Ancient Greek architecture

“ That, and not the colossal monuments of the Caesars, reappears in the capitals of Europe, and stimulates the genius of a Michael Angelo or a Christopher Wren.
The flourishing period of Greek architecture was during the period from Pericles to Alexander,--one hundred and thirteen years. The Macedonian conquest introduced more magnificence and less simplicity. The Roman conquest accelerated the decline in severe taste, when different orders began to be used indiscriminately.
In this state the art passed into the hands of the masters of the world, and they inaugurated a new era in architecture. ”

“ The Greek cities must have included structures of great beauty and adapted to many purposes, of which in most cases few traces, if any, have been preserved. We have no remains of a Greek palace, or of Greek dwelling-houses, although those at Pompeii were probably erected and decorated by Greek artificers, for Roman occupation. The agora of a Greek city, which was a place of public assembly something like the Roman Forum, is known to us only by descriptions in ancient writers, but we possess some remains of Greek theatres ”

“ As regards Greek architecture, its ornament is a question of sculpture, its structure is the result of intellect combined with a certain amount of design due to their artistic sense of proportion. The Greeks did great service to humanity in working out the principles of building—but, thereafter, there was no scope for originality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In historic times the Greeks developed an architecture of noble simplicity and dignity. The discoveries in Crete and Argolis have shown that Greek architecture owes much less than was supposed to Egyptian and Chaldæan architecture. It is considered to have attained its greatest perfection in the age of Pericles, or about 460-430 B.C. The great masters of this period were Phidias, Ictinus, Callicrates, &c. All the extant buildings are more or less in ruins. The style is characterized by beauty, harmony, and simplicity in the highest degree. ”

“ On the mainland of Greece, notably at Mycenæ and Tiryns, exists relics of many buildings, including at the former the noble Lion Gate that gave access to the Acropolis, and at the latter the residence of a chieftain, which maintain the continuity between the earliest and the latest phase of Greek architecture, and may justly be said to presage the triumphs of the Golden Age. ”

“ Through various channels the Greeks inherited from both Egyptian and Assyrian art, the two influences being discernible even through the strongly original aspect of Greek architecture. The Romans in turn, adopting the external details of Greek architecture, transformed its substance by substituting the Etruscan arch for the Greek construction of columns and lintels. They developed a complete and original system of construction and decoration and spread it over the civilized world, which has never wholly outgrown or abandoned it. ”

“ The actual origin of Greek architecture is buried in impenetrable obscurity. If the building called the{300} Treasury of Atreus, or the Tomb of Agamemnon, was really of that period, it would distinctly prove that what we now know as Grecian architecture was unknown to the heroes in the “Iliad,” inasmuch as over its entrance remains a little piece of highly-decorative columnar work, bearing no resemblance to the subsequent architecture of Greece, and going far to prove that these early inhabitants of Greece had a style of building which did not evince a timber but a stone original. ”

“ It is more than likely that the next revival will be a Hellenic revival. Renaissance architecture, as is well known, is the imitation of Roman or late Hellenistic art, with certain peculiarities and modifications forced upon the builders by their education and surroundings. But many of them thought they were reproducing pure Greek style, concerning which they were really in total darkness. The few earlier attempts in this century to imitate Greek buildings show a similar ignorance. ”

“ This it is which accounts for the immense superiority of Gothic to Grecian architecture—a superiority so complete as to elevate it into quite another sphere of beauty. The pleasure we experience at the sight of the highest efforts of a Greek architect is almost exclusively æsthetic, sensible, artistic. It is occasioned by sharpness of outline, grace of form, beauty of proportion. In these is the only poetry it can express; which can never, consequently, mount to sublimity. It can only be beautiful at best. It pleases the sense, but the soul—of the poet, at all events—soon wearies of them. ”

“ Not only do we find direct reproductions of Greek architecture forming part of the practice of every European country, but we are able to trace to Greek art the parentage of many of the forms and features of Roman, Byzantine, and Gothic architecture, [81] especially those connected with the column and which grew out of its artistic use. Greek architecture did not include the arch and all the forms allied to it, such as the vault and the dome ”

“ The conquerors took the letter from the Greeks, but never had the slightest feeling for its Ideal. But even this letter, when they transcribed it, writhed and was choked beneath hands which knew better the iron caestus of the gladiator than the subtile and spiritual touch of the artist.
We can have no stronger and more convincing proof that Architecture is the truest record of the various phases of civilization than we find in this. There was Greek Art, living and beautiful, full of inductive power and capacities of new expressions; and there were the boundless wealth and power of Rome. ”

“ The deserved sovereignty of Athens over Greece, its naval power, imposing even to the Orientals of Western Asia and Egypt, and, finally, the necessity and opportunity of rebuilding the Attic capital after its destruction by the Persians, before the decisive battle of Salamis, caused a monumental rebirth of the noble city, which not only became the classic model in those ages throughout the extent of Greece and its colonies upon distant shores, but the highest ideal of architecture to the present day and for the entire future of the human race. ”

“ A reflection of the Munich school is seen in the modern public buildings of Athens, designed in some cases by German architects, and in others by native Greeks. The University, the Museum buildings, the Academy of Art and Science, and other edifices exemplify fairly successful efforts to adapt the severe details of classic Greek art to modern windowed structures. They suffer somewhat from the too liberal use of stucco in place of marble, and from the conscious affectation of an extinct style. ”

“ The architecture of Greece was broad enough to lay the foundation of the future, and so we find, even in our {248} modern life, the Grecian elements combined in all of our great buildings.
Painting and frescoing were well established in principle, though not carried to a high state until the mediaeval period; but in sculpture nothing yet has exceeded the perfection of the Greek art. It stands a monument of the love of the beauty of the human form and the power to represent it in marble. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the invention of the Corinthian, the beauties of the former orders were combined, while their defects were also obviated; the removal of the triglyphs left the arrangement unembarrassed, while the circular capital presented always the same outline, and adapted itself equally to all positions. The system of Greek architecture, the most perfect combination of the necessities of science with forms most pleasing to the eye, that ever did, or, we may venture to say, will exist, was completed. When this perfection was attained is doubtful, as we have elsewhere shown ”

“ Is a Gothic cathedral ever really finished? Is "Faust" finished? Is "Hamlet" explained? The modern spirit is mystical; its architecture, painting, poetry employ shadow to produce their highest effects: shadow and color rather than contour. On the Greek heroic stage there were a few figures, two or three at most, grouped like statuary and thrown out in bold relief at the apex of the scene: in Greek architecture a few clean, simple lines: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily expressible in language and mostly describable in sensuous images. ”

“ To the peoples who have built and{42} 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. ”

“ It is utter absurdity to talk of building Greek edifices now; no man ever will, or ever can, who does not believe in the Greek mythology; and, precisely by so much as he diverges from the technicality of strict copyism, he will err. But we ought to have pieces of Greek architecture, as we have reprints of the most valuable records, and it is better to build a new Parthenon than to set up the old one. Let the dust and the desolation of the Acropolis be undisturbed forever; let them be left to be the school of our moral feelings, not of our mechanical perceptions ”

“ In Egypt, at least, where the mind would necessarily be guided by the same laws as in Greece, it is certain that while sculpture and painting never escaped from the swaddling bands of infancy, architecture advanced to a very high degree of perfection. The force of necessity, which leads to the creation of architecture, communicates a far more lasting impulse than the instinct of imitation. Men must everywhere build to protect themselves from the fury of the elements ”

“ However this may be, a place paved with such great mosaics of slabs and lined with palaces of so massive a tradition, structures which, in their large dependence on pure proportion for interest and beauty, reproduce more than other modern styles the simple nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have placed dignity first in the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great treasure of that ragged picturesqueness--the picturesqueness of large poverty--on which we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During the reign of King George a new Athens has sprung up alongside of and overlapping the old city; although the nation is not wealthy, the individual bequests of certain Greeks have given her the Museum, University, and Academy, each of strict classic design, and a hospital of Byzantine design. Under the sunny skies of Greece those buildings certainly appear to much greater advantage than if in a more northern atmosphere, and their statuary and polychromy show the value of these accessories to such architecture in this climate. ”

“ 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.
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. ”

“ Or let us take the Glyptothek, a composition as completely Greek as the feeling and the perception of the day enabled the architect to make it; are we to take the shafts without flutings, which seem to be called for, as so many violations of Greek verity? In all Grecian art, moreover, there are no round-headed niches, that is to say, niches covered by semi-domes, because there are no arches therein. There are no frontispieces made up of an entablature, a pediment and two pilasters, used for mere ornament and surrounding a round-topped opening. ”

“ 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. ”