portico

portico, colonnaded porch or entrance to a structure, or a covered walkway supported by regularly spaced columns. Porticoes formed the entrances to ancient Greek temples.

The portico is a principal feature of Greek temple architecture and thus a prominent element in Roman and all subsequent classically inspired structures. The types of portico furnish the main terms for describing Greek temples. There are two basic plans. If the long walls of a temple extend past the cella, or sanctuary, to form the side walls of the porch or anteroom, these long walls often terminate with antas, an anta being a corner post or pilaster. The open end of the porch, or portico, is then supported by between one and four columns in antis, that is to say, “between the antas.” The temples so constructed are called henostyle (one column), distyle (two columns), tristyle (three columns), or tetrastyle (four columns). No more than four columns were ever used.

If the temple terminates in a porch that is open at the sides as well as the front, with freestanding columns across the entire portico, the temple is said to be prostyle. The smallest number of columns found supporting a prostyle portico is 4 (tetrastyle), followed by 5 (pentastyle), continuing through 10 (decastyle), and including 12 and 14. An amphiprostyle temple has porticoes in front and in back; a peripteral temple has a colonnade running completely around it; and a dipteral temple has a double line of columns completely surrounding it. The Temple of Artemis Propylaea at Eleusis would therefore be described as tetrastyle amphiprostyle, while the Parthenon at Athens would be described as hexastyle (six-columned) peripteral. The latter was the most favoured temple plan among the ancient Greeks.