Nobody has ever disputed the beauty of Greek Architecture. We recognize
the justice of a description of the Parthenon as 'le suprême effort du
génie à la poursuite du beau'; but the layman must sometimes ask himself
what does it mean? Where did it come from, where did it go to, why is it
thought so beautiful, how was it that this people relatively
insignificant in power, in territory, and in numbers, was able to attain
to this astonishing supremacy in art? These are questions not easily
answered. The evidence is fragmentary and not always conclusive, the
ruins of a few temples and buildings, a technical treatise by a
garrulous third-rate writer in the first century A. D.,[125] the
anecdotes of an indefatigable collector[126] a little later, the notes
of a traveller in the second century,[127] and the materials collected
by the patient research of scholars and archaeologists, pieced together
on more or less ingenious hypotheses. Indeed, a great part of what is
written on Greek Architecture is simply hypothesis. There is not much to
go on, yet Greek Architecture (and by this I mean the architecture of
the sixth and fifth centuries B. C.) remains one of the great
outstanding facts in the history of the Architecture of the Western
world, and the Art of the age of Pericles is the fountain-head to which
artists still return.
[125] Vitruvius, _De Architectura_.
[126] Pliny the Elder, _Historia Naturalis_, xxxvi.
[127] Pausanias, Ἑλλαδος Περιηγησις {Hellados Periêgêsis}.
Where that art sprang from, and how it grew, is largely a matter of
speculation. There have been legends of civilizations wiped out in
tremendous cataclysms that left no trace behind them. Vague suggestions
are made that the cradle of the race was in Asia. All we know for
certain is that the earliest civilizations of which actual historical
evidence remains are those of Chaldea and Egypt, and that the art of
these countries reached a high degree of attainment long before we come
upon the earliest traces of art of any sort in Greece. That both these
countries contributed in varying degrees to the art of Greece is
certain, but that is not the whole of the story. As we shall see,
another element comes into play, which made of that art almost a new
creation, differing in outlook and ideal from any art that preceded it,
stamped by the genius of a vigorous northern race with a character all
its own. The art of the East and the art of the West never really fused.
There is a difference in kind between the joyous vitality of pure Greek
art, and the gloomy vision of Asia, with its craving for the vast and
terrible, its sombre imagination, its lack of humanity and indifference
to the individual.
It is not, however, till far down in the progress of history that this
differentiation asserts itself. Greek art is relatively a late
development. The Great Pyramid at Ghizeh was built some 2,000 years
before a stone was laid of the masonry of Mycenae. The Hall of Columns
of Karnak, with its columns sixty feet high, was probably coeval with
the Treasury of Atreus: in other words, when the art of Greece and of
the islands was scarcely out of the barbaric stage, a wonderful art had
been in existence across the Mediterranean from time immemorial. Both
Egypt and Chaldea attained a high degree of civilization long before the
Dorians were ever heard of. At some remote period the Egyptian influence
penetrated to Crete and Cyprus, the islands of the Aegean, and the
mainland of Greece; and the intermediaries were the Phoenicians, that
enterprising race of merchant adventurers, whose home was in Syria, and
whose fleets traversed the Mediterranean from East to West. The
Phoenicians were traders and not artists. In Egypt they came into
contact with a highly developed art, beyond their comprehension in its
essential features, yet including details which could easily be
apprehended by their quick commercial intelligence. Wherever they
touched on their voyages, Cyprus, Crete, the southern islands of the
Aegean, the mainland of Greece, the south of Italy, Sicily, Carthage,
the Balearic islands, Spain in the far west, they probably carried with
them, for trading purposes, minor articles of Egyptian workmanship which
may have supplied hints to the indigenous peoples. Where they
established settlements, they reproduced what they could recollect of
the methods of Egyptian architecture, possessing at second-hand a
knowledge of technical methods in advance of anything within the
knowledge of the people among whom they settled. Rudimentary
anticipations of the Ionic volute are found in Phoenician capitals,
vague reminiscences of what the traders had seen in Egypt and elsewhere.
Moreover, the Phoenicians, who possessed the skill of sailors in the use
of tackle, would have had little difficulty in handling large stones set
dry in more or less regular courses, which was a characteristic feature
of Cretan and Mycenaean building. It is too soon to describe the work as
architecture. It is doubtful if the Phoenicians possessed any aptitude
for the arts. Their rôle was that of intermediaries only.
Obscure as was the part played by the Phoenicians in the early origins
of art in Greece and the islands, there was another channel through
which Eastern influences came to bear on its development, which is even
more uncertain. To the west of Chaldea and north of Syria, dwelt a race
of which little is known, the Hittites. Carchemish, their capital, was
on the upper Euphrates, north-east of Antioch, and their power appears
to have extended westward through Asia Minor to the shores of the
Aegean. Dr. Sayce says that in the thirteenth century B. C. it extended
from 'the banks of the Euphrates to the shores of the Aegean, including
both the cultured Semites of Syria and the rude barbarians of the Greek
Seas', he even says that the Hittites 'brought the civilization of the
East to the barbarous tribes of the distant West'. What actually remains
of Hittite art hardly bears out this statement. When the Hittite power
was at its height, Minoan 'art' had long been practised in Crete, and
according to the most popular chronology, had already passed its prime
and given way to the art of Mycenae and Tiryns. The scanty evidence of
Hittite art consists of bas-reliefs of figures and animals cut on the
face of rocks along the natural caravan routes through Asia Minor from
East to West. This and the evidence of seals and engraved gems show that
Hittite art was derived first from Chaldea, later from Egypt. It
undoubtedly exercised some influence on the art of the early Greek
settlers on the eastern side of the Aegean, and gave it an Asiatic cast,
which it never lost throughout all its later developments. For the
Greeks of Asia Minor never really understood the austere ideal of Doric
art. Ionian art crossed westward to Greece, but the Dorian never went
east. It was the art of a strong northern race, that found no place for
itself among the softer peoples of Asia Minor.
At this point we can take up the first rudimentary beginnings of Greek
art. The discoveries of the last forty years have proved the existence
in Crete and Cyprus, Southern Greece, and the islands of the Aegean, of
an archaic art of obscure origin, of very great interest, and of
remarkable attainment in certain directions, long before the earliest
beginnings of what we mean when we speak of Greek architecture. So far
as architecture is concerned, this archaic art is of relatively minor
importance. It plays a small part, if any, in subsequent developments,
and though enthusiastic explorers claim to find in it anticipations of
the details of modern domestic architecture, the evidence produced is
unconvincing. Great movements in the arts always owe some debt to the
periods that have preceded them, but Minoan and Mycenaean art, at any
rate in regard to architecture, was rather the last word of a decaying
civilization than the first herald of the glorious art of Greece in the
sixth and fifth centuries B. C. We are still far back in remote ages,
remote that is so far as Greek art is concerned, anywhere between 2000
and 1000 B. C. or even earlier,[128] back in the Minoan age of Crete
with its rudimentary architecture, and its relatively high excellence in
the crafts, and in the age of Mycenae and Tiryns, the age that produced
the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and that strange half-barbaric work, if I may
be pardoned the term, the Treasury of Atreus. It is worth pausing to
consider these archaic buildings, not so much to show a relationship to
later work (which scarcely existed), as to call attention to the fact
that the Minoan and Mycenaean builders were moving unconsciously in a
direction that would never have led to the column and lintel
architecture of the seventh and sixth centuries B. C. It might have led
to some form of dome construction, it could never have led to the Doric
of the Sicilian temples. No stronger evidence of the genius of the
Dorian invaders could be produced than that, with this unpromising art
in possession, they were yet able in the course of three or four
centuries to create Greek architecture. The design of the Lion Gate is a
strange jumble of ill-adjusted motives. It is set in a wall of great
stones roughly squared and laid dry. Two monolith jambs support a huge
lintel, cambered in the middle like the tie-beams of our
sixteenth-century roofs. Above the lintel the courses are gathered over,
leaving between their lower faces and the top of the lintel a
triangular space of a steep pitch (about 60°), in which was inserted a
frontispiece carved on a single stone representing two lions standing up
on either side of an archaic column supporting a fragment of a
rudimentary architrave.[129] The heraldic pose of the lions and the
technique of their sculpture, so suggestive of Assyrian reliefs with
their splendid sense of muscular form and energy, are far ahead of an
architecture that is still barbaric, scarcely architecture at all. There
is here nothing to suggest the Doric of Paestum and Selinus, much to
recall the megalithic buildings of Syria, and the sculpture of the
farther East.
[128] Sir Arthur Evans has drawn up an ingenious chronology of Early
Minoan (2800-2200 B. C.), Middle Minoan (2200-1700 B. C.), and Late
Minoan (1700-1200 B. C.). The evidence is almost entirely that of
pottery discovered on the site. The whole question of the relations
of Minoan to Mycenaean art, and of this archaic art to the earlier
civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea, is very obscure and uncertain.
[129] The heraldic treatment of the lions is of Eastern origin. The
Greeks had a tradition that the chieftains of Mycenae came from
Lydia.
[Illustration: Fig. 1. LION GATE, MYCENAE]
The Treasury of Atreus is still more remarkable, not only because it
shows more skill in building, but because its design is based on a
structural motive which seems to have been wholly abandoned by the
successors of the Mycenaean builders. The Treasury of Atreus (or Tomb of
Agamemnon) was excavated in a hill, and consists of a long passage about
120 ft. by 21 ft. wide, with retaining walls of megalithic masonry on
either side, terminating in a great entrance doorway. This doorway is
flanked on either side by columns tapering downwards, and decorated with
chevrons in a manner very similar to Norman work of the eleventh
century, and apparently intended solely for ornament.[130] The entrance
opened into a circular domed chamber about 48 ft. 6 in. in diameter, 45
ft. 4 in. high, out of which opened another smaller chamber. The dome,
in section, is built on the curve of a parabola, formed with courses
projecting over one another, and not set out radial to the curve of the
dome--in other words it is not a true dome or arch, but a succession of
corbels. The internal face of the dome is dressed down, and was covered
with ornament of some sort, whether metal rosettes, or enamelled
terra-cotta, or wholly in metal, possibly the famous gold of Mycenae, is
not known. The whole of this chamber was covered in with a mound of
earth, in accordance with the primitive custom of concealing the
chieftain's grave. It is impossible to find, in this extremely
interesting monument or in the domed chamber of Orchomenos in Boeotia,
any trace of future developments in Greek architecture. Both in
intention and in its psychological background it seems almost as remote
from the Doric Temple as the Great Pyramid itself. In point of fact
architecture was still in a rudimentary stage. It has been proved
abundantly that Architecture comes late in the sequence of the Arts.
People could draw well, long before they could design. Among the
cavemen, for example, there were admirable draughtsmen, but they had to
make their drawings on the sides of caves. That there existed in the
Minoan and Mycenaean ages skilful potters and metal-workers, is shown by
the vases of Knossos and the gold cups found at Vaphio near Sparta; that
they built habitable buildings and decorated them to the best of their
ability is also proved, as, for example, the palace of Tiryns, but it
has not yet been shown that their builders reached the degree of skilled
design, at which building becomes architecture. Architecture had not yet
found itself in Greece.
[130] Portions of these columns are now in the British Museum.
Then somewhere about 1000 B. C. came the Dorian invasions, and the art
of Crete and Mycenae vanished into space--possibly the legend was right
which said that the conquered people of the mainland carried it away
with them to Asia. Anyhow, the three or four centuries following the
Dorian invasions are a blank which future research may fill out for us,
and so far as art is concerned, there appears to have been a _détente_,
during which the new race was settling down to its conquest, finding
itself, and assimilating something at any rate of the older
civilization. The survival of such buildings as the Treasury of Atreus
show that the Dorians were not simple barbarians, destroying all that
came in their way. Even Sparta in its earlier days was not a mere
military machine. Discoveries made in 1906-9 suggest that from the ninth
to the seventh centuries B. C. Sparta had some sort of an art of its own
showing traces of Asiatic influence in its pottery--a little later
Sparta concluded an alliance with Croesus, King of Lydia, and Bathycles,
an artist of Magnesia in Ionia, was treated with honour in Sparta. The
Dorians were something more than fighters, they seem to have possessed
some sort of civilization, and to have been endowed with a natural
capacity for the arts, which after two or three centuries of experiment
will find its own splendid expression within very definite and original
lines. The legend of the return of the Heracleidae was to be justified
by their later history. No merely imitative race could have evolved the
perfect manner of the great Doric temples from the scraps of Egypt and
the East, and the rudimentary buildings of Crete and Mycenae.
Greek architecture for the purpose of this study is Dorian architecture,
and its elements are simple. It was evolved in the design of their
temples, and with the exception of their theatres it was summed up in
these temples. From the period during which Greek architecture was being
built up to its maturity, say from the seventh century B. C. to the
completion of the Parthenon in the fifth century B. C., the whole life
of the Greek was coloured and dominated by his religion and its
observances; and his religion was not the sinister mystery of Egypt, but
on the whole a cheerful open-air Pantheism that gloried in the life and
beauty of the visible world in which he lived. He himself was content to
live in a poor house, so long as he had his market-place, his ceremonial
theatre, and the glorious temples of his Gods. Moreover, to whatever
depths the Athenians may have sunk in the time of St. Paul, in the
heroic days of Pericles they were remarkable for constancy of purpose
and the steadfastness of their ideals. They stood on the ancient ways,
and it never occurred to them to abandon the tradition of their fathers,
their business was to carry it forward to perfection. The result was
that the architecture of their temples proceeded on lines that long use
had made sacrosanct; and its technique is summed up in the history of
two orders, the Doric and the Ionic.[131]
[131] The order, I may say for the uninitiated, means the complete
ordonnance of the column, the architrave resting immediately on its
capital, the frieze and the cornice. It is the final expression of
the simple device of the post and lintel, of the beam resting on the
heads of two or more posts; and there is little doubt that in its
ultimate origin, the Order is the translation into stone of the
details of a rudimentary wooden construction.
Now, the order, its character, dimensions and disposition, with the wall
of the Cella (or enclosed shrine) within the colonnade, summed up the
elements, the vocabulary, if one may so put it, of Greek architecture;
and we come here at the outset on a curious quality of the Greek genius,
and one that differentiates it from the Roman. The properties of wood
and stone as materials are clearly different, things can be done with
the one which are impossible with the other; but the Greeks either did
not realize this or did not trouble their heads about it. They found
that the post and lintel was a simple means of building, and they
adopted it as their permanent method of construction. If the span became
too wide, they thickened the posts (the columns of Paestum are 7 ft. in
diameter) and increased the strength of the beam (the architrave). Hence
the vast solidity of the Doric order of the temples of Sicily and Magna
Graecia. The Greek was incurious about construction _qua_ construction.
He found, in the column and the lintel, means perfectly adequate to
realize his ideal of high unalterable beauty, and he was content. The
Romans, who for a time were satisfied with these simple methods, became
impatient of the constructive limitation of the post and lintel. They
wanted to cover in great spaces, and to leave the floor unencumbered;
and concentrating on this they arrived at the arch, the vault, and the
dome, and so became the greatest builders of the world. To them, the
orders were a mere appanage of decoration, which they never properly
appreciated, of which they mistook the intention, adopted the worst
elements, and often enough made a gross misuse. The Greeks took another
line. They adopted the column and lintel once for all as the only
possible method of construction, and devoted all their labours to the
incessant refinement of this type, eliminating the unessential, arriving
by constant selection at the most perfect expression of their purpose,
and their purpose was not that of the Roman and the modern architect,
mainly utilitarian, it was directed entirely to the aesthetic appeal,
the appeal to the emotions through beauty of line, of form, and in a
less degree of colour. 'The whole fabric of Greek art goes to pieces
when it is brought into contact with a purely utilitarian nation like
Rome.'[132]
[132] _Hellenistic Sculpture_, by Guy Dickins, p. 85. The author,
who wrote with something of the insight of the artist as well as the
accurate knowledge of the scholar, died of wounds, on the Somme, in
1916.
Of the two orders, the Doric and the Ionic, the Doric seems to me the
purest embodiment of the true Greek spirit, in its faultless form, and
its austere restraint and rejection of the unessential. It was,
moreover, the order _par excellence_ of the Greek temple of the
mainland. The Erechtheum was the only Ionic temple of first-rate
importance in Greece, and the employment of the Ionic order in Greece
was confined to interiors and minor buildings. As for the Corinthian
order, the favourite order of the Romans, it was scarcely recognized by
the Greeks. In all their great temples, in Greece, in Sicily, and Magna
Graecia, they used the Doric order.
[Illustration: Fig. 2. TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE AT PAESTUM]
How this order was arrived at we do not really know. Ingenious
conjectures have been made as to its origin in wooden construction,
and though some of these conjectures are more probable than others they
leave us pretty well where we were in regard to the stages by which it
reached its final form. It has been suggested that the Doric column
originated in the wooden post of the earliest temples, such as are
supposed to have existed in the Heraion at Olympia. The square post
would have its angles taken off, and become an octagon, and the further
elimination of the angles would gradually produce a form nearly circular
in plan, in which the arrises of the chamfered angles would remain, and
this might easily suggest to artists so sensitive as the Greeks, their
further refinement and definition by a slight hollow between the arrises
which would constitute the flutings of the Doric column. Its derivations
from the Minoan and Mycenaean columns seems most improbable. There are
two essential parts in the Doric column, the shaft and the capital (the
Greeks did not use any base for this order). The Minoan columns taper
downwards instead of upwards, an utterly unconstructional form, and
though in the palace of Knossos and at Tiryns columns of this shape
appear to have been used to carry lintels, the stone columns on either
side of the entrance to the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae were used for
decorative and not for structural purposes. On the other hand columns of
great massiveness tapering upwards had been used long before in Egypt;
and though there is evidence against it, it still seems probable that
the suggestion of the shaft of the Doric column may have come from
Egypt. We first find it in Greece in the seventh century B. C. at the
period when Psammetichus I (671-617 B. C.) opened Egypt to Greek trade
and settlement. The Greek colony of Naukratis on the west side of the
Nile delta was founded by Milesians about 650 B. C. and by the middle of
the sixth century B. C. definite trade relations were established
between Naukratis and the mainland of Greece. The Greek settlement at
Daphnae on the eastern arm of the Nile appears to have been founded at
about the same time as Naukratis, in both cases with the sanction and
encouragement of the Egyptian king. The earliest Doric temples in
Greece, Sicily, and Magna Graecia date from the end of the seventh
century and early part of the sixth century. The nearness of date makes
it probable that the shaft of the Doric order had its origin in the
Egyptian column seen by some quick-witted Greek when trading in Egypt.
When we come to the capital of the column, the rôles seem to be
reversed, for we find nothing in Egyptian architecture to suggest the
echinus moulding under the square abacus of the Doric column; whereas
the Mycenaean column had a rudimentary capital which may have suggested
the idea of the Doric capital. But the notable thing about it is that
when we first come across the Doric capital in Sicily and Greece, it is
already far in advance of anything that had gone before it in Greece,
and it is quite different from the columns of Egypt. In the Doric temple
of Corinth (650-600 B. C.) the columns have already reached the type
form, the tapered shaft with its entasis or slight convex curvature in
outline, its massive solidity (the ratio is one of diameter to four and
a quarter of height), and the bold parabolic curve of the echinus
moulding under the abacus of its cap. In this form, the Doric column was
an absolutely fresh note in architecture. Archaic though they were,
these columns at Corinth show that the Greeks were already on the track
of those refinements of form, those optical corrections and
compensations, which differentiate Greek architecture from that of any
other race. The exaggeration in the entasis of the archaic column
disappears, its tapering was diminished, its height increased, and the
overhang of the capitals reduced, till in the Theseion (465 B. C.) and
the Parthenon (450-438 B. C.) we reach the final inimitable type. The
column, which at Paestum was not much over four times the height of its
correct diameter, is now over five times, the great overhanging
capitals are reduced to reasonable dimensions, the depth of the
entablature is diminished, the axis of the column is slightly inclined
inwards to give the impression of stability, the shafts have the slight
curve or 'entasis' just sufficiently marked to prevent the outline of
the column looking incurved; the lines of the stylobate, or continuous
base, on which the columns stand, and the entablature which they carry,
have a slight rise toward the centre in order to correct the impression
of the lines sinking in the middle; the columns at the angles are
thickened, because standing free with the light all round them they
would otherwise appear smaller than the columns standing against the
background of the building. Nothing was left to chance; every aspect of
the building, the relation of every part to the whole, and of the whole
to its part, was studied profoundly, so that there should be no failure
in its perfect harmony. Except in Egyptian architecture, and there to a
much smaller extent, nothing like this had been done before. What the
Greeks did, was to formulate a rhythmical architecture, in which each
part stood in a definite and considered relation to the whole, so that
even in their ruined state these Doric temples give an irresistible
impression of a great idea, a great architectural epic, in which each
detail, however beautiful, was subordinated to the unity of the
conception as a whole. It is this abstract quality which lifts Greek
Doric so far above the ambitious art of later ages, and indeed above all
but the very finest work of any period of architecture.
[Illustration: Fig. 3. DORIC TEMPLE, CORINTH]
Many attempts have been made to discover the secret of this wonderful
perfection of proportion. That the Greeks had a system of their own,
that they worked to definite ratios of dimension and number, and
employed graphic methods of determining their proportions, such as the
use of triangles and the like to determine the limits of their designs,
seems certain. But no contemporary account of any such system remains;
and all the explanations that are given are _ex post facto_, made by
theorists analysing existing buildings, not by architects designing new
ones. Some four or five hundred years later Vitruvius compiled a
treatise on architecture, in which, following the doctrines of the
school of Alexandria, he expounded a Greek theory of proportion on the
basis of the human figure. Vitruvius is obscure, and does not seem to
have been certain himself whether the proportion of the parts of a
design were to bear a relation to the whole, analogous to that of
members of a human body to the body as a whole, or whether the
proportions of the order were to be taken from the actual proportions of
the human body; and he complicates the position by reference to the
'perfect numbers' of the Greeks. But here again he was uncertain whether
the 'perfect number' was ten or six. After which, and having, in his
reference to the human figure as the canon of proportion, unwittingly
set a trap for the scholars and artists of the Renaissance, he drops the
subject and digresses into a general classification of temples, with
formal rules for the placing and dimensions of columns, which have
formed the staple of treatises on classical architecture ever since. One
should speak with gratitude of the labours of Vitruvius, because, after
all, his is the only technical treatise left us on the subject; but he
applied to the pure Greek temples a system evolved centuries later by
critics and theorists; he was thinking chiefly of Roman versions of
Greek architecture, and he was more interested in technical rules and
precepts for the use of architects than in that abstract beauty which
was all the Greek cared for. No classification, however laborious, will
reach the mystery of Greek architecture. Its beauty is too subtle to be
reduced to any formula.
The Doric order reigned supreme throughout the great period from the
sixth till the end of the fifth century B. C. It failed with the failure
of the high ideals of Athens. Other forces came into play to which it no
longer responded, and later Greek critics even found fault with the
Doric order for certain 'mendosae et inconvenientes symmetriae';[133]
but that order, the true symbol of the sons of Heracles, was one of the
most momentous contributions ever made to the art of architecture. It
was the keynote of Greek architecture throughout its finest period.
Later it was superseded by the Ionic order, and when Rome became
paramount in the western world, that, in its turn, yielded its place of
pride to the Corinthian order, opulent, luxurious, a little vulgar, a
true register of the lowering of the sense and standard of beauty that
followed the downfall of Athens.
[133] _Vitruvius_, iii. 1. The difficulty was, that if the triglyph
was placed on the angle of the building (the practice of the Greeks)
and the next triglyph was placed over the axis of the column, the
metope (or panel) between these two triglyphs would be larger than
the metopes between the triglyphs axial over the other columns. The
Greeks solved it by reducing the width of the end intercolumniation,
but later critics disliked this, and solved it by removing the end
triglyph from the angle and placing it axial over the end column.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Aegean, the Ionic order was reaching
its perfect form through a similar process of systematic thought on a
type definitely adopted. The Greek colonies in Asia Minor were of very
early origin. Legend attributed their foundation to the earlier
inhabitants of Greece, driven out by the Dorians. By the sixth century
B. C. the Greek colonies were well established on the west and
south-west coasts of Asia Minor, and had evolved their own
characteristic architectural idiom in the Ionic order and its column,
more slender than the Doric, with its moulded base and its strange
characteristic capital, unsuitable from the constructional point of view
in stone or marble, yet ultimately attaining the exquisite beauty of
line and modelling of the capitals of the Erechtheion at Athens. Two
things seem fairly certain as to the origin of this capital; first, that
it was derived from the wooden horizontal head-pieces fixed on posts to
reduce the bearing of the primitive wooden lintels; and, secondly, that
the first suggestion of the volute reached the Ionian Greeks from the
East. A crude anticipation of the volute is found in Phoenician work,
and it also appears on a Hittite relief at Boghaz Keui in the middle of
Asia Minor. Its origin in either case was oriental, and we have here the
other motive in Greek architecture, Eastern, at any rate exotic, and, as
compared with Doric, almost alien to the true Greek genius. Yet this
astonishing people gave it a form as far removed from its barbarous
originals, as the Doric capitals of the Parthenon from the capitals of
the columns of Mycenae, and when the Greeks of both sides of the Aegean
drew together after the defeat of the Persians, the Ionic order crossed
the sea, and assumed a place of honour in the temples of Greece, still,
however, with rare exceptions, in subordination to the Doric order. In
the colonies in Asia Minor, the supremacy of the Ionic order had long
been recognized. The Ionic temple of Hera at Samos, 368 ft. long by 178
ft. wide, is supposed to have been built at the end of the sixth or
early in the fifth century B. C., and this was the forerunner of the
great fourth-century temples of Ionia, built when Architecture had
changed its direction and Hellenistic Art was beginning its adventurous
career.
With these two orders as the terms and idioms of expression the Greeks
built up the architecture of their temples. Their plans were the
simplest possible. The rudimentary type was a simple chamber or cella,
with a loggia open to the air except for two columns standing between
the two extremities of the side walls, which terminated in pilasters
known as 'antae'.[134] The next stage was to bring the colonnade
forward,[135] stage number three repeated the column at the other end of
the building,[136] stage number four continued the colonnade along the
sides,[137] stage number five doubled the colonnade on all four
sides,[138] and stage number six retained the outer rows of columns but
omitted the inner row along the sides, leaving a wide passage-way all
round the main building.[139] Vitruvius gives a further classification
by the spacing of columns which will be found in all the handbooks of
classic architecture. With minor variations in detail, these types
remained constant for the temples of Greece and Rome. The principal
alterations occurred in the extension of the temple proper, at the
expense of the surrounding colonnade. In the Archaic temples, such as
the older temples of Selinus in Sicily (sixth century B. C.), the
portico and colonnade occupy three-quarters of the site. In the temple
of Hephaestus (Theseion) at Athens (fifth century B. C.) the cella
occupies only a little more than half the total area, and in the
Parthenon, built some twenty years later, the size of the cella is still
further increased. Most of these temples were covered in. Hypaethral
temples, in which the cella was open to the sky, are mentioned by
Vitruvius, and it is probable that some of the larger ones at any rate
were partly open to the sky. But how the openings were arranged is
almost entirely a matter of conjecture. The roof used was of a very flat
pitch, one of height to four of base, later it was even flatter, and
this dictated the slope of the pediments. This roof covered the whole of
the building, that is, both the cella and the colonnades on either side
of it, and as the Greeks were ignorant of the principle of the
triangulated truss built up of beams in compression and tension, they
were at a loss to know how to carry their roof without pushing out their
walls. Hence the great solidity of their buildings, and the rather
clumsy expedient of the colonnades in the interiors of temples which
appear to have been the only means they could think of to carry the
roof. One has to bear it in mind in thinking of Greek architecture, that
the Greeks were not constructors in the sense that the Romans were; they
built well, and the best of their masonry was extraordinarily
skilful--only by unusual skill in the cutting and setting of stone could
they have carried out the delicate curves in the columns and other parts
of their buildings--but construction, in the sense of the invention of
new methods to meet difficult conditions, did not interest the Greek,
and one cannot help thinking that the Greeks may have been more
successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside. It
seems clear that they devoted most of their attention to the external
elevations. It is not really known for certain how they lit their
temples, though of course all sorts of suggestions of top-lighting have
been made. It is possible that in some cases they were lit only from the
principal entrance, and it is certain that the Greek did not want for
the interior of his temple any such floods of light as are necessary
under our northern skies. In the first place, he enjoyed a most
brilliant and penetrating light, so that within his colonnades reflected
light was amply sufficient to show the friezes and other ornaments, and
he did not hesitate to use strong primary colours to heighten and
explain their effect, wherever he found it necessary. In the second
place, within the shrine itself, other considerations came into play. A
certain luminous atmosphere, rather than positive light was what was
aimed at, and the deep shadows of these internal colonnades might have
helped this effect, adding to the mystery of the figure of the God.
[134] Vitruvius gives this as the 'aedes in antis'.
[135] Pro-style (colonnade in front).
[136] Amphipro-style (colonnade at both ends).
[137] Peripteral (single colonnade all round).
[138] Dipteral (double colonnade all round).
[139] Pseudo-dipteral (inner row of columns omitted).
This, too, may be the explanation of what must strike an architect as an
anomaly of design, the Greek habit of placing enormous figures in the
interior of their temples. The Greek, in his own way, was a very
religious man. In his temple, he was doing his utmost to set forth the
majesty of his God, and if it was necessary for this purpose he was even
prepared to sacrifice his principles as an artist, to ignore the scale
of his interior and the rhythmic harmony of his design, by the
introduction of gigantic figures. The eye judges by what it knows, and
the readiest way of arriving at some idea of the size of a building or a
monument is by relating it to the normal size of the human figure.
Vitruvius, in his confused way, suggested that the human figure was the
canon and standard of architectural design, but how is it possible to
determine the scale of a building which contained a figure at least six
times the size of a man, reaching from the floor to the roof? The
chryselephantine figure of Zeus at Olympia, made by Pheidias, is
supposed to have been some thirty-five feet high, and to have reached
nearly to the roof, passing the double tier of columns and the gallery
above the aisles of the cella. Moreover, this god was represented as
seated on his throne, so that by no possibility could it have been in
scale with the building so far as the architecture was concerned. Even
the gigantic temple of Zeus at Agrigentum with its external columns 61
ft. 9 in. in height, and large enough for a man to stand within one of
the flutings of the columns, could hardly have stood up to figures on
such a scale as this. Such a violent contrast in scale broke the
principle of συμμετρια {symmetria}, that strict relation of the part to
the whole which the Greek artists maintained elsewhere with scrupulous
care. Artists with such a consummate sense of proportion as the Greeks
possessed would hardly have made a mistake here, and the conclusion one
comes to is that where their religion was in question, everything had to
give way. Indeed, one can imagine the tremendous effect of this colossal
figure seen dimly in the half-light of the cella, filling the whole
temple with its presence. The same anomaly in scale occurred in the
Akropolis at Athens, where the vast figure of Athene Promachos must have
reduced the beautiful Caryatides of the Erechtheum to insignificance. M.
Choisy makes a gallant effort to show that this want of relationship in
scale, and also in the siting of the temples, was deliberate and
considered. As a fact, the general rule that seems to have been observed
in the time of Pericles was that new temples should always be built on
the site of the older ones,[140] but axis lines were neglected, and even
the masses of the Propylaea, beautiful building as it must have been,
did not balance. The Akropolis was just a collection of unrelated
buildings, and in the great Temenos of Delphi the various monuments were
all anyhow.[141] The Sacred Way meandered about like an S, and the only
method it observed was to clear the various treasuries and shrines which
appear to have been scattered about within the enclosure, with a
disregard of each other little less than brutal--a rather suggestive
symbol of the internecine rivalry of the small Greek states. At Delphi,
also, there was a huge figure of Apollo Sitalkas said to have been
seventeen metres high, which must have been hopelessly out of scale. The
fact was that Greek architects of the fifth century had not yet arrived
at the conception of the city as a whole. They had an admirable eye for
a site, for example, the position of the Parthenon itself, and the
temple of Hera Lacinia at Agrigentum placed high above the sea, but it
is unhistorical to invest even the architects of the Parthenon and the
Propylaea with a knowledge and outlook which was not thought of till a
hundred years later. Even the Greek architects and sculptors of the
fifth century B. C. were not omniscient, yet within their limits, in
their mastery of what they set themselves to do, the artists of the age
of Pericles remain unapproachable, and theirs was the Golden Age of
Architecture. They had fixed for all time essential elements of the art,
and had set up a standard of attainment in pure form which no subsequent
architecture has ever been able to reach.
[140] The Erechtheum was an exception.
[141] See _Delphi_, by Dr. Frederick Poulsen, p. 52. It is suggested
that the Sacred Way was in existence before the shrines were built,
and that its wanderings were necessitated by the gradients of the
hillside. No sort of attempt, however, seems to have been made to
correct this, or to treat it as an element of design.
The fall of Athens closed this splendid chapter, but Greek
architecture was by no means done with. The Silver Age, the Hellenistic
art that followed, is of intense interest. With the rise of the
Macedonian monarchy the stage of history shifted from the mainland to
the Ionian colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Cities such as Ephesus
and Miletus became immensely prosperous, Mausolus of Halicarnassus, the
Attalids of Pergamon, possessed wealth that would have been unimaginable
to the Greeks of Marathon. The City State, fighting desperately for its
existence, inspired by high ideals of patriotism and religion, was a
thing of the past. These Greeks of Ionia were well content to enjoy the
comfort and prosperity of a settled civilization without having to fight
for it; and the whole atmosphere of their existence must have been
different from the strenuous life of Greece in the fifth century.
Moreover, the Ionian Greek, influenced, even if subconsciously, by the
spirit of Asia, was by temperament unable to maintain the intellectual
level of the Doric architecture of the mainland; and a difference
appears in the whole orientation of art, in sculpture perhaps even more
than in architecture. The history of Hellenistic art has yet to be
written. It has been described as decadent, and it was undoubtedly
responsible for some very poor stuff, but it also produced the 'Victory'
of Samothrace, one of the finest things ever done in sculpture, and some
very remarkable developments in architecture. It is not to be judged by
the standards of the art that preceded it. The Ionian Greek of the
fourth and third centuries B. C. broke away from the tradition of the
mainland, a tradition always rather alien to his instincts. His interest
lay less in a somewhat impersonal religion than in the assertion of his
own individuality. He did not understand the lofty patriotism, and the
high ideal of abstract beauty that had inspired Pericles and his artists
in the Akropolis; indeed, there is a curiously modern feeling about much
of his work, which became more marked as he came under the dominance of
Rome. The individualism, the realism, the revivalism, and the
commercialism of modern art, were all anticipated by the Hellenistic
artists of Ionia, of Rhodes, of Alexandria, and of Athens itself in the
Roman period. Civilization was becoming more complex, and one finds this
reflected in Hellenistic art, at once more florid than the Doric of the
fourth century, yet also more skilful in its handling of complicated
problems of planning and design. No one wanted archaic simplicity when
the wealth of Asia was flowing into the treasuries of the Ionian states,
and the expression of this opulent ease is found in their magnificent
temples, such as the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus, of which the
outer colonnade measured 342 ft. 6 in. by 163 ft. 9 in., or the vast
temple of Apollo Didymaeus at Miletus, 165 ft. wide by 360 ft. long out
to out of the colonnades; or the amazing monument of Mausolus of Caria
at Halicarnassus, or the great altar of Pergamon. Fragments of the
columns of the Temple of Artemis, now in the British Museum, tell of its
size and richness, they also give the first hint of the downfall of art
and civilization which was to follow centuries later. The Greeks of the
great period had kept the structural parts of their building free of
ornament. It would never have occurred to them to interfere with the
lines of the column in any way that would contradict its purpose; but
the Greek architects of Ephesus not only placed their columns on
pedestals (making them so far less stable in appearance), but they
adorned the lower part of their Ionic columns with figures, of admirable
execution, but perfectly inappropriate in the position they occupy. One
cannot imagine Pheidias making a mistake such as this. Splendid in
execution as Hellenistic sculpture often was, it won its place at the
expense of architecture; one looks in vain for that selection and
restraint which give its undying distinction to the earlier work.
[Illustration: Fig. 4. TEMPLE OF THESEUS, ATHENS]
The Greeks of the fifth century realized that architecture is an art
with a definite purpose other than that of a mere vehicle for sculpture,
and that it makes its aesthetic appeal by its own inherent qualities of
rhythm, and proportion, spacing, mass, and outline. Though they used
sculpture and colour to heighten and intensify the effect of their
architecture, they saw very clearly the function of the arts in relation
to each other, and kept their sculpture and their colour in strict
relation to the aesthetic purpose of their architecture. It is a point
on which later architects went lamentably astray. A great deal of early
Renaissance work is mere ornamentation of buildings, indeed in buildings
such as the Certosa of Pavia the architecture has almost ceased to
exist; and most of the bad architecture of the last fifty years is due
to the deplorable fallacy that ornament is architecture. The columns of
Ephesus, the sculpture of the altar of Pergamon, brilliant as they were
in technical accomplishment, were the first hint of that decline which
was in time to undermine the whole fabric of the Arts. Architecture was
deposed from its high intellectual dominance. It tended more and more to
become a conventional affair, and it was an easy transition from the
exuberance of Hellenistic art to the point-blank vulgarity of Roman
ornamental architecture.
It was, however, inevitable that the fine simplicity of Periclean art
should vanish with its ideals, and one finds a certain compensation in
the extension of the range and outlook of architecture, which we owe to
the Hellenistic architects of the fourth and succeeding centuries B. C.
So far as perfection of form was concerned, it was impossible to carry
the art beyond the stage to which Ictinus and Callicrates had brought
it; but there still remained something, and something very important, to
be done. Axial planning, the consideration of the relation of building
to building, seem to have been outside the consciousness of Greeks of
the fifth century, and each building was treated as an unrelated unit.
But the inconvenience of this, its loss of opportunity, and the
necessity of order and method, must have become apparent, as
civilization became more complex and more exacting. By the end of the
fourth century B. C. the tradition of architectural technique was
firmly established, and architects were able to turn their attention to
problems of large planning, and these they seem to have handled with
extraordinary skill. So far, what had been done in this direction had
been due to religious inspiration, as in the processional ways leading
to the Egyptian temples or the avenue of figures at Branchidae. What the
Hellenistic architects did was to think out consecutive schemes of city
planning, in which the dominant motive of arrangement was artistic. They
had learnt to treat the temples, the public buildings, the open spaces
and approaches, as the elements of one harmonious composition, in which
the utmost use was made of the natural opportunities of the site. At
Ephesus, for example, there is supposed to have existed a consecutive
scheme, larger than anything of the kind carried out even in France in
the eighteenth century, though the evidence, it should be noted, is
largely conjectural. As presented by sanguine and enthusiastic restorers
the scheme was magnificent. Next the port, and facing it on one side,
was the Arsenal, a regular building opening on to a court surrounded by
a colonnade, which again opened on to the great 'Place', a square
enclosure some 850 ft. wide north and south, by 650 ft. east and
west,[142] surrounded by a colonnade on all four sides, with exhedrae,
or semicircular recesses. In the centre of this Place was an oblong
water-piece, about 300 ft. by 200 ft., and on the farther side, opposite
the Arsenal buildings, were the Senate House and other public buildings;
and behind these and to the right and left of them the Theatre and the
Stadium, partly excavated in Mount Coressus. The Arsenal, the great
Place with its water-piece, and the public buildings, were laid out on
an axis line, and on a regular rectangulated plan.
[142] The Place Vendôme measures 450 ft. × 420 ft.; Grosvenor Square
about 650 × 530; and Lincoln's Inn Fields about 800 × 630, measured
from wall to wall of buildings.
A scheme such as this (if it is possible to accept a conjectural
restoration), thought out in all its bearings, meant a real advance in
the range of architecture. It is useless to look for the faultless
beauty of the fifth century, but the resourcefulness and skill of the
Hellenistic architects gave a new meaning to the art; and indeed they
might almost be said to have established the first stage in the
development of its modern practice. It was from these able Hellenistic
architects that the Romans learnt the monumental planning of their
cities, and for centuries the architects most frequently employed were
Greeks of Asia Minor. At this point, Hellenistic architecture merges
into Roman, and loses its distinctive character. Through Roman it passes
on to modern architecture, and so in a sense the chain is complete; but
between this later art and pure Greek architecture there is a great gulf
fixed, differences not only of technique but of outlook, of ideal, and
of temperament. The mighty Doric of Paestum, Selinus, and Segesta, the
Theseion and the Parthenon, remains for all time the perfect expression
of the soul of ancient Greece.
It is one of the ironies of history that when in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries scholars and artists awoke to the fact that there
had been a great architecture in the past they should have known of no
other version of it but the Roman. What splendid developments might have
followed if the finer spirits of the Renaissance, Alberti, Bramante, or
Peruzzi, had founded their theories of architecture on the temples of
Sicily and Magna Graecia, instead of on the debased examples of Imperial
Rome! They, at least, would have caught a glimpse of the beauty of
abstract form and perfect harmony, the secret of which seems to have
been revealed to the Greeks alone among the peoples of the world--and to
them for only a transient period of their history. Unfortunately, when
Greek architecture was discovered in the second half of the eighteenth
century, it became the shibboleth of the 'virtuosi'. The national
traditions, both of France and England, were lost, Greek architecture
became the fashion, and the misguided enthusiasm of pedants and
amateurs insisted on literal reproductions which completed the
extinction of architecture as a vernacular art, and replaced it by the
series of revivalisms from which it has suffered for the last one
hundred and fifty years. Conscious and deliberate tinkering with the art
of architecture ended by destroying it.
We can never hope to revive Greek architecture, nor should we attempt to
do so. There was once a well-known Scotch architect who held that the
column and the lintel was the only permissible form of construction, and
with this limitation and ill-selected Greek details he produced some
fantastically ugly buildings. Following a similar line of thought a
famous critic of the last century condemned methods of construction not
sanctioned by the Old Testament. Both were wide of the mark; because,
above and beyond all technical details of architecture is the spirit in
which it is approached, the intellectual outlook of the artist on his
art, and this may express itself in widely differing forms. In Greek
architecture of the Golden period, that outlook was definite and
distinctive, and it was one that has a very urgent lesson for us to-day.
The aim and ideal of the Greek was beauty of form, and this beauty,
which he sought in the first instance as the expression of his religion,
ultimately became almost a religion in itself. To the realization of
this ideal he devoted all his powers, sparing himself no pains in
chastening his work till it had attained the utmost perfection possible.
He merged himself in this work, without thought of the expression of
himself in his vision of a divine and immutable beauty. It hardly
occurred to him that his individual emotions were worth preserving. (In
the sculpture of the great period the expression of the face is usually
one of unruffled calm.) Although religious emotion was the source and
inspiration of his work, his work was impersonal. He was aloof from that
feverish anxiety for self-revelation which has made much modern art so
interesting pathologically, and so detestable otherwise. Nor again had
he anything of the virtuoso about him. To him technique was not an end
in itself. In Hellenistic art it became so, but not in the Golden Age.
Indeed, he was sometimes almost careless of exact modelling, and in
architecture he did not use the order as a mere exhibition of
scholarship. In his search for beautiful form, he stood upon the ancient
ways, patient and serene, moving steadily to his appointed end. 'Ainsi
procède le génie grec, moins soucieux du nouveau que du mieux, il
reporte vers l'épuration des formes l'activité que d'autres dépensent en
innovations souvent stériles, jusqu'à ce qu'enfin il atteigne l'exquise
mesure dans les efforts, et dans les expressions l'absolue
justesse.'[143] There have been rare periods since, when Architecture
has moved with the same calm unhesitating purpose, Gothic architecture,
for example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and certain phases
of eighteenth-century architecture in France and England, when tradition
was still active and vital, and artists were content to let well alone.
[143] Choisy, _History of Architecture_, vol. i, p. 298.
Modern conditions seem to be wholly against the Greek standpoint in art.
The Arts are in the melting-pot, the old standards of attainment are
trampled under foot, and the prophets prophesy falsely. Quite lately we
were asked to find our inspiration in the fetishes of the Gold Coast,
and if the aim of the artist is to outstrip his brethren in brutality,
the advice is sound. A recent critic justified the antics of certain
artists by the necessity they were under of advertising themselves.
That, no doubt, is the readiest way to immediate success. But the
question for the critic is, not the personal advancement of the artist
but the value of his work; and one would ask if any good work at any
period in the history of art has been inspired by this ambition to shout
louder than one's neighbours. Certainly, the standpoint of the Greek was
the exact opposite. He did not seek advertisement and notoriety. He was
happy with his inner vision of beauty, and intent only on its
realization. He had not the smallest desire to shock or startle any
one. There are occasions when shock tactics are necessary, but they are
not necessary every day in the week, nor is it necessary to make a clean
sweep of the past before one sets to work in one's own little corner of
art.
What is wanted in modern art is some consciousness of this old Greek
spirit, some recognition of its value. The Greeks of the age of Pericles
wanted neither revivalism nor revolution; they moved forward, without
haste or anxiety, on traditional lines, and they were able to do so
because their art was so interwoven with their life that, in the plastic
arts, they could no more have changed their methods of expression than
they could have changed their manner of speech. That high outlook on
life is lost and hardly to be recovered under modern conditions of
social life and political government. It was perhaps only possible under
the true democracy of the small Greek city state, when every citizen
took his share in the ordered life of the community. Yet the Greek ideal
remains. In our fitful fever of honest intention and wrong judgement,
high endeavour and point-blank commercialism, Greek art, the art of
Pheidias and Ictinus, is still the wise mother to whom we must return.
The lesson of the Parthenon is the lesson of a steadfast vision of
beauty, held high above individual effort and failure, realizing itself
not in complex detail or calculated eccentricity, but in a serene and
exquisite simplicity of form. It teaches us that in the arts there are
no short cuts, and that anarchy, the destruction of what has been won
for us in the past, is not advance but the straight road to the
bottomless pit of barbarism. Instead of repudiating the work of his
fathers, the Greek carried it on to its perfection, and built his palace
of art on a sure foundation because he turned neither to the right hand
nor to the left, but steadily set his face towards the light.