A monumental golden (or gilded bronze) tripod, set up on a
pedestal, is viewed through a screen of columns in this Second
Style wall-painting in the Roman villa at Oplontis (the modern
Torre Annunziata, in Campania, Italy), which is one of the
illustrations for Mark Wilson Jones's scholarly argument in
Origins of Classical Architecture: Temples, orders and gifts to
the gods in Ancient Greece (Yale, £40 (£36);
978-0-300-18276-7). "So multivalent and universal was the sacred
charge of the tripod that it would indeed make a particularly
fitting temple ornament,"he writes