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[Illustration: TROPHONIUS SLAYING AGAMEDES AT THE TREASURY OF HYRIEUS.]
SOME OLD MASTERS
OF GREEK
ARCHITECTURE
By HARRY DOUGLAS
CURATOR OF [Illustration: Decoration]
KELLOGG TERRACE
[Illustration: Decoration]
PUBLISHED AT THE
QUARTER-OAK
GREAT BARRINGTON,
MASS., 1899 [Illustration: Decoration]
_Copyright, 1899_,
BY HARRY DOUGLAS.
[Illustration: Decoration]
TO EDWARD
FRANCIS
SEARLES
WHOSE APPRECIATION OF THE HARMONIES OF ART, AND
WHOSE HIGH IDEALS OF ARCHITECTURE HAVE FOUND
EXPRESSION IN MANY ENDURING FORMS, THIS BOOK IS
RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED.
[Illustration: Decoration]
PREFACE
The temptation to wander, with all the recklessness of an amateur,
into the traditions of the best architecture, which necessarily could
be found only in the history of early Hellenic art, awakened in the
author a desire to ascertain who were the individual artists primarily
responsible for those architectural standards, which have been accepted
without rival since their creation. The search led to some surprise
when it was found how little was known or recorded of them, and how
great appeared to be the indifference in which they were held by nearly
all the writers upon ancient art, as well as by their contemporary
historians and biographers. The author therefore has gone into the
field of history, tradition and fable, with a basket on his arm, as it
were, to cull some of the rare and obscure flowers of this artistic
family, dropping into the basket also such facts directly or indirectly
associated with the architects of ancient Greece, or their art, as
interested him personally. The basket is here set down, containing,
if nothing more, at least a brief allusion to no less than eighty-two
architects of antiquity. The fact is perfectly appreciated that many
fine specimens may have been overlooked; that scant justice has been
done those gathered, and that the basket is far too small to contain
all that so rich a field could offer.
This book, therefore, aims at nothing more than a superficial glance
at the subject, and the author will be content if he has accomplished
anything toward bringing those great geniuses of a noble art into a
little modern light, who have been left very much to themselves in one
of the gloomiest chambers of a deep obscurity.
CONTENTS
PAGE
1. POPULAR APPRECIATION OF ARCHITECTS, 1
2. MYTHICAL AND ARCHAIC ARCHITECTS AND
BUILDERS, 24
3. ORIGINATORS OF THE “THREE ORDERS,” 49
4. EARLY GRECIAN ARCHITECTS, 63
5. ARCHITECTURAL EPOCH OF PERICLES, 90
6. ARCHITECTS OF THE AGE OF PERICLES, 103
7. LATER GREEK ARCHITECTS, 136
8. ALEXANDRIAN ERA, AND ROMAN SPOLIATION, 148
9. ALEXANDRIAN ARCHITECTS, 164
INDEX OF ARCHITECTS AND ARCHITECTURAL SCULPTORS, 185
CHAPTER I.
THE POPULAR APPRECIATION OF ARCHITECTS.
Of all the fine arts none more completely answers for its _raison
d’être_ than architecture. In this art alone do we find the harmonious
mingling of æsthetical fancy with utilitarian purpose. It is this
feature of usefulness that completes its well-rounded perfection,
rather than detracts from it, and dignifies its mission of existence.
Architecture, in its capacity to draw to its enrichment the other
arts, may be compared to the polished orator, whose purpose is to
sway the judgment of his audience by forensic effort, embellishing
his language with the flowers of rhetoric, adapting his gestures to
graceful emphasis, and controlling his voice to suit the light and
shade of his thought. So sculpture has been stimulated by architecture
and has contributed to its ornamentation; painting has been invoked to
the highest accomplishments, and music has awakened within its walls
voice and harmony. “The progress of other arts depends on that of
architecture,” Sir William Chambers very truly says. “When building
is encouraged, painting, sculpture, gardening and all other decorative
arts flourish of course, and these have an influence on manufactures,
even to the minutest mechanic productions; for design is of universal
advantage, and stamps a value on the most trifling performance.”
It is perhaps not a little odd that despite its pre-eminent importance,
and the high rank which it has ever assumed, from that early time when
the first rays of dawning civilization began to warm the latent germs
of culture and refinement in human nature, to the present day, it is
the only art that has not, with very rare and isolated exceptions,
stamped renown upon those who have practised it as a profession, and
lifted the artist into the lasting remembrance and gratitude of the
admirers of his works. How greatly the painter, the sculptor, the
musician, are identified with their arts, and the products of their
brush, chisel or pen! how great has been their praise, how lasting and
unstinted the esteem in which they have been held! but how reserved
has been the applause that has encouraged the architect who has given
to the world the grand and noble results of his skill and genius, and
how soon he himself has been forgotten! It happens only too often that
it is the name of the distinguished painter that stamps the value of
his canvas rather than the merits of the picture itself. The title
of a beautiful piece of sculptured marble is not asked with greater
eagerness than that of the artist who created it. Bach and Beethoven
and Mozart are played and sung to the popular audiences rather than
their fugues, their sonatas and their symphonies.
But what is known of the artists who have reared the greatest monuments
of enduring architecture? Their personality, and even their names,
appear to have faded from popular recollection. This seems to have
been the fact from the earliest days of the art in Greece and Rome
to the present time. The exceptions are so rare, throughout all the
intervening ages, and the waving prominence of the art, that they might
almost be numbered upon the fingers of a single hand.
The reader, if he is not a professional architect, or an amateur who
has read deeply in his favorite subject, can arrive at the truth of
this seemingly exaggerated statement, if he will lay aside this book
for a moment and try to recall the names of the designers of some of
the more conspicuous monuments of architecture he has visited at home
or abroad.
“I will erect such a building, but I will hang it up in the air,”
exclaimed Michael Angelo when he saw the dome of the Pantheon at Rome.
The reader may remember this boast of the great Renaissance genius, the
fulfilment of it in the colossal dome of St. Peter’s, and be satisfied
that his memory has captured one architect of celebrity. If the
beautiful Florentine campanile of Giotto looms up in his recollection
he will think at once also of that early artist, but perhaps not more
so in connection with that ornate tower than in association with the
Pre-Raphaelites. Of course, he will not overlook Inigo Jones, whose
very name is stamped upon the memory by reason of its peculiarity,
or Sir Christopher Wren, the creator of St. Paul’s, and the British
idol. If he is an admirer of the picturesque architecture of Venetian
churches and palaces, the Italian Palladio may not escape him; and
if of French Renaissance, the Louvre façade will possibly suggest
Perrault, and the Parisian roofs Mansard. If he is a native of our
“Modern Athens,” of course, the peril in which the classic front of
the State House rested for a time, at the hands of a _fin de siècle_
legislature, will not permit him to forget Bulfinch, and Trinity Church
will bring to memory the only Richardson. But aside from a few names
such as have been mentioned, with possibly a sprinkling of others
fixed in the memory, by incident or association, the average reader,
however well acquainted he may be with the numerous luminaries of the
other arts, will be unable to say who was responsible for the beauty
and nobility of many buildings that have individualized the cities and
towns of their location to the art-loving world. Who, for example,
can tell of the authors of the cathedrals at Milan and Siena, Cologne
and Strassburg, Rheims and Amiens, Wells and Litchfield; the Giralda
at Seville; the Church of the Invalides at Paris; the Strozzi Palace
at Florence; the Henry VII. chapel at Westminster Abbey; the much and
justly admired south façade of the old City Hall in New York; Grace
Church in that city; the Capitol building in Washington, or that model
of colonial architecture in America, the Executive Mansion?
It is not, however, the purpose to here speculate too extensively upon
the apparent lack of justice on the part of the general public which
has been done the architects of all climes and times, but to gather
together a few facts concerning the Old Masters of early Grecian
architecture that are not popularly known, and recall some of the
leading lights of that art so inimitably practised by the Hellenic
people during their progress from archaic darkness to the zenith of
their æsthetic culture.
It is but repeating a well-worn truth to say that the influence of
the early Grecian architects upon the followers of their art in all
countries of recognized civilized enlightenment, throughout the ages
that have succeeded them, has been an almost dominant one. Robert
Adam, the architectural authority in the time of George III., says,
in the introduction to his work on the ruins of the palace of the
Emperor Diocletian: “The buildings of the ancients are in architecture
what the works of nature are with respect to the other arts: they
serve as models which we should imitate and as standards by which we
ought to judge; for this reason they who aim at eminence, either in
the knowledge or practice of architecture, find it necessary to view
with their own eyes the works of the ancients which remain, that they
may catch from them those ideas of grandeur and beauty which nothing,
perhaps, but such an observation can suggest.”
It is equally true that no country that has experienced an evolution
in intelligence and culture, during the twenty-five hundred years that
have fled since the time of Pericles, has succeeded in introducing any
new school of architecture, that has not been compelled to draw upon
ancient Greece for many of the most important and essential features of
the art it could only modify, but never wholly re-create.
The Gothic, or pointed-arch style, that sprung into such beautiful
being in the thirteenth century, and reigned a queen within the
Christian countries of Europe for several centuries thereafter, came
more nearly answering for an original scheme of architecture than
perhaps any other of equal importance, and yet had it been deprived of
the Grecian props that helped to sustain it, it must have fallen to the
ground.
In the Gothic the effort was made to incline the inherited principles
of architecture more closely toward the spiritual progress of the
people, but when at last it had run its course, and was dethroned,
owing to a realization of the fact that even a closer allegiance
to classic models could be made to answer still better spiritual
requirements, how completely did the artistic temperament of the people
revert to Greece and Rome, as the light of their returning inspiration
and truth appeared with the dawn of the sixteenth century. Renaissance
architecture and Renaissance art swept Europe like a wave, and the
people turned with reactionary enthusiasm to the ancient standards of
art, as they did to the study of classic authors, and to the writing of
even Greek and Latin verses.
The debt of gratitude, therefore, which posterity has owed the
originators in ancient Greece of the three noble orders of
architecture—namely, the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian—can scarcely
be overestimated, for it is to those three orders or styles that
all subsequent architects have turned for the fundamental truths of
their art. They may not have followed each or all with conventional
strictness; but they have not succeeded in escaping from borrowing many
of the features there everlastingly fixed by the unerring geniuses of
classic times.
“Famous Greece!
That source of art, and cultivated thought,
Which they to Rome, and Romans hither brought.”
The uses to which the Greek and Roman architectural forms, principles
and ornaments have been put since the birth of the Renaissance have
broadened largely, and would seem to preclude any possibility of their
ever again falling into even partial desuetude. It is not only in
the more pretentious buildings, monuments and ornamental structures
that abound so plentifully in the populous and wealthy cities that
classic models and features are so liberally employed, but even the
unpretentious and simple rural homes cannot escape their use. What
is more common than the Doric mutule or Corinthian modillion, so
frequently seen in the cornices of modern houses, or the Ionic dentils
that show their teeth below a piazza roof or over the door casing of a
colonial dwelling? The various combinations of the fret, the egg and
dart, the bead and fillet, the honeysuckle, the acanthus and many other
Grecian _motifs_ of ornamentation, are met with constantly, not only in
buildings of a public or private nature, but in furniture and fresco,
in interior decoration, and in enhancing the attractiveness of almost
any article of use or ornament. Even the simple ogee moulding, which is
employed, if nowhere else, about the door panels of the humblest abode,
is classic in its origin, and had its archetype in the entablatures
of those stately and beautiful temples dedicated to the pagan gods of
ancient Greece.
It must not be inferred, however, that all the individual features
employed in the Greek orders found their birth in the brains of
Hellenic architects. Sir Jeremy Bentham says:
“From Egypt arts their progress made to Greece,
Wrapt in the fable of the Golden Fleece.”
This statement, however, though poetical, is much too sweeping to be
literally correct as to architecture. The Greeks borrowed a little—a
very little—not only from the Egyptians, but from the Assyrians, the
Chaldeans, the Persians, and other western Asiatic races as well; but
so altered what they had borrowed, so refined it and entwined it with
original conceptions of their own, that the captive features could
have returned again to their native lands without fear of detection.
Indeed as to the origin of some of the architectural features which
the Greeks are supposed to have taken from the countries of a more
unrefined people to the south and east of them, and especially as to
the volute, so conspicuous in the Ionic capital, which is supposed to
have been a Persian conception, there is much dispute.
Professor T. Roger Smith, of London, very truly observes: “We cannot
put a finger upon any feature of Egyptian, Assyrian or Persian
architecture the influence of which has survived to the present day,
except such as were adopted by the Greeks. On the other hand, there is
no feature, no ornament, nor even any principle of design which the
Greek architects employed that can be said to have now become obsolete.”
In discussing the three primary orders of which mention has been
made, and to which he adds the Tuscan and Composite, both of Italian
or Roman origin, and closely dependent upon the original three, Sir
William Chambers remarks: “The ingenuity of man has hitherto not
been able to produce a sixth order, though large premiums have been
offered, and numerous attempts been made by men of first-rate talents,
to accomplish it. Such is the fettered human imagination, such the
scanty store of its ideas, that Doric, Ionic and Corinthian have ever
floated uppermost, and all that has been produced amounts to nothing
more than different arrangements and combinations of their parts, with
some trifling deviations scarcely deserving notice; the whole tending
generally more to diminish than to increase the beauty of the ancient
orders.... The suppression of parts of the ancient orders, with a view
to produce novelty, has of late years been practised among us with
full as little success; and although it is not wished to restrain
sallies of imagination, nor to discourage genius from attempting to
invent, yet it is apprehended that attempts to alter the primary forms
invented by the ancients, and established by the concurring approbation
of many ages, must ever be attended with dangerous consequences, must
always be difficult, and seldom, if ever, successful.” Thus is seen the
marvellous discretion and judgment exercised by the Grecian architects
in selecting from contemporary art that alone which was best to
perpetuate, and thus is well expressed in the statement of indisputable
fact, a tribute to their originality and creative genius.
And who were these Old Masters of classic architecture—older in point
of service to their art by thousands of years than Giotto and Raphael
and Michael Angelo and Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, and many
others who might be mentioned, and who in campanile and cathedral,
in public building and private palace, in monument and mausoleum,
have proved themselves justly entitled to the laurels with which they
have been crowned, but who nevertheless are but disciples of Hellenic
and Roman masters? Where do we find the biographies of the original
Old Masters of architecture recorded? Where can we turn to read of
their lives, of their deeds and achievements, of their aspirations
and ambitions, of their shortcomings and their foibles? Where are
written down those anecdotes and incidents of personal interest, so
entertaining in association with their works or their art? What, in
fact, were their names? There is comparatively little recorded of the
lives of the Greek and Roman architects with which to answer these
questions; strange as it may appear, even their names are unfamiliar,
and in many important instances are forgotten altogether. Among that
large galaxy of brilliant men which Greece in her prime produced, who
figured prominently in almost every walk of life, who were great in
war and in peace, in philosophy and poetry, in satire and history,
in oratory and valor, and as great, if not greater than in all, in
statuary and sculpture—a galaxy clinging to the memory in all ages of
human progress, because never excelled, the name of a Grecian architect
is a strange sound, and does not ring in tune, if it is ever heard at
all, with the names enrolled upon the list of Greek immortals.
The sculptors and statuaries of ancient Greece are especially well
remembered in the popular mind, and Myron and Phidias and Praxiteles
and Polycletus call for no introduction to the ordinarily informed
lover of art; not so the designer of the Parthenon or the Temple of
Theseus, or the Erechtheum, or the Choragic monument of Lysicrates. It
is strange that the artist who modelled or chiselled a bull or a cow
or a Faun or a nude Venus, or any pagan god or goddess, however much
we may praise the excellence of his skill, should be remembered by
posterity, while the artist, his contemporary, who designed the most
beautiful and graceful buildings of all time, which in their glory were
the pride of their people, and which in their decay and ruin are still
the loadstones that attract pilgrims from the most distant lands, is
forgotten, and, it would appear, denied almost the humblest mention.
Can it not be said of the Grecian architects, as well as the Grecian
sculptors, that under the magic of their touch “Stones leap’d to form,
and rocks began to live”? Were not the temples they reared in all
the pride of surpassing beauty, which tempted the sculptor’s caress
on frieze and pediment, and which gave shelter to those works of the
statuary’s art which Shakespeare recalls so vividly when he draws the
simile:
“They spake not a word.
But, like dumb statues, or unbreathing stones,
Stared at each other, and look’d deadly pale,”
as much entitled to give immortality to their creators as the works,
however competitive, of other branches of art to their authors? And
still so incidentally and indifferently have the historians and
biographers of their time alluded to the Grecian architects, that
little or nothing is to be found to quench that desire to know of them
personally, which an interest in their grand achievements may well
awaken.
Did we not know it to be otherwise, we might think that they, too,
were like the poor architect of whom Goethe speaks: “He is employed
in lavishing all the luxury of his fancy upon halls from which he
is to be ever excluded, and display his ingenuity in bestowing the
utmost convenience upon apartments he must not enjoy.” But it does not
appear that any social discrimination was exercised against the Greek
architects to cast a shadow upon their present or future fame.
It is popularly believed that the great buildings of the ancient world
were very long in the process of construction—that they, in fact, took
many decades and sometimes even hundreds of years to complete. If this
were true it might in a measure explain the obscurity in which their
architects have been left, inasmuch as the original designer of the
building might have been forgotten ere the last of his successors had
finished the work he had undertaken. But this is not altogether the
fact. Even the pyramid of Cheops—that colossal marvel of the creative
genius of man—we are informed by some authorities took but thirty
years to construct, ten of which were given to the building of a
road leading to the site of the pyramid, for the greater facility in
handling the huge blocks of stone to be used. Neither were the temples
and public edifices of Greece and Rome, as a rule, long in building,
being generally undertaken and finished during the influential period
of a public man’s career, or the reign of a single emperor. There
were, of course, exceptions to this rule, as, for example, the temple
of Apollo at Delphi, that erected to Diana at Ephesus, and that
dedicated to Jupiter at Athens; but in nearly all such instances it
will be found that the temples were destroyed and rebuilt during the
long interval which is supposed to have passed from the time when
their foundations were first laid, to that which found them again in
all respects completed structures; or, if not destroyed and the work
undertaken anew, the delay was caused by some political influence which
contributed to check the continuous prosecution of the work, implying
no procrastination on the part of the original builders. But even in
the most of such cases the names of the various architects who were
from time to time associated with the work are at least known, if their
biographies are not more fully recorded.
It may be stated broadly that both the Greeks and the Romans were
rapid builders when the size of their edifices is taken into account.
Especially is this true of the time of Pericles, if we are to believe
the testimony of Plutarch: “Every architect strived to surpass the
magnificence of design with the elegance of execution, yet still
the most wonderful circumstance was the expedition with which they
[the buildings] were completed. Many edifices, each of which seemed
to require the labor of successive ages, were finished during the
administration of one prosperous man.” And the great biographer also
adds: “... Hence we have the more reason to wonder that the structures
raised by Pericles should be built in so short a time, and yet built
for ages, for each of them as soon as finished had the venerable air
of antiquity; so now they are old they have the freshness of a modern
building. A bloom is diffused over them which preserves their aspect
untarnished by time, as if they were animated by a spirit of perpetual
youth and unfading elegance.”
Another mistaken idea is that the sculptors of ancient times were also
architects. Some instances occur where, like the Italian, Michael
Angelo, a prominent sculptor of Greece or Rome, made architecture one
of his accomplishments, but they were not as numerous as they are
supposed to have been, and the rule seems to be the reverse: that the
sculptors of antiquity had no technical knowledge of architecture, and
that the arts were quite as distinctly practised as professions in
early times as they are to-day.
There remains to be presented only one other reason for the
indifference shown the early architects by their contemporary writers
and public, which is so well expressed by an English historian in his
discussion of the Coliseum at Rome, that it may well be quoted as a
type of the excuse offered by apologists of the same class: “The name
of the architect to whom the great work of the Coliseum was entrusted
has not come down to us.[1] The ancients seem themselves to have
regarded this name as a matter of little interest; nor in fact do they
generally care to specify the authorship of their most illustrious
buildings. The reason is obvious. The forms of ancient art in this
department were almost wholly conventional, and the limits of design
within which they were executed gave little room for the display of
original taste and special character.... It is only in periods of
eclecticism and Renaissance, when the taste of the architect has wider
scope and may lead the eye instead of following it, that interest
attaches to his personal merit. Thus it is that the Coliseum, the most
conspicuous type of Roman civilization, the monument which divides
the admiration of strangers in modern Rome with St. Peter’s itself,
is nameless and parentless, while every stage in the construction
of the great Christian temple, the creation of a modern revival, is
appropriated with jealous care to its special claimants.” In other
words, the pupil is a fitter artist to awaken the personal interest of
those who admire his works than his master; and the revived imitation
of more consequence to the public than the original model. If this
were true, why should the Coliseum, “the most conspicuous type of
Roman civilization,” upon which the pilgrims of the North, as we are
informed by Gibbon, based the longevity of Rome itself, when in their
rude enthusiasm they gave expression to the proverb, “As long as the
Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome will
fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall,” _divide_ the admiration of
the stranger with St. Peter’s? Should it not, rather, be subordinate
to the Christian cathedral of Bramante, Raphael and Michael Angelo?
Is there not a touch of the _reductio ad absurdum_ in this argument?
Such reasoning does not seem to be quite obvious upon other grounds
as well. If it is the fact that the ancients regarded the names of
their architects as of little interest, and their buildings as wholly
conventional, why does Vitruvius speak of four of the principal temples
of Greece as “having raised their architects to the summit of renown”?
Why is it that Rhœcus and Theodorus, Ictinus, Mnesicles, Dinocrates,
Detrianus, Apollodorus and many other architects—to whom more
particular mention will be made later—are remembered in ancient history
with more or less circumstantiality, not only in association with their
works—all conventional, if we are to accept this writer’s judgment—but
also on account of their individual merit, while the architects of the
buildings which departed most from that same conventionality, both in
plan and detail, as, for example, the Erechtheum, the original Odeon
of Pericles and even the Coliseum itself, where:
“Firm Doric pillars formed the solid base,
The fair Corinthian crown the higher space,
And all below is strength, and all above is grace,”
are lost in the ocean of oblivion?
Do not our modern authors overlook the fact that the architects of
their own age share, as a rule, in the same popular indifference, and
that the period of revival is no exception to the period of inception;
that the one has inherited from the other not only the forms and
principles of its art, but the same neglect of its artists?
Whether this is true or not, the fact must remain and be accepted with
patience or impatience, as we please, that there is little preserved
for us by the ancient writers in respect to their architects. Two
rather conspicuous exceptions, however, occur to this general rule in
respect to Pausanias, the Lydian, and Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman.
Pausanias lived toward the close of the second century after Christ.
He was a great traveller and a close observer, his observations having
been confined principally to works of art, such as public buildings,
temples and statues, which he mentions in direct and simple language.
He visited most of the states of Greece at a time when that country
was still rich in her treasures of art, and what he has to say of what
he saw there would tend to indicate that while he was by no means a
critic or a connoisseur, he was still a faithful and minute recorder of
what appealed to his taste or excited his curiosity.
Vitruvius, however, was not only a writer on architecture, but a
professional architect as well, who resided in Rome about a century
earlier than Pausanias, or in the time of Augustus. He is practically
the only writer of his time who has given us technical information
concerning the ancient buildings. Vitruvius wrote his treatises upon
architecture at a very advanced age, and, it would appear, much in
defence of the pure Greek models which were even in that time being
corrupted. The frankness with which he hopes for fame by reason of his
book, and exposes his poverty as well as the unprofessional practices
of his brother architects, is not the least attractive feature of his
discourse: “But I, Cæsar,” he exclaims, “have not sought to amass
wealth by the practice of my art, having been contented with a small
fortune and reputation, than desirous of abundance accompanied by a
want of reputation. It is true I have acquired but little, yet I still
hope, by this publication, to become known to posterity. Neither is it
wonderful that I am known to but few. Other architects canvass and
go about soliciting employment, but my preceptors instilled into me
a sense of the propriety of being requested and not of requesting to
be entrusted, inasmuch the ingenuous man will blush and feel shame in
asking a favour; for the givers of a favour, and not the receivers,
are courted. What must he suspect who is solicited by another to be
entrusted with the expenditure of his money, but that it is done for
the sake of gain and emolument? Hence, the ancients entrusted their
works to those architects only who were of good family, and well
brought up, thinking it better to trust the modest than the bold and
arrogant man. These artists only instructed their own children or
relations, having regard to their integrity, so that property might be
safely committed to their charge. When, therefore, I see this noble
science in the hands of the unlearned and unskilful of men, not only
ignorant of architecture, but of everything relative to buildings, I
cannot blame proprietors who, relying on their own intelligence, are
their own architects; since, if the business is to be conducted by the
unskilful, there is at least more satisfaction in laying out money at
one’s own pleasure rather than at that of another person.”
Vitruvius also epitomized in his books on architecture much that had
been written prior to his time by his professional brethren of Greece
and Rome, and so preserved something of what otherwise might have been
entirely lost.
Allusion has been made to these two writers with some particularity,
for the reason that they will be more quoted than any others in the
course of this volume, but it must not be inferred that they are alone
responsible for all the knowledge which has come down to us respecting
the Greek and Roman architects, little and unsatisfactory as it is.
Although it has been shown that the historians and biographers of
ancient Greece made no attempt to treat architects with especial favor,
it would not be just, however, to close this chapter without quoting
from Homer to prove that lie, at least, could rank them as among those
who, by serving the people in the highest sense, were entitled to
unusual hospitality:
“... What man goes ever forth
To bid a stranger to his house, unless
The stranger be of those whose office is
To serve the people, be he seer, or leech,
Or architect, or poet heaven-inspired,
Whose song is gladly heard?...”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] There is an old ecclesiastical tradition, which is much doubted,
that the architect of the Coliseum was a Christian by the name of
Gaudentius, who suffered martyrdom in its arena, and that the services
of thousands of Jews contributed to its erection.