Greek architecture

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So also we can never look at Greek architecture without seeing in it the reflection of a nature refined, precise, and critical; loving grace and finish, but content to live with the graces and the muses without any aspirations that spurned this earth. We can hardly go further than this in attributing emotional expression to 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. ”

“ Seemingly deficient in culture, they were yet able to recast the forms of Greek architecture in new moulds, and to evolve therefrom a mighty architecture adapted to wholly novel conditions. They brought engineering into the service of architecture, which they fitted to the varied requirements of government, public amusement, private luxury, and the common comfort. They covered the antique world with arches and amphitheatres, with villas, baths, basilicas, and temples, all bearing the unmistakable impress of Rome, though wrought by artists and artisans of divers races. ”

“ Greek architecture was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir Reginald Blomfield well says, “may have been more successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often remained bleak. ”

“ 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 laborer among the gravestones of our modern architecture must yet be raised up, and become a living soul. Before he can be thus raised, the whole system of Greek architecture, as practiced in the present day, must be annihilated ”

“ As a style, the sentiment of Greek architecture{303} may be said to be a quiet, calm solidity and repose, free from all question as to its stability, because it admits of no pressure but what is vertical. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Greek Ornaments have exerted the same wide influence over the whole course of Western art as Greek columns; and in their origin they are equally interesting as specimens of Greek skill in adapting existing types, and of Greek invention where no existing types would serve.
Few of the mouldings of Greek architecture are to be traced to anterior styles. There is nothing like them in Egyptian work, and little or nothing in Assyrian ”

“ 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. ”

“ Photographs of Greek architecture are by no means common or easy to obtain, and the subjects given as illustrations of the present issue of The Brochure Series are presented, not as in the preceding numbers, either all from a single building, or of similar features from several buildings, but merely as fragments of detail, representing the period of Greek art when architecture and sculpture had reached their highest development.
LVII. Capital from the Parthenon, Athens. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Use of Color upon Athenian Architecture and Sculptures.—While we look upward at this group of temples and their wealth of sculptures, let us state now something we have noticed during all our walks around Athens, but have hitherto left without comment. Every temple and statue in Athens is not left in its bare white marble, as later ages will conceive is demanded by “Greek Architecture” and statuary, but is decked in brilliant color—“painted,” if you will use an almost unfriendly word. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That art is not altogether Greek with us need astonish172 no one. We are trained for practical purposes, but the Greeks were trained to appreciate beauty, symmetry, and harmony, not in verses only, but also in the human frame and in every product of art. Architecture with them was thoroughly plastic; it was never subservient to some metaphysical subtlety; it was finished in itself; a total of which every part formed, as in the human body, a completing element—without which the whole conception of a temple would be as incomplete as a man without arms, legs, or toes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Not only are the main features of Greek architecture, mere reproductions in stone of what were originally parts of a wooden building, but our modern copyists of Gothic architecture often build solid buttresses capped with weighty pinnacles, to support a wooden roof which has no outward thrust to render them necessary; and even think they ornament their buildings by adding sham spouts of carved stone, while modern waterpipes, stuck on without any attempt at harmony, do the real duty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”