the household fixtures that were deemed necessary in the afterlife near the dead there had to be everything he owned: houses, properties, stables and slaves, the little ushabti that would spare them all the chores.
Also in the Greek Punic and Roman worlds we have found scale models that are not connected to architectural projects. They probably were votive objects representing temples, nymphaea, huts or primitive houses. They were all done in the most various materials, from the simple ceramic molds, to the golden ones from Chartage and the siver small temple of Ephesus Artemis that were chiselled for the visitors of the celebrated shrine. Souvenirs just as the today alabaster copies of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa that are sold in the “Piazza dei Miracoli“. Not scale models created for the builder’s yard, then, but something to bring back home, but we must also remember that, if, for some hapless event, in a thousand years from now the Leaning Tower would fall down, those bad taste objects will become priceless heirlooms for the future archaologists who will study and write papers about them and, maybe, use these alabaster models to reconstruct the tower.
But what interest us are the real scale models, well measured and exact molds connected with temples and monuments. Among them we can cite two of them, two temples. One of them, that had to be built in Syria, was fashioned in simple stone and the other, found at Ostia, in marble. Another one was also found at Villa Adriana: it is the marble model of a “so called stadium”, so called because it has a very hybrid shape. As a matter of fact, it has two arched sides at its two extremities instead of having only one arched side in front of the straight one of the starting line, something maybe studied to be able to use it both as Stadium and Circus.
The first of these scale models we have just cited was found in Lebanon at Niha, a village set twenty km from Baalbek. It measures 61 x 64 cm and from a Greek inscriptions engraved on one of its side we learn that it represented the temple’s “aditon” (The “aditon” was the back basis of a temple, which among the Lebaneses and the Syrians was considered the most sacred part of the shrine). The scale model corresponded so exactly with the temple that was found in Niha, that some notations that were grafted on it enjoining the builders to make some variations to the original projects - modifications probably agreed with the priests and the city bigwigs during the presentation and the discussion of the plan – were found to have really been done. The confront of the temple with its scale model and the data grafted on it confirm that the building strictly observed the measures of this model set in a scale of 1/24, and, as the cubit was divided in 24 digita, to each digitum of the model corresponded a cubit of the real Niha temple.
The Ostia’s model – a marble one kept in the Museum - hit the observers by the exactness of its work and by its technical notations as the ones that, with two cuts practised on the stylobate, pointed to the builder what thickness must had the cement stratum on which the floor might be set. Also this model was in scale and the measure of the steps, giving us the connection with the human foot, told us that - as in the Niha one - the scale employed was 1/24: also here each “digitum” corresponded to a “cubit” (a foot and a half) of the building. Of course the scale model of this pseudoperipter temple, must have also had its elevation, and this is proved also by the holes practised to insert the pivots of the wooden elements or the supports of the waxen ones in the columns’s bases. We can, however, with the help given to us by the columns’ diameter and, the proportions existing between it, the column’s height and also the trabeation one find something about it. It is in any architecture treaty, but we will never be able to establish if its order was Ionic or Corinthian, Usually we find it from the proportion between the “intercolumnium” and the column’s diameter. In this case unfortunately the small difference existing between the Ionic “intercolumnium” (4 time and ½ the column’s diameter) and the Corinthian one (4,12 time the column’s diameter) linked with the small dimensions of the scale model doesn’t allow us to define which one of this two orders has been used. We must, however, point to the fact that, Giovanni Becatti, a great archaeologist who spent many years in Ostia, leaned toward the Ionic order and suggested that the temple must have been very similar to the one dedicated to the “Fortuna Virile” still standing in Rome in Piazza Bocca della Verità. Thus in my drawings I reconstructed it as Ionic.
Apart of this two temple we also have a scale model of a so called Stadium. It was found at Villa Adriana in the sector comprised between the so called Praetorium and the Great Therm, the quarter of the marble workers where there also was Villa Adriana’s last working yard, and exactly the one that in the 138 A.D. worked for the completion of the Baths and stopped its work at the Emperor’s demise. The fact that the scale model was still there and had not been brought to the working yard charged to realize it, proves that Hadrian’s death blocked its realization. If ever it could have been built it would have completed the whole of the spectacle buildings appointed to entertain the people living with continuity in the imperial residence. Together with the small Arena existing under the Piazza d’Oro, the Circus-stadium would have been one of the two structures intended to host such spectacles as the gladiators’ combats and the horses’ or chariots’ races, two shows really loved by the Romans, and the ones that for them had the same importance of boxing and football soccer for our masses. The model of the Circus-stadium was measured as always in feet and digita and, as for the Ostia’s one, it was fixed by the steps’ width. Its scale was 1/48, then each digitum of the model corresponded to two cubits of the building. It is interesting to notice that as the Arena had been realised in a reduced measure and was a fifth of the Colosseum, also the circuit of the Circus-stadium was 200 m against the kilometer of the Circus Maximus. It was, as we see, normal that these two places intended for the court, and then for a limited number of viewers, had both been planned to be a fifth of the corresponding two great Roman structures.
Then we find other scale models, but not real ones. They are the models represented in some works of art. Thus, in a stele of a tomb found in Cyzicus, while the deceased man, Attalus son of Aslepiodorus lays on a tricliniar couch with his wife at his side, a very young slave holds on her two hands a scale model of a round temple, probably one of her master works, and offers it to them.
To held a scale model on one’s hand just as an offering was a typical pose in which kings and high dignitaries were represented in their statues, bas-reliefs and coins. Thus Lucian remembers that at Hierapolis on the Euphrates there existed a statue of Semiramis that on her left hand held a scale model of a temple that she was offering to her favorite god. Examples of this kind could have been the ones that, forestalling by many centuries the American Mount Rushmore, inspired the architect Dinocrates to propose to Alexander to sculpt Mount Athos with his gigantic portrait, but not only this because he also offered him to join marvel to marvel, and, advanced the idea that, just as if it was a scale model offering to the gods, he could set on the extended huge hand of the colossus a real city complete of, men animals and everything else. A most eccentric idea that Alexander did not accept. There is no doubt, however, that Dinocrates had succeeded to attract the young “condottiero” attention, because when Alexander decided to found Alexandria he charged the imaginative architect to do it.
We could, however, spend years to list all the works of the ancient times architects or examining their fascinating personalities. Men who, as we have seen were considered superior beings endowed by a superhuman intelligence and exquisite esthetic taste and, in some case, even considered a true divinity, as it happened to Imhotep, the Egyptian author of the Saqqara pyramid grand tomb of the Pharaoh Djoser. Even Vitruvius listing what an architect must knew, what he must do and, more that that, how he must be (even beautiful according to him) pointed to such perfection that I highly doubt was never reached. Not everyone, however, had this idea of the architects: someone laughed of them, and they were mocked just in this Rome that took away from them the possibility to sign their works and kept them on short rations. With his usual sour and malign verve so wrote Martial:
To what teacher, my Lupus, must you confide your son?
Avoid, I admonish you, that he
could mix with Maro’s and Cicero’s books;
Let Tutilius stay with his fame.
If he ever composes verses, disinherit the poet.
Do you want that he could learn a remunerative art?
Make him a cithara player or a choir’s flutist.
But if the boy is a bit slow on the uptake
Make him a town crier or an architect.
A bit slow on the uptake? Well in a town that charged them with hard work, that from them pretended the impossible and that in addition didn’t even pay them the just reward, we must avow that a little fathead they must have been. Martial was right.

Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Gli architetti e progettazione di architettura nell'antichità in Archeo (Anno XI, nº 12 (142) December 1996, pp. 58 - 85.

Academic papers
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Villa Adriana. Un singolare solaio piano in opus caementicium, in Palladio, Nuova serie, Anno I, N. 1, Giugno 1988. pp. 1-12.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Adriano: architettura del verde e dell’acqua in Horti Romani, Rome , 1995, pp. 363-399.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Hadrien, architecte, ingénieur et urbaniste, in Hadrien. Trésors d’une villa impériale, Italia 1999, pp. 37-46
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Adriano, architetto, ingegnere e urbanista, in Adriano architettura e progetto, Italia 2000, pp. 41-45 e schede