force--was still the theme; but it was material force which had met with
its match, the force of mind; and the ponderous entablature, every
detail of which expresses weight, is lifted and borne beautifully in air
by a series of members every one of which conveys the impression of an
opposite ascendant force, which recognises but does not suffer in the
least degree from its burthen, beneath which the animated shaft is seen
to fling away a part of its supporting power just at the point where
most weight is borne, and the Caryatides of the Pandrosium can afford to
stand with one knee bent easily forward. Here, then, again was a great
and new phase of the human mind envisaging the universe, expressed by
simple reference to weight of material in its temples.
The third great phase--that in which an ascetic spirituality, refusing
all willing alliance with earthliness, only recognises it as a
thing to sbe defied and to be made the measure of the spirit’s
predominance--obtained its artistic expression by employing material
weight as the symbol of its opponent; which it neither suffers from nor
enters into alliance with, but vanquishes, converts, and glorifies in
ascending streams of life.
The Moresque style also owes its singular integrity of effect to a
peculiar mode of regarding the idea of gravitation: if that can be
called a mode of regarding it which consists in a most ingenious and
fanciful ignoring of it, either as an oppressor, an ally, or a
vanquished foe. The honeycombed domes of the Alhambra and the Mosque of
Cordova hang apparently suspended in air upon “pendentives,” like sunny
clouds in station; and the astonishing art by which innumerable details
are made to concur in this effect would justify this style in ranking
with the three foregoing, had this effect any symbolic meaning for the
human race and its religions; but it has no meaning for men who have
their feet upon the earth, and is only adapted for the palaces and
temples of a race of sylphs or gnomes.
Lastly, the Norman style, though no less consistent an exponent of one
idea than are the other temple styles, is founded upon no reference to
superincumbent weight, but depends almost wholly upon its boast of the
mass and eternal stability of the wall. It well conveys the solemn
expression of a calm eternity of time; but for religious purposes it
will not bear the least comparison with the flamelike Gothic, expressing
at once the peace and ardour of the “eternal moment.”
In the following papers a short analysis will be given of the somewhat
obscure means by which the well-recognised expressions of these five
great architectures are obtained.
II
The symbolisation of material life and power by an elaborately artistic
treatment of the mere fact of weight, which is the most universal and
obvious attribute of matter, is the object of every general form and of
almost every, so-called decorative, detail of Egyptian architecture; the
few exceptions, such as the occasional intrusion of the lotus and palm
into the capitals of the columns, being due to an obscure but probably
intimately related symbolism of a different kind.
The pyramid is the simplest artistic form by which mere weight can be
expressed. It is nothing more nor less than a mound or mountain shaped
so as to give it an artistic consciousness. The form of the Egyptian
Temple is nothing but the expression of this elementary form of weight
with emphasis upon emphasis, until there results such an accumulation
and concentration of the idea of weight that the whole building seems as
if it would crush the earth on which it stands. This effect is mainly
produced by a multiplication of the pyramidal form in the masses of the
building; by its truncation at various heights, which introduces the
powerful element of suggestion; by numerous inferior members which
emphasise the expression by contrast; and by such a multiplication and
formation of shaft and capital as to convey the idea of an overwhelming
burthen above them. The great double-towered Propylon of the typical
Egyptian Temple is, in its entire mass, a truncated pyramid; and, as
simply such, is a much more forcible expression of pyramidal form than
the pyramid itself. This expression is doubled by the division of the
upper part of the mass into two low towers. Immense _cavetto_ cornices
crown these towers, and intensify their effect by the strongest
contrast. Their pyramidal outline is emphasised to the eye by the great
roll-mouldings which follow the angles of the masonry from summit to
base. Finally, the plane of the great doorway by which the two masses of
the Propylon are joined leaves that of the pyramidal mass and becomes
nearly perpendicular, while the sides of the doorway become actually
perpendicular--constituting a _cumulative_ contrast which seems to
double the already manifold emphasis of the main bulk of the building.
The comparatively low mass of the body of the temple behind the Propylon
is still the truncated pyramid crowned with the contrasting cornice; but
the truncation occurs so near the ground, and so far from what would be
the apex were the converging lines of wall continued upwards, that the
pyramidal form would scarcely have been suggested, were it not for its
plainer manifestation in the Propylon; but, with this aid, the eye at
once catches the idea of the decapitated pyramid throughout. Through
openings in these strongly inclined walls appeared the vertical
colonnades; and such niches or apertures as were practised in these
walls had the contrast of perpendicular jambs. In front of the vast
ponderosity of the Egyptian Temple rose the final and most effective
contrast to the whole--the “fingers of the sun”: the pair of tall and
slender monoliths, which only tapered sufficiently to give them the
reality and the appearance of security. In the interior of the building
the idea of weight had to be conveyed in a different manner--namely, by
the bulk, number, and form of the columns. Every detail of shaft and
capital--with the two or three exceptions already spoken of--was
calculated to express actual sufferance from the burthen borne by them.
The shafts bulge towards the base, and the capitals likewise swell as
they approach their juncture with the shafts; shaft and capital being
usually clothed with vertical convex mouldings: the exact reverse of the
Doric shaft, which, as will be shown, had exactly the opposite idea to
convey. Unlike the repose and sufficiency of the Doric column, the
Egyptian expresses violent and yet insufficient energy, which seems to
rush towards and to be partially driven back by the entablature. The
immense thickness of wall, wherever it was shown, was emphasised by
sculpture in very low relief. These are only the main elements of an
effect which, and the means of producing which, will be more forcibly
felt by a corresponding analysis of Greek architecture, which culminates
in the Doric of the Parthenon.
This temple has a double basement, the first of which is on a “dead
level”; from this rises the second basement, in which the true life of
the building commences. In 1837 Mr. Pennethorne announced the important
discovery that the lines of this basement, together with those of the
entablature, are not horizontal lines, but parabolic curves; and Mr.
Penrose, in 1852, in a work published by the Society of Dilettanti,
gave the actual measurements of these curves; which are found to prevail
not only in the horizontal but in all the vertical lines and faces, in
the inclined lines of the pediment, and in the axes of the shafts. These
curves are so subtle--the rise being only an inch or two in as many
hundred feet--that they are rather felt than seen; but that they are
felt, even by the comparatively gross modern eye, is clear enough from
the different way in which it is affected by the Parthenon itself and by
any imitation of it by modern builders. It is probable that these curves
were in some instances meant to correct optical illusions, by which
straight lines would look hollow, etc.; but a far greater motive for
their introduction was an effect of animation in the whole and in every
part and of unity through the predominance of general curves, which a
cultivated eye can discern very easily, but which is probably beyond our
present powers of analysis. Above the basement the Doric Temple
externally--and the Greek Temple’s architectural beauty is all
outside--consists of two parts, of opposite and exactly balanced
significance. The first consists of a colonnade of shafts, each of which
rises at once from the stylobate, without the footing or “base” found in
subsequent styles. The shaft diminishes somewhat rapidly, until it
impinges upon and ends in the capital; which is an hyperbolic “ovolo,”
spreading widely under the “abacus” or tile, which constitutes the
neutral point, or point of rest, between the column and the entablature.
The outlines of the shaft (always fluted in early Greek architecture)
converge from the base towards the capital--not in straight lines, but
in decided parabolic curves, of which the departure from straight lines
is greatest at about two-thirds of the height of the shaft. This curve
of the shaft is called the _entasis_; and upon it depends mainly the
expressional life of the shaft. It will be remembered that there is a
similar swelling in the Egyptian shaft; but this is where it approaches
the base. Its position in the Greek shaft expresses an ascendant energy
of force, which is manifested most strongly as it approaches the
capital. In the one case yielding under weight is expressed, in the
other superabundant power. This animated expression is multiplied by
every multiplication of the outline provided by the flutings, which in
the Greek shaft are concave, expressing concentration of force towards
the centre; whereas, in the Egyptian the flutings are convex, expressing
further a tendency to bulge and burst under their burthen. A little
under the capital, and just where the Greek shaft is thinnest, one or
more deep channels are incised in its substance, showing that power can
be triumphantly cast away just where power is most needed. The Egyptian
shaft, at the same point, is usually bound with a heavy thonglike
moulding, as if to prevent it from being crushed. The ovolo, which
constitutes the Doric capital, provides and expresses the distribution
of the power of the shaft to meet the superincumbent entablature; and
the “quirk” or sudden diminution of its breadth immediately under the
abacus is a repetition of the device of the incised channels for proving
the existence of superabundant power. At the point where the Greek
entablature is met with easy grace by the noble spread of the hyperbolic
ovolo, the Egyptian capital, as a rule, diminishes and seems to dash
itself with violence towards the point of conflict.
As every feature of the column thus expresses cheerful and abundant
energy, every detail of the entablature is a mode of expressing the
weight which is thus met and carried with such graceful power. The Doric
entablature is made up of three parts--architrave, frieze, and
cornice--each expressing in a different manner the idea of weight. The
architrave is a massive layer of stone with its face unbroken by any
sort of “decoration”; it projects beyond the neck of the shaft, so that
a line dropped from it would about touch the outer circumference of the
shaft at its base. In this member, then, weight is expressed by a
simple mass directly imposed upon the centres of support. The frieze is
a similar layer of masonry having its face broken up by
triglyphs--members resembling, and no doubt originating in, the
terminations of beams of timber. These triglyphs are slightly projecting
quadrilateral masses of stone, considerably higher than they are broad,
and cut into deep vertical channels. They would express little besides
the memory of the old timber construction, were it not for the _guttæ_
which hang below them, separated from them by a fillet. These guttæ, by
multiplying the vertical lines of the triglyphs, confer upon them the
appearance of pendants, the force of the earthward tendency being
increased by the fillets, whose momentary interruption of that tendency
seems to increase it. To increase what Franz Kugler calls the
“triglyphic character,” little pendants sometimes occur at the top of
the chamfered sides of the triglyphs. No one can realise the whole force
of this extremely simple means of expression except by trying what the
Doric entablature would be without it. There is, or was, a church in the
Waterloo Road, massively built and preserving pretty well all the
features of the Doric Temple, except the triglyphs and guttæ. Their
omission makes the whole building light-headed. There seems to be no
meaning in the vast current of upward force in the fluted shafts, if
that is all they have to carry. Any one can satisfy himself of this
point by simply covering the frieze, in a print of a Doric Temple, by a
slip of white paper. Of course this all-important triglyphic character,
though only expressed in the frieze, is felt to apply to the entire mass
of the entablature, of which the weight is thus _made visible_.
As the architrave expresses simple weight, and the frieze weight
depending, so the cornice is weight impending. The great projection of
this massive member beyond the face of the frieze and architrave
contains in itself the ground of that expression; but it is carefully
heightened by the deep undercutting of the corona, which throws the mass
forward and separates it by a dark shadow from the top of the frieze;
and it is still further heightened by a repetition of the rows of
guttæ--which, however, in this instance seem to be sliding off the
inclined faces of the mutules (inclined slabs set in the undercutting of
the corona); so that the same device which gives dependent weight in the
frieze, expresses weight impendent in the cornice.
These are only a few of the more obvious means by which the lovely
equilibrium of the Doric style is created. There are many other details
which it is impossible to notice here; but every one bears the central
thought constantly in view, and adds to the most perfect--though not
perhaps the highest--architectural beauty which the world has ever seen.
The other so-called “orders” are only modifications or corruptions of
the same idea.
III
Before proceeding to show how the idea of Greek architecture, symbolised
in a system of construction and decoration which emphasised to the eye
in every detail an exact adequacy of endeavour to effect, was modified
or corrupted in the so-called “Ionic,” “Corinthian,” and other “orders,”
a few words should be said about the very peculiar and little understood
treatment of the wall by the Doric architects. As a contrast to the
active conflict of apparently ascending power in the columns with the
gravitating power, rendered, as it were, visible in the entablature, the
treatment of the walls of the _naos_, _pronaos_, and _posticum_--that
is, of the body of the temple and of the porches created by the
prolongation of the side walls--is emphatically passive and neutral, and
just the reverse of the treatment of the wall by the Egyptians, who made
it the base of a truncated pyramid, a mass of conscious ponderosity,
which “lean’d down on earth with all its weight.” The vertical junctures
of the stones of the walls of the Greek Temple were rendered invisible
by polishing their adjacent faces; but the horizontal faces were
rough-worked, so that the wall-face presented a series of straight lines
parallel to the base. These lines were only strong enough to be plainly
seen, through the gaps in that torrent of ascending power, the fluted
colonnade; increasing that force by their contrast, but themselves
expressing nothing but the fact that the wall was a wall, built in
ordinary courses of masonry. Had the perpendicular junctures of the
masonry been visible, the contrast to the shafts--which were either
monoliths or had the junctures of the _frustra_ so polished that they
looked like monoliths--would have been lost. The _antæ_, or ends of the
walls, are treated in a way which is particularly noteworthy. In the
Roman corruptions of Greek architecture these antæ were confused with
and often treated as flattened and applied shafts. The fact of passive
resistance of the wall, in contrast to the active resistance of the
colonnade, is carefully but very unobtrusively expressed in these
wall-terminations in the purest Doric. Where the strongly ascending
force of the shaft sacrifices power in order to prove its abundance, the
antæ are increased in breadth and strength by successive cappings, or
by mouldings so undercut as to express a rolling over or sufferance from
superimposed weight; there is no _entasis_ or visible swell in the
antæ--until they were used by later architects who had lost the sense of
what entasis meant; these wall-terminations were further strengthened by
a base, which no Doric shaft ever had. The base and capping were, more
or less, continued along the top and bottom of the whole wall, the doors
and other apertures of which usually diminished in width towards the
top, suggesting--but still in a passive and unobtrusive way--the simple
reality of weight and pressure in the wall, and affording a further and
most important contrast to the living “emporstreben,” as the German
critics call it, of the line of shafts. Thus Mr. Ruskin is wrong in
saying that “in the Greek Temple the wall is as nothing; the entire
interest is in the detached columns and the frieze (entablature?) they
bear.” The wall is the expression of the passive life that becomes
active when it is concentrated in the colonnade, and has so much more
work to do.
In the “Ionic Order” exactly the same idea of the symbolisation of the
balance of material and intellectual forces is carried out with the same
integrity as in the Doric, though with less simplicity and obviousness.
The idea of elasticity--as noticed by Franz Kugler in his _Handbuch der
Kunstgeschichte_ for the first time--is added to that of simple upward
met by simple downward force. It occurs especially in the base and the
volutes of the column, as these members are found modified and perfected
by the Attic architects. By tracing the growth of the Attic base, much
light will be thrown upon the Greek architectural idea. A base is a
support for the shaft. The Doric had no base, because the notion of any
weight to be supported was not allowed to be expressed anywhere but in
the entablature; the Ionic differing from the Doric mainly in this--that
the visible conflict between weight and supporting power, which in the
Doric was wholly concentrated upon the abacus, or tile, where the column
met the entablature, was in the Ionic so distributed that almost every
member was at once agent and reagent, expressing an adequate power of
supporting what was above it, but also requiring support from that which
was below. A great square stone or plinth is the simplest form of base;
but this would have looked poor and inorganic underneath the elaborately
fluted and voluted column. The square stone cut into a circle with its
edges rounded is the next simplest form; but it was left for the Romans
to use this base, for they had not the sensitive eye that discerned the
fatal effect of swelling or sufferance from weight which this
cushion-like form conveys. The first Ionic base had a _scotia_, or
hollow receding moulding, under the round _torus_. This contradicted the
above impression; but it did it violently and awkwardly. Finally, the
Attic base was formed of a large torus below, a smaller one above, and
the scotia, or receding moulding, between them; so that the base--which,
on the whole, was a spreading and supporting member--was nevertheless
narrowest where it would have been thickest had it suffered, like a
cushion, from the weight it carried. The fluting of the Ionic order,
while it expressed ascendant force like the Doric, had a flat space or
fillet instead of a sharp edge between each concavity, and each line of
fluting had semicircular terminations. The effect of this was to endow
the shaft itself with a substantive expression of weight, which had no
existence in the Doric shaft, that flew, like a sheaf of arrows, from
the earth to strike against the ovolo of the capital. The Ionic capital,
like the Ionic base, had its elastic character perfectly developed by
Attic architects. In the original Ionic the ears of the volutes simply
hang on either side of the ovolo like horns; but in Attic specimens they
appear to be formed by the pressure of the entablature upon a series of
elastic curves. The Ionic abacus differs from the Doric in expressing,
in common with all the other members of the Ionic column, an active
supporting power; whereas the Doric tile is simply negative, the “point
of rest” between the opposing forces of the column and entablature. The
architrave, the first member of the Ionic entablature, instead of
expressing weight by simple mass, as the Doric architrave does, consists
of two or three layers of masonry, the upper projecting over the other,
and giving to the entire entablature the expression of impending weight,
which in the Doric is limited to the corona. In the frieze there are no
guttæ or triglyphs, because the pendent effect which these give to the
Doric frieze would be inconsistent with the continuation of the idea of
support as well as weight throughout all the members of the Ionic order.
In the pure Doric there is absolutely no such thing as ornament; though
Kugler, notwithstanding that he is of all critics the one who has come
nearest to the perception of the true sense of Greek architecture,
asserts that the head and foot members of the antæ are merely
ornamental. How far this is from being the case has been now shown. The
so-called “egg and arrow” and other figures into which Greek mouldings
were cut have nothing to do with ornament. They are simply the means of
emphasising the forms of the mouldings and rendering them visible at
distances at which otherwise they would not be distinguished. But in the
Ionic we have real architectural ornament, and lines of roses or bands
of foliage are inserted at points where it is desirable to express--in
the absence of more severe means of expression--the freedom and
cheerfulness with which a superincumbent weight is carried.
The “Corinthian” is only a highly decorated Ionic, and the Greeks of the
good age seem to have thought it fittest for secular or semi-secular
purposes. It only attained somewhat of the character of an “Order” in
the hands of the Romans, who had little taste for or understanding of
pure Greek art, but had sufficient intelligence to see how to apply
ornament for the most part in the right places. When they tried to
improve upon the Doric of the Parthenon, they did it in a very
characteristic way. They simplified it by doing away with the fluting of
the shaft and setting it upon a base of the single torus or
roll-moulding, so that it looked like a big sausage set on end upon a
small curly one; and instead of the channel cut in the neck of the
shaft--which must have been a hopeless puzzle to them--they bound the
shaft at the same point with a projecting moulding: as the Egyptians did
rightly, because they wanted to express an idea the exact opposite of
the Greek one. Meretricious ornament and mock simplicity went hand in
hand, and all pretensions to integrity of style had to be abandoned when
the arch and the entablature had to be reconciled. As builders the
Romans perhaps surpassed all others before or since; and as architects
also they were as great as they could be, in the absence of the Greek
devotion to the unity produced by one all-pervading symbolic thought.
IV