The Eglise Du Temple Of Paris And The English “Round Churches Movement”: New archaeological updates and missing data for a phenomenology of architectural reproduction “ad instar Sancti Sepulcri”

Under Capetians patronage, Knights Templars’ power achieved in French territory in the first half of the XII century allowed to establish their principal commandery in the northern periphery of Paris, where they built a round-naved church, renewed in the first quarter of XIII century with the addition of a long single aisle chancel and in the ‘40s with a two-level porch on the western façade. Despite the building survived Order’s suppression, it was definitively dismantled by the order of Napoleon I at the beginnings of the XIX century. The archaeological surveys carried out in 2011 unearthed the chancel’s apse but a new investigation provides further archaeological and archivistic details on the chapel’s Romanesque phase, certifying its belonging to the group of architectural reproductions of the Holy Sep-ulchre Church arisen in Western Europe from the XII to the XIII centuries. Archaeological excavations in the Holy Land model, carried out by the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, in addiction to micro-interventions conducted on its Western copies, offer the opportunity to reconsider different buildings’ chronologies till anchored to out-dated observations. On the same way enables to establish once and for all the relations between the Parisian church and the ichnograph-ically cohesive group of English foundations like the Old Temple Church, New Temple Church and St. John Clerkenwell (London), Tem-ple Bruer (Lincolnshire), Holy Sepulchre (Cambridge), Holy Sepulchre (Northampton) and Temple Church (Bristol).