Sir C. Fellows,[47] in his interesting account of his travels in Asia
Minor, draws attention to the remarkable rock-tombs which he discovered
in Lycia, and which clearly prove that these tombs were models in stone
of wooden dwellings. At Antiphellus (Plate V., Fig. 1) the timbering is
reproduced to every detail of mortise and tenon. The stems of trees,
laid horizontally to cover the chamber, are imitated in masonry. They
project beyond the wall, and show their ends, as a row of circular
sections, in the middle of the entablature. The tree trunk at each
extremity of the row was larger than the rest, and has been squared.
Sometimes all the trunks are squared, as may be seen at Xanthus (Plate
V., Fig. 2); and we witness, as Dr. March points out, the origin of
the well-known Greek ornament called “guttæ.” He also calls attention
to the fact that skeuomorphs of timbering were much affected by the
Normans, as in their various billet patterns; whilst their capitals
often show sections, not alone of branches springing from a tree trunk,
but of the enveloping bark also. (Plate I., Fig. B.)
[47] C. Fellows, _A Journal written during an Excursion in Asia
Minor_, 1839.
Another rock tomb at Antiphellus (Plate V., Fig. 3) shows a row of
squared trunks projecting beyond the side of the building, as would be
a natural arrangement in any wooden house that had a length greater
than its width. In the same building are external indications of
a second story. They are indications only, for the story does not
exist. The device is a skeuomorph, because it is functionless. “But
we understand,” to again quote from Dr. March, “the origin of our
‘string-course,’ and we recognise one of the many reasons, in the
ancestral training of the eye of our race, why the sight of a large
unbroken surface produces in the mind a sense of disappointment, a
feeling of unsatisfied expectancy, the anguish that Hood sings—
“‘A wall so blank
That my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there!’”
The gables of the roof of the old-time houses were often formed by the
bent boughs of trees crossing each other at the ridge, as witnessed by
an Etruscan hut-urn from Monte Albano (Plate I., Fig. C), and Pompeian
wall-paintings. (Plate V., Fig. 4.) A finished treatment of the bent
bough gable is seen in a tomb at Antiphellus. (Plate V., Fig. 3.)
In the wooden originals of the rock-tombs of Asia Minor (Plate V.,
Figs. 2, 3) one sees the birth of the gable which, arising as a
structural necessity, was perpetuated in stone as the crowning glory of
Grecian temples, and ever since has remained as a decorative adjunct
to buildings, or the functionless adornment of the humblest household
furniture. (Plate I., Figs. D-F.)