This earliest Hadrianic building perfectly expresses one aspect of the man: his genius, his moodiness, his striving for form, his restlessness. With its wall, its moat, and its drawbridge, it is all designed for privacy and quiet. From any room one gets a view of variously lighted sections of space: _chiaroscuro_ to match moods grave and gay. In the midst of axial symmetry, unrest is everywhere: in the curved forms, in the abrupt switches from light to dark, from roofed to open spaces, from horizontal architraves to the vertical play of the central fountain. The unrest is central: the midpoint is water and inaccessible. Tension and split are expressed in the divided bridge approach. All is indirection, schizophrenia, avoidance of forthrightness. As an architectural exercise, it is uniquely abstract, a proposition of Euclid in brick and marble, at one moment seeming to involve nothing but circles, at another, nothing but squares. It is probably no accident that its total diameter is almost exactly the same as the Pantheon’s. It would have suited the complexity of Hadrian’s mind to design a grandiose habitation for all the gods to the self-same dimensions as this splendid toy, the habitation of a restless, schizophrenic man whom his subjects worshipped as a god. The gods had made Hadrian in their own image; seconded by flattering courtiers, he was returning the compliment. The next building in Hadrian’s architectural biography is his Temple of Venus and Rome, built facing the Coliseum to rival the most splendid buildings of Athens and the Greek East. Literary sources give its foundation date as Rome’s birthday, April 21, A.D. 121; the brick-stamps, of 123, 134, and the fourth century, tell the story of long years of building and late restoration. The restoration probably followed Hadrianic lines; at any rate the proportion of straight to curved profiles in the apses--exactly half and half--is Hadrianic language, repeated in the Pantheon. The essence of the plan is two apses back to back, one for Venus and one for the goddess Roma. They may be interpreted as a colossal architectural pun. Venus is a goddess of love, Love is AMOR, and AMOR is ROMA spelled backward. The symbolism does not stop here. Hadrian is Caesar: his is the heritage, if not the blood, of the Julian line, and the temple is a reminder of the greatness of Rome, firmly established by Augustus, and smiled upon by Augustus’ ancestress, Venus. The plan (Fig. 11.5 and 11.6) was ingenious and devious, in Hadrian’s manner. The exterior is foursquare and conventional: the interior, with its vaults and apses, was novel and emphasized curves: compare the interplay of the square and the round in the _Teatro Marittimo_. Daring as it was, the design was the butt of the criticisms which cost Apollodorus his life. He had said that the temple should have been set on a high podium, which could have housed various paraphernalia useful in the Coliseum opposite, and that