LATER GREEK AND ROMAN DESIGN
In chapter one there was discussion of the simplest Greek
architecture--that which we call Doric--which reached its culminating
point about 450 B. C. Considering now, very briefly, the later and more
elaborate Greek buildings we find that they were more generally of the
Ionic[17] style, that the most important of them were built along the
Asiatic coast by the Greek colonists there, and finally, that not one of
the larger monuments remains in any such condition that it can be seen
even as an attractive ruin. The only important Ionic building which we
can find impressive, as it stands, is the Erectheion at Athens, and
this, though a very small building, is admitted to contain the most
exquisite details of the Ionic style which are known to us. Plate V
gives two views of the Erectheion in its present condition, and Plate VI
gives the small portico of caryatides on the south flank of the same
building. The views given here shows the curious and entirely unexampled
relation of these different parts to one another. The full significance
of this combination of small apartments is not understood.
As a general thing the Ionic temples were not different in purpose from
the Doric temples; they have therefore the same plan and the same simple
structure; but they have a much more elaborate decorative treatment.
Thus, we find here architectural sculpture, properly so called,
introduced into the building. Plate VII gives a number of separate
details of Ionic buildings, and it will be readily seen that here an
influence was at work far different from that which ordained the
absolutely unmodified square-edged and formal Doric building depending
upon proportion and upon brilliant color; and that here
[Illustration: ERECHTHEUM (ERECHTHEION) ATHENS, FROM THE EAST.]
[Illustration: ERECHTHEUM, ATHENS, FROM THE NORTH, SHOWING NORTH
PORTICO.]
[Illustration: PLATE V.]
[Illustration: ERECHTHEUM; PORTICO OF CARYATIDES. FROM S. E.]
[Illustration: PLATE VI.]
conventionalized leafage, independently designed curvatures and broken
lines, and the play of surface given by slight reliefs alternating
continually with smooth flat planes, are all introduced. If, farther, we
look back to Plate VI and note the treatment of that splendid “Portico
of the Maidens,” we shall see what Greek thought was capable of in the
way of architectural sculpture. Now there is no difference of opinion
about the beauty of the simple patterns, the anthemions,[18] the
egg-and-dart[19] mouldings, and the like; but the very greatest
difference of opinion exists with regard to the essential propriety of
human figures used as architectural members of such great importance as
these, and especially when used as supports for a superincumbent
weight. The author of this volume admires this portico as, on the whole,
the finest thing left us by Greek architectural art, combining as it
does the exquisite design and faultless modelling of each separate
figure, the successful combining into a group of the four maidens of the
front, or of the whole six, with their superincumbent weight of marble,
and the exquisite management of the whole structure so that it shall
seem light and yet solid, fanciful and yet dignified, graceful and yet
enduringly noble. Viollet-le-Duc has pointed out (“Entretiens,” vol. I.,
p. 293) how successfully the figures are posed and grouped to express
their constructional function. There are excellent judges who think
differently and who would fain ignore the Pandrosion,[20] as it is
sometimes called, or relegate it to the position of a mistake made by
that race of artists who were of all races the least likely to make
mistakes. In this
[Illustration: ERECHTHEUM, HEAD OF DOORWAY UNDER NORTH PORTICO.]
[Illustration: DETAILS OF ENTABLATURE, IONIC STYLE, ACROPOLIS, ATHENS.]
[Illustration: CORNER CAPITAL, IONIC STYLE, FOUND ON ACROPOLIS, ATHENS.]
[Illustration: PLATE VII.]
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF ATHENE POLIAS, PRIENE, IN ASIA MINOR, SOUTH OF
EPHESUS.
(From “Antiquities of Ionia,” published by the Dilettanti Society.)]
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.]
connection it may be noted that the buildings of the Ionic style offer
other and very curious exceptions to the more usual treatment of
sculpture when applied to buildings. Thus in the Erectheion itself, the
principal frieze was of dark gray marble in smooth slabs, upon which
were fixed figures in white marble in vigorous action, the scale small,
and the whole composition much more nearly pictorial than anything in
the Parthenon. Again, in the balustrade built about the little temple of
Victory on the edge of the cliff at the west of the Acropolis, reliefs
of moderate projection are treated with singular vivacity: draped
goddesses in active and easily understood movement.
There is also in Greek architecture the beginning of the Corinthian[21]
style, of which the best example known to moderns is the totally ruined
Tholos[22] near Epidauros in the Morea, and the most familiar, that
little monument in Athens, called the Choragic[23] Monument of
Lysicrates: but for this style we must refer to the Roman buildings in
which it reached its highest development.
When we come to consider more especially the traditional repute of
Grecian architecture, and the influence which it has had in shaping the
opinions of what we call the taste of sixty generations throughout all
the European lands, we are brought at once to the work of the Roman
imperial times. All the nationalities--all the peoples--which take their
recent and existing social form and opinions in art and literature from
the same common source, the all-embracing empire of Rome, have taken up
Greek art as they have taken up Greek literature, as their chief and
original guide to thought. Indeed it has been shown, and is accepted as
true, that the chief mission of the great Roman empire was in preserving
Hellenic thought in art and literature for the future. It is because of
this, as has been truly said, that the works of Homer and Æschylus and
of the Greek sculptors are plants growing in our own garden. They might
have been, and but for the Roman empire they would be, as foreign to the
modern world as are the thought and literature of Persia and India. It
is therefore necessary to consider what Greek architecture was to the
five or six centuries which followed its greatest epoch, and again what
it was to the five or six centuries which followed the Middle Ages, in
Europe. From 450 B. C. to 400 A. D., and again from 1400 A. D. to recent
times, Greek thought in these matters of fine art was the central thing,
the spring of life. To the peoples of antiquity Greek architecture was a
guide and inspiration, even under the much altered conditions of a
foreign and irresistible rule: it was constantly and uniformly the
model. To the peoples who have built and designed since the fourteenth
century, Greek art has been of weight generally as acting through the
Roman styles of design, for it was not until the beginning of the
nineteenth century that the actual buildings of the Greek peoples in
Greece, in Asia Minor, in Italy, and in Sicily, came to be known at all:
but it was the Greek part in Roman imperial art that interested those
Moderns. At the time of the first explorations and discoveries of
Stuart, Revett, Penrose, Cockerell, Pennethorne, Texier, Renan, and the
other explorers of the years from 1760 to 1850, the Greek buildings were
in ruins. Not one single roof remained in place. Not one single building
was so far preserved that the question could be definitely answered
whether the temples had openings in the roofs for light in all or in any
cases: so that the hypæthral[24] theory remains a theory only, and is
apparently incapable of verification. On the other hand, the details,
not only the mouldings and flutings and channelings, but also the
carving in conventionalized leafage, were plainly to be seen and were
capable of exciting the most enthusiastic interest. Thus Plate VIII
shows the order and some other details of the Temple of Athena Polias at
Priene in Asia Minor: the drawings having been made about 1766 under the
direction of Dr. Richard Chandler and the architect Nicolas Revett. The
general plan remained doubtful, but as it was evident that the buildings
had received the most careful thought, with a view to their artistic
character, and as, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
proportion in the larger distributions of the building was esteemed the
most important element of architectural greatness, it was taken for
granted that the Greek buildings would be found to have also such
excellence of proportion; and it was believed that this particular
beauty could be enjoyed and judged by those who were patient and shrewd
enough to combine the shattered ruins and deduce from them the original
form of the buildings which they represent. What one temple would not
give, another supplied. What one temple had lost, another had preserved.
The height of the columns could be ascertained and the diameters of
their shafts at top and at bottom: the distance apart of these columns
could be ascertained: the shapes of the capitals were there to be noted:
the entablature could be restored by a mental process and drawn out with
almost perfect certainty. In this way the Greek temples were put into
shape for the modern student. No such student had ever seen one except
in the state of apparently hopeless ruin: but no such student could fail
to grasp the evident significance of the original building when
presented to him as a work of pure form, white and colorless, simple in
construction, refined in detail beyond anything that later times had
ever achieved, presumably faultless in proportion, and invested with
minute and delicate decoration in conventionalized leaf form and the
like. We have then to keep in mind two different ways of judging of the
Greek buildings; first, the truly historical and also truly critical
way, in which we take them as buildings once very real and really put to
use, made rich by splendid color and abounding variety of detail, much
of this detail being in paint or in gilding alone without form to
represent it; and the other way, the modern traditional way, by means of
which a small body of writers and lecturers swayed architectural opinion
for a century and a half, and until the accurate examination and close
study, given to the subject in the second half of the nineteenth
century, had produced its effect.
In the later chapters of this little book there will be found frequent
reference to this professional or technical view of pure Greek
architecture. Still, what has been thought about it since its discovery
in the eighteenth century, is of less importance to our inquiry than the
similar assumptions with regard to the architecture of Imperial Rome;
for that architecture influenced the peoples of Europe at all times
during the Middle Ages, and more especially at the important periods of
revival or of change in the fifth, the eleventh, and the fifteenth
centuries.
The early architecture of Rome, that is of the city and its
neighborhood, is not under consideration; it is very little known even
to modern archæologists, and it was not known at all to the people of
the Risorgimento[25] or their successors, upon whose work the modern
traditions and feeling about architecture have been based. The buildings
which directly influenced the world of the Middle Ages, and then that
later world of the fifteenth century, the time of Italian imitation of
antiquity, were those of the early Emperors. There was, as has been
discovered within the last quarter of a century, a special art
introduced in the reign of Augustus, a beautiful art made up of
sculpture not exclusively Greek in character; and, in its architectural
form, of an enlarged and more decorative handling of the Greek system of
design. In both of these innovations some loss in refinement comes with
the gain in splendor and in utility: but we can see this Augustan
architecture to have been a splendid decorative art. It is also true
that somewhat more of it than we now see remained in place, and nearly
complete, in the fifteenth century. The great buildings which partly
remain to us from the Imperial epoch are generally later than the time
of Augustus. The famous Pantheon (see Plate IX), as we now have it, with
its huge rotunda, dates from the time of Hadrian (117-138 A. D.): the
magnificent Forum of Trajan with its accessories, a group of buildings
inconceivably vast and splendid, was completed during the same
administration of Hadrian. The best preserved Roman memorial arch, which
is also fortunately very rich in sculpture, that of Benevento in South
Italy, was also built after Trajan’s death and in the time of Hadrian:
the best preserved buildings of Palmyra and of the North-African cities
are of the time of the Antonines, those of Heliopolis (Baalbec) of the
same epoch and later. The temples on the old Forum--the Forum Romanum as
distinguished from the later or imperial Fora--were restored and altered
many times before the final collapse of the imperial power in Rome: the
temple of Castor, apparently under Tiberius (14-37 A. D.), the temple of
Saturn, with the State treasury in its basement, perhaps not later than
the time of Augustus (30 B. C. to 14 A. D.), the temple of Vespasian,
much rebuilt, under Severus and Caracalla, at the beginning of the third
century, A. D. The buildings named as being in Rome itself, together
with the Temple of Antoninus Pius, that of Mars the Avenger in the Forum
of
[Illustration: RESTORED MODEL OF PANTHEON, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,
NEW YORK.]
[Illustration: THE PANTHEON, ROME, AS NOW EXISTING.]
[Illustration: PLATE IX.]
[Illustration: RUINS OF TEMPLE OF CASTOR AND POLLUX, ROME.]
[Illustration: RUINS OF TEMPLE OF MARS ULTOR, ROME.]
[Illustration: PLATE X.]
Augustus, the enclosing wall of the Forum of Nerva, and other fragments
now wholly destroyed, were the pieces of architectural art which most
especially influenced the studies of the men of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Plate X gives what now remains of the Temple of
Castor, and also what remains of the Temple of Mars; but as late as the
sixteenth century there was much more to be seen and studied about these
ruins. The building behind the Temple of Castor in the Forum, now
entirely stripped of its architectural decorations, retained its
interior order of marble columns until the sixteenth century, and this
building also was of great importance to the earlier restorers of
antique art: it is thought by modern archæologists to have been the
Temple of Augustus, which is known to have existed in this neighborhood.
The buildings named above were generally columnar in character. The
memorial arch and the Pantheon are the only two of them which were
certainly vaulted structures. Now, the memorial arch required only one
or three simple barrel vaults, and the example of the Etruscans must
have made such work as that familiar to the people of Rome, but the
Pantheon is a very different thing. This, as rebuilt under Hadrian, with
the rotunda which we know, must have been one of the earliest Roman
buildings in solid mortar-masonry. Its walls are very thick, faced on
both sides with brick, but built actually of small stones laid in strong
mortar, and it is roofed with extremely massive vaulting of the same
materials. Other such buildings of which large parts exist are, in the
city of Rome itself, the great Halls of the Thermæ of Caracalla
(probably built about 205-10 A. D.); those of the Thermæ of Diocletian,
built a century later, and that of the basilica of Maxentius and
Constantine on the north side of the Forum Romanum, built between 312
and about 330 A. D. In these buildings a vaulting as massive as that of
the Pantheon but of wholly different shape was used. The Pantheon, a
circular building, is roofed by a circular cupola[26] which is kept in
place by a ponderous superstructure carried up from the haunches of the
vault, so that the thrust of the cupola could not, however great it
might be, affect the stability of the structure. In the great halls of
the Thermæ and the basilica above named, the conditions are very
different, for the groined-vaulting[27] of these halls would, if built
under ordinary conditions, exert a formidable pressure outward upon all
its points of support. In these Roman examples, however, there were two
influences at work to save the buildings from possible injury: the
skillful disposition of walls and piers to take up or absorb the thrust
from each point of support, and the fact that these vaults were built in
such a fashion, with horizontal beds of stone laid in strong cement
mortar, that there could not be much thrust when once the mortar was dry
and the vault consolidated. The vault could not thrust outward without
breaking: and it was too homogeneous to break. Buildings whose actual
construction was carried out in this fashion exist throughout those
Mediterranean lands which once were included in the great empire. This
system of building gave the world those great permanent interiors which
were the first in the world’s history to be of architectural importance.
Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, both those of Greece and
those of the Colonies--none of these great building nations had ever
conceived of interiors prepared and designed for their own sake, and as
the chief part of the building. The Assyrian kings in their palaces came
nearer to understanding the possible effectiveness of the interior: but
even they were satisfied with long and narrow halls shaped like what we
call corridors. It was left for the Romans at once to develop their
system of vaulting and at the same time to improve the construction of
their roofs of wood and metal, so that halls fifty feet, sixty feet,
even eighty feet wide, could be built with roofs of effective and
beautiful form high above the floor. Under these conditions the most
splendid possible interior effects were producible. Such vast columned
interiors as that of the Ulpian basilica and that of the Septa Julia
must have given an effect of stately grace absolutely unknown to the
modern world; the true evolution of Greek art in one direction was
assuredly to be found there. On the other hand the imperial dwellings on
the Palatine Hill in Rome with their numerous vaulted halls, the temples
of pure Roman design, like that of Venus and that of the City of Rome,
built back to back, near the Colosseum, and the great halls of the
basilicas and baths, as above suggested, were capable of being adorned
in a permanent and strictly architectural way as none of the buildings
of earlier races had been. The basilica of Maxentius had its middle
division, its nave,[28] about eighty-three feet wide and roofed with a
groined vault, although the span of that vault is less than this, about
seventy-eight feet, because carried by immense columns which stand free
of the wall on either side. This great hall was one hundred and
twenty-five feet high to the top of the vault: and it was flanked on
either side by an aisle[29] made up of three rooms, each about
fifty-three feet square, opening into the central hall; and the
barrel-vaults[30] even of these six minor divisions rose eighty feet
from the pavement. (See Plate XI.) This building dates from the
declining days of the Empire and of classical civilization, when
sculpture had already become a feeble and barbarous thing, without
character, and when what we consider the Byzantine feeling in matters of
decoration had already obtained the mastery throughout the greater part
of the Roman world. The strong hold which the system of building had
upon the engineers of the empire can be judged from this fact.
[Illustration: BASILICA OF MAXENTIUS AND CONSTANTINE, ROME.]
[Illustration: PLATE XI.]
[Illustration: SCULPTURED DETAILS OF TEMPLE OF VESPASIAN, ROME; RESTORED
MODEL METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.]
[Illustration: ARCH OF TRAJAN, AT BENEVENTO, SOUTHERN ITALY.]
[Illustration: PLATE XII.]
That which we are undertaking here is not a history of architecture, but
in a sense a history of the modern way of judging of architecture. What
then is the origin of those traditions and accepted doctrines upon which
are based all our ways of criticising a building? This and the previous
chapter are a partial answer to that question. The contribution of the
Roman Imperial world to this tradition has been, by much, the greatest
of all. It is upon the Roman practice that all subsequent European
systems of decorative building have been founded, except the lightest
and slightest--the wooden-framed houses of mediæval Europe and those of
modern America, and their like. Apart from fortification, and from
structures built by engineers without artistic intention, there is not a
single form of building in masonry since the fifth century which has not
been developed from the practice of the Imperial builders. Now it
appears that those builders not only built in two different ways, but
that they undertook the curious twofold task of constructing their
buildings with massive walls and vaults of mortar-masonry (thereby
abandoning wholly the example of the Greeks who never used mortar at all
in the buildings we admire, and who had no arches nor windows nor
interior designing of any sort in our modern sense), and of decorating
these buildings within and without, by means of a borrowed Greek system
of the Orders, which had nothing whatever to do with the actual
structure. They allowed themselves to take certain liberties with the
Greek Orders. They raised the column on a pedestal, they made the shaft
of costly and beautiful material, of porphyry or granite or pavonazzetto
marble or cipollino; and consequently, because the material was precious
and also hard, they did not try to adorn the shaft with channels or
flutes. They made the capital of bronze, cast hollow and gilded richly,
and put such capitals around the top of the shaft as a mere ornamental
jacket, concealing the actual supporting member. They built the
horizontal architrave of wedge-shaped stones, making of each span
between two columns a flat arch instead of a simple lintel of one block,
and they protected this built-up lintel by a second arch above, a
discharging arch to throw the weight upon the columns and relieve the
centre of the lintel. Finally, they increased the amount of carved
ornament upon all parts which seemed capable of receiving it. This they
did, not only by making the sculpture of any one moulding very elaborate
and rich, but also by increasing the number of sculptured mouldings.
Thus in Plate XII, there is given, that it may be compared with the
carved work of Athens (see Plate VII) a part of the entablature of the
Temple of Vespasian in the Roman Forum. And the differences between
Greek and Roman practice in this respect are not limited to the amount
of sculpture in a given moulding or a given monument: they affect also
the very nature of the ornament itself. Plate XII gives one side of the
imperial arch at Benevento; a monument intended primarily as a pedestal
for a great group of bronze figures; the reliefs on the arch showing
Trajan in war and in peace, sacrificing, conquering Dacians and
Armenians. It is evident that no such use of human subject in sculpture
had ever suggested itself to the Greek builders of the temples. It is
historical: and it is also strictly decorative, and subordinate to the
architectural design. For any similar conception arising among Greek
peoples we moderns must go to buildings which were utterly unknown to
the European artists who built up the neo-classic system, the men of the
fifteenth and subsequent centuries. Such a building as the famous tomb
of Mausolus at Halicarnassos, now Budroun, on the coast of Asia Minor,
may indeed have influenced greatly the Roman architects of the time of
Hadrian. That Emperor, who was a great traveller, may have seen the
Mausoleum; his favorite architect may have been a student of it from
childhood; but any ideas which the men who brought classic art back to
modern Europe drew from that famous structure came to them through the
Roman designers.
However much they might abandon the Greek use, that is to say, the
rational and inevitable use of the Orders, the Roman architects still
employed those Orders constantly, and in a way more splendid than
anything the Greeks had attempted. The Eastern notion of adorning a town
by a broad central avenue lined with colonnades two or three deep, an
idea developing itself rapidly in the cities of Syria, obtained
throughout the empire during its peaceful days. It appears that in the
fourth century it was feasible to go afoot from almost any point in the
central regions of Rome, north, south, east or west, for a mile or two,
while keeping always under cover; except indeed as one crossed a street
or avenue, though even at such crossings there was often the Tetrapylon,
the four-fronted gateway, to carry the shelter on from portico to
portico. This system of colonnaded porticoes, roofed always and enclosed
very often with a solid wall on one side at least, was developed in
many forms. A temple would stand in a great court surrounded by just
such colonnades. A forum of a Roman town like an agora of a Greek town
would be faced by colonnades on every side. For the purpose of display,
great squares were opened up essentially for the purpose of surrounding
them by just such porticoes. Plate XIII gives views of the ruins at
Jerash in Syria, east of the Jordan, the remains of the city of Gerasa,
whose glory seems to have been of the time of the Antonine emperors. The
lower figure gives the great triple archway south of the ancient walls
of Gerasa: the upper figure a view of the great oval or semi-oval space,
whose shape is not determined, and which we may hardly call either a
_forum_ or an _agora_. Plate XIV gives a detail of the _Forum
Transitorium_ of Nerva, Emperor from A. D. 96 to 98. The whole enclosure
was a massive wall about ninety feet high and built of huge blocks of
limestone, the decorative treatment and the sculptures being on the
inside and facing upon the Temple of Minerva. The figure
[Illustration: JERASH, SYRIA; THE ANCIENT GERASA, GENERAL VIEW.]
[Illustration: ANCIENT CITY GATE OF GERASA.]
[Illustration: PLATE XIII.]
[Illustration:
PART OF THE BOUNDING WALL OF THE FORUM OF NERVA (FORUM
TRANSITORIUM) ROME: THE MODERN LEVEL AT LEAST TWENTY FEET ABOVE
ANCIENT PAVEMENT.
]
[Illustration: PLATE XIV.]
[Illustration: Plan of that part of Rome which contains the Imperial
Fora. Shaded parts are those covered by modern buildings.]
gives a trustworthy plan of the buildings called by the name of Trajan
and built during his reign and that of his successor, Hadrian. The
modern buildings and streets are shown, and it is seen from these how
the actual plan can only be inferred by that which has been discovered
by digging here and there, or by investigations in cellars of modern
structures. Still the general type of the old design can be seized: a
great open square, 270 by 370 feet and this surrounded on three sides by
a covered portico fifty feet wide with two rows of great columns in
addition to the wall outside, which itself was pierced by many openings
filled with columns _in antis_.[31] Across one end of this great square,
stretched the Ulpian basilica, as long as the whole square was wide,
including its portico, and half as wide as that: in other words, the
open interior of the basilica was about 180 by nearly 400 feet and the
roof of all this was carried by two rows of columns on every side in
addition to the outer wall which again was in parts opened up into a
colonnade. The basilica may or may not have been covered in the central
part: various conjectural restorations have been made, but nothing is
absolutely certain. It is evident that it was very open to persons
coming and going--that they were allowed to cross it almost as freely as
one crosses through a great cathedral in France or in Italy, going in at
the north door and out at the south door, almost at pleasure. Beyond it,
was a court where stood the Column of Trajan, still erect, though
without its accompanying minor buildings, and beyond that again and
across what may have been an entirely open street was the temple erected
to the deified Trajan, after his death, by the Senate, which temple was
surrounded by another portico and covered nearly as much ground as the
great forum itself. In this way a continuous space of nearly a thousand
feet in length by a width of from three hundred to four hundred feet
was either covered by the roofs of porticoes or open to the sky within
belts of these same porticoes. To walk once around the whole, following
the outside ambulatory of the porticoes would be to walk the best half
of a mile, and this one could do without ever passing out under the open
sky, except perhaps in crossing to the temple enclosure. Nor does this
account of the whole composition include in the least the great
semicircular buildings projecting from the forum and from the basilica
on the northeast and southwest. Now as all of this vast congeries of
splendid buildings must be assumed to have been entirely of
trabeated[32] structure, a mere series of columns and horizontal lintels
resting upon them with superstructure, it is evident that the Greek
spirit and the Greek taste controlled all parts of this vast
composition.
Mile upon mile of colonnades, as Greek in taste as the later age would
allow, enclosed and led up to superb interiors of a dignity and
magnificence immeasurably beyond anything conceived by the Greeks. This
is the Roman signet, as it were, the stamp which the great Empire put
upon the world.