Greco-Roman architecture

“ Then in the purer air, and among the more refined energies of Greece, architecture rose into a more studied beauty, equally perfect in its school, because fostered in a district not 50 miles square, and in its dependent isles and colonies, all of which were under the same air, and partook of the same features of landscape. In Rome, it became less perfect, because more imitative than indigenous, and corrupted by the traveling, and conquering, and stealing ambition of the Roman; yet still a school of architecture, because the whole of Italy presented the same peculiarities of scene. ”

“ It is to be observed that architecture and sculpture had no original growth at Rome, and were not indigenous to the soil. Roman structures were modifications from the Greek, adapted to suit the requirements and tastes of the people; and thus it happened that the simple severity, purity, and ideality of early Greek art degenerated, under the Roman empire, into the wanton luxuriousness that characterised its latest period. ”

“ It is one of the ironies of history that when in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries scholars and artists awoke to the fact that there had been a great architecture in the past they should have known of no other version of it but the Roman. What splendid developments might have followed if the finer spirits of the Renaissance, Alberti, Bramante, or Peruzzi, had founded their theories of architecture on the temples of Sicily and Magna Graecia, instead of on the debased examples of Imperial Rome! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The domestic architecture of Greece is guessed at by the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which, though Roman provincial cities, were in style and decoration a fair reflection of Greek art. The remains of the art found 268in these cities have been styled Greco-Roman. ”

“ In short, gigantic dimensions and tasteless magnificence, favored by the insane competition among the followers of Alexander, extinguished true art, the more rapidly as works of these later ages were not executed with the solidity which preserved Roman architecture from similar decline, even though it accepted many unsound artistic influences from these Hellenic and barbarian despots.
{263}The sculpture deserves even more unlimited admiration than the architecture of Greece. Hellenic building shows monumental ideals such as the creative power of no other people has attained ”

“ In consequence of this invention, the Romans erected a greater variety of fine structures than either the Greeks or Egyptians, whose public edifices were chiefly confined to temples. The arch entered into almost every structure, public or private, and superseded the use of long stone beams, which were necessary in the Grecian temples, as also of wooden timbers, in the use of which the Romans were not skilled, and which do not really pertain to the art of architecture. An imposing building must always be constructed of stone or brick. ”

“ The laborious and useful investigations which have rendered our artists so well acquainted with even the minutest details of the Greek forms, cannot remain without fruit—provided architects will be true to the best interests of their profession. Let it ever be borne in mind, that, magnificent as are the specimens of Roman skill, we desert the parent source when for these we forsake the remains of Grecian genius and art. ”

“ The Roman builders left two great traditions, the adornment of the building, the open square, the city with combinations of Greek-seeming colonnades; and the huge interior, arranged for interior effect, vaulted when practicable, flat roofed with massive trabeated construction when the light and open character of the building, as of a huge portico, invited a pure Greek manner of design. The first-named of these traditions was destined not to be very boldly or very generally followed until after the Middle Ages. ”

“ The House of the Faun is beautified by no wall pictures, but it contained on the floor of the room which divided the two peristyles one of the finest mosaics ever found, that which depicts the battle of Alexander the Great upon the Issos.
The stream of Greek influence ran pure for some four generations. After that it was contaminated. Man can keep no beauty in his hands for long unspoilt. The change is manifest in Pompeii. The Roman influence stole in. A muddy taste obscured the simple grace of the Greek lines, tortured the architecture, piled up unmeaning ornament, and degraded all the city. ”

“ When, after studying the architecture of Greece, we come to examine that of Rome, we are at once struck by the incongruous mixture of elements which it exhibits; and although we may be impressed by its grandeur, we are unable to give it our unqualified admiration. In Byzantine art we find Greek, Roman, and Oriental elements, logically modified in adaptation to new uses, and fused into a radically new and distinctive style of entire consistency and great nobility. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It was not until the Empire that Roman architecture took on a truly national form. True Roman architecture is essentially imperial. The change from the primitive Etruscan style to the splendors of the imperial age was due to the conquest of the Greek states. Not only did the Greek campaigns enrich Rome with an unprecedented wealth of artistic spoils; they also brought into Italy hosts of Greek artists, and filled the minds of the campaigners with the ambition to realize in their own dominions the marble colonnades, the temples, theatres, and propylæa of the Greek cities they had pillaged. ”

“ 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 use of both dentils and consoles is a barbaric duplication, characteristic of the tasteless architectural magnificence of the Roman decline. The so-called Corinthian base is{250} no real characteristic of the order, being only a combination of Ionic and Attic forms, with a double scotia between the two tores.
Hellenic architecture has thus far been considered exclusively in its relations to sacred edifices, because the art of building, among nations whose civilization has been influenced by religious conceptions, is always best exemplified by temples. ”

“ There can be, however, little doubt that the palaces of the West Asiatic style must have at least contributed suggestions as to internal disposition of the later and more magnificent Greek mansions. The ordinary dwelling-houses of citizens, as described by ancient writers, resembled those now visible in the disinterred cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which will be referred to under Roman Architecture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the new capital of Constantine, emancipated from the restraint of Pagan associations and art, the Byzantine builders founded an architecture peculiarly their own. Of this the cupola was the great characteristic, to which every other feature was subordinate. In consequence of this principle, that which at Athens was straight, angular, and square, became in Constantinople curved and rounded, concave within, and convex without. Thus the old architecture of Greece owed its destruction to the same nation from which it had taken its first birth. ”

“ Architecture, regarded as a fine art, had been brought by the Greeks to the highest perfection of which it was capable under the limitations which they imposed upon themselves. The Greek temple appeals to the aesthetic sense by the simplicity and harmony of its proportions as well as by the rational correspondence between function and decoration in its several members. On these lines there was no room for progress. It is true that the Etruscans modified the type of the Greek temple and profoundly influenced Roman construction in this respect. ”

“ I had already collected together a great many observations on the progress of Greek and Roman architecture in different ages, drawn not from books or connected with system, but from the models themselves, which I myself had measured. I had been long of the opinion, in which I am still further confirmed, that taste for ancient architecture, founded upon the examples that Italy alone can furnish, was not giving ancient architects fair play. What was to be learned from the first proportions of their plans and elevations seemed to have remained untouched in Egypt ”

“ 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. ”

“ In reviewing the arts of Rome, as in the corresponding chapter on the productions of Greece, we will first consider their architecture, and then the subordinate departments of plastic and pictorial works. Roman, Greek, and Egyptian architecture are to be viewed as constituting but one vital and continuous trunk; each having grown out of its predecessor, and the last destined to produce yet another and, perchance, a nobler growth. ”

“ Yet in certain respects—as, for example, the spacing and position of the columns—a degree of freedom was enjoyed which Roman [133] architecture did not possess. Repetition ruled to the almost entire suppression of variety. Disclosure of the arrangement and construction of the building was almost complete, and hardly a trace of concealment can be detected. Simplicity reigns in the earliest examples; the elaboration of even the most ornamental is very chaste and graceful; and the whole effect of Greek architecture is one of harmony, unity, and refined power. ”

“ The really good things in Roman architecture, of which anything remains to us, are comparatively very few. The temple of Vesta is rather Greek than Roman. Then we have the three columns of Jupiter Stator; three of Jupiter Tonans; the temple of Antoninus and Faustina; that of Mars Ultor, and the portico of the Pantheon, all six of the Corinthian order, nor have we anything of much value of any other. There are magnificent fragments besides, and in particular, some of the marble ornaments in the forum of Trajan raise a high idea of its beauty and perfection. ”

“ I need not, of course, in any way follow out for you the mode in which the Greek system of architecture is derived from [7] the horizontal lintel; but I ought perhaps to explain, that by Roman architecture I do not mean that spurious condition of temple form which was nothing more than a luscious imitation of the Greek; but I mean that architecture in which the Roman spirit truly manifested itself, the magnificent vaultings of the aqueduct and the bath, and the colossal heaping of the rough stones in the arches of the amphitheater ”

“ The Greek element having during the later Roman period become merely decorative, and therefore no more than an artificial adjunct, it was natural that the overthrow of the ancient civilisation should at once sweep it away as a useless luxury, and that the real and useful portions of architecture should alone survive, though the actual skill in using them would be reduced. We find, accordingly, that during this interval architecture became purely arcuated, though in Western Europe the more difficult forms of arcuation, such as the vaulting over of large spaces, were usually avoided. ”