Temple of Ancient Virtue Stowe Landscape Gardens

My recently completed watercolor from a picture I took at Stowe Garden in Scotland on a recent Lutyens Trust America tour.

From Heritage Records

“The Temple of Ancient Virtue is a circular peripteral ionic temple with a domed cella on a podium, approached by two flights of steps. Built in the 1730's to a design probably by Kent. The design is inspired by the Temple of Sibyl at Tivoli. Copies of the original four statues of greek heroes representing the enlightened ideals of Lord Cobham and his Whig friends have been reintroduced.

The design was based on the ancient Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, which Kent knew at first hand from his extended sojourn in Italy in the 1710s, and from Book IV of Palladio’s Quattro Libri, here translated from the Corinthian to the Ionic order.

The temple is inscribed on the outside ‘Priscae virtuti’ (‘To Ancient Virtue’) and was devised as a cenotaph to four Ancient Greeks who embodied the virtues that Lord Cobham found so lacking in the public figures of his own day: Socrates, Homer, Lycurgus and Epaminondas. The circular temple form has a solemnity and nobility well suited to memorial buildings, from Hawksmoor’s great mausoleum at Castle Howard (1729) to John Russell Pope’s Jefferson Memorial in Washington (1939). Bordered by laurel and elevated both by the grass mount and its own basement, with narrow stairs cut into it, this is an overtly exclusive building worthy only of a select few.

The Process

A Value Study to start.