R. Blomfield: Ancient Greek Architecture

Page 11

This, too, may be the explanation of what must strike an architect as an anomaly of design, the Greek habit of placing enormous figures in the interior of their temples. The Greek, in his own way, was a very religious man. In his temple, he was doing his utmost to set forth the majesty of his God, and if it was necessary for this purpose he was even prepared to sacrifice his principles as an artist, to ignore the scale of his interior and the rhythmic harmony of his design, by the introduction of gigantic figures. The eye judges by what it knows, and the readiest way of arriving at some idea of the size of a building or a monument is by relating it to the normal size of the human figure. Vitruvius, in his confused way, suggested that the human figure was the canon and standard of architectural design, but how is it possible to determine the scale of a building which contained a figure at least six times the size of a man, reaching from the floor to the roof? The chryselephantine figure of Zeus at Olympia, made by Pheidias, is supposed to have been some thirty-five feet high, and to have reached nearly to the roof, passing the double tier of columns and the gallery above the aisles of the cella. Moreover, this god was represented as seated on his throne, so that by no possibility could it have been in scale with the building so far as the architecture was concerned. Even the gigantic temple of Zeus at Agrigentum with its external columns 61 ft. 9 in. in height, and large enough for a man to stand within one of the flutings of the columns, could hardly have stood up to figures on such a scale as this. Such a violent contrast in scale broke the principle of συμμετρια {symmetria}, that strict relation of the part to the whole which the Greek artists maintained elsewhere with scrupulous care. Artists with such a consummate sense of proportion as the Greeks possessed would hardly have made a mistake here, and the conclusion one comes to is that where their religion was in question, everything had to give way. Indeed, one can imagine the tremendous effect of this colossal figure seen dimly in the half-light of the cella, filling the whole temple with its presence. The same anomaly in scale occurred in the Akropolis at Athens, where the vast figure of Athene Promachos must have reduced the beautiful Caryatides of the Erechtheum to insignificance. M. Choisy makes a gallant effort to show that this want of relationship in scale, and also in the siting of the temples, was deliberate and considered. As a fact, the general rule that seems to have been observed in the time of Pericles was that new temples should always be built on the site of the older ones,[140] but axis lines were neglected, and even the masses of the Propylaea, beautiful building as it must have been, did not balance. The Akropolis was just a collection of unrelated buildings, and in the great Temenos of Delphi the various monuments were all anyhow.[141] The Sacred Way meandered about like an S, and the only method it observed was to clear the various treasuries and shrines which appear to have been scattered about within the enclosure, with a disregard of each other little less than brutal—a rather suggestive symbol of the internecine rivalry of the small Greek states. At Delphi, also, there was a huge figure of Apollo Sitalkas said to have been seventeen metres high, which must have been hopelessly out of scale. The fact was that Greek architects of the fifth century had not yet arrived at the conception of the city as a whole. They had an admirable eye for a site, for example, the position of the Parthenon itself, and the temple of Hera Lacinia at Agrigentum placed high above the sea, but it is unhistorical to invest even the architects of the Parthenon and the Propylaea with a knowledge and outlook which was not thought of till a hundred years later. Even the Greek architects and sculptors of the fifth century B. C. were not omniscient, yet within their limits, in their mastery of what they set themselves to do, the artists of the age of Pericles remain unapproachable, and theirs was the Golden Age of Architecture. They had fixed for all time essential elements of the art, and had set up a standard of attainment in pure form which no subsequent architecture has ever been able to reach.

[140] The Erechtheum was an exception.
[141] See Delphi, by Dr. Frederick Poulsen, p. 52. It is suggested that the Sacred Way was in existence before the shrines were built, and that its wanderings were necessitated by the gradients of the hillside. No sort of attempt, however, seems to have been made to correct this, or to treat it as an element of design.

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R. Blomfield
Ancient Greek Architecture

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R. Blomfield Ancient Greek Architecture

Learned Freeware

R. Blomfield
Ancient Greek Architecture