Greek Revival architecture

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 memorable exploration to which we have alluded, and many others which it would take too long to enumerate, have not only made known to us the most original and most fertile period of Greek sculpture, but have given us much information as to that art which, when combined with the statues of Phidias and Alcamenes, reared those splendid creations which have been reconstructed with such skill and care by the artist and the archæologist; we mean Greek architecture at its best, the purest and the most complete architecture which the world has yet seen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though the remains of these prehistoric ages show in some degree the form of an ancient Greek acropolis, with its royal dwelling of courts and halls, and the sepulchral monuments before its gates, they are yet insufficient to complete even the main outlines of the picture by giving any understanding of the temple—that structure destined to become the ideal of Hellenic architecture. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ These souvenirs of Greek genius still serve as models for the architect and the sculptor. It needs no chronicle to prove that they mark the culmination of the fine arts. If the moderns have failed to excel, or even equal them, it is not because their conception, design, or construction involved occult processes. It is rather because there is a limit to the development of the so-called fine arts, and that limit in architecture and sculpture was reached in Greece more than two thousand years ago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had begun to fear that Greek beauty was too subtle for me, or that Greek beauty was cant, when the Maison Carrée in a moment utterly undeceived me. The puzzle was solved: I had never seen Grecian architecture before. The things which our domestic Pecksniffs call Grecian—their St. Martin's porticoes, and St. Pancras churches—bear about the same relation to the divine original, as the old statue of George IV. at King's Cross to the Apollo Belvidere. ”

“ First, it is a calumny of the old Greek style itself, which, like every other good architecture that ever existed, depends more on its grand figure sculpture, than on its proportions of parts; so that to copy the form of the Parthenon without its friezes and frontal statuary, is like copying the figure of a human [62] being without its eyes and mouth; and, in the second place, so far as modern Pseudo-Greek work does depend on its proportions more than Gothic work, it does so, not because it is better proportioned, but because it has nothing but proportion to depend upon. ”

“ We have fixed on sculpture as the most complete expression of Greek art; in other directions there is neither enough material nor enough research to give us a connected view. Not a single town, hardly a single house, in Greece has been excavated; there is no consecutive knowledge of the ordinary products and objects of life; and there is very little recorded of the discoveries of the tombs. The artistic interest of the sculpture and architecture has starved other branches of archæology, and for Greece more remains to be done than for some less celebrated lands. ”

“ 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. ”