R. Blomfield: Ancient Greek Architecture

Page 13

The Greeks of the fifth century realized that architecture is an art with a definite purpose other than that of a mere vehicle for sculpture, and that it makes its aesthetic appeal by its own inherent qualities of rhythm, and proportion, spacing, mass, and outline. Though they used sculpture and colour to heighten and intensify the effect of their architecture, they saw very clearly the function of the arts in relation to each other, and kept their sculpture and their colour in strict relation to the aesthetic purpose of their architecture. It is a point on which later architects went lamentably astray. A great deal of early Renaissance work is mere ornamentation of buildings, indeed in buildings such as the Certosa of Pavia the architecture has almost ceased to exist; and most of the bad architecture of the last fifty years is due to the deplorable fallacy that ornament is architecture. The columns of Ephesus, the sculpture of the altar of Pergamon, brilliant as they were in technical accomplishment, were the first hint of that decline which was in time to undermine the whole fabric of the Arts. Architecture was deposed from its high intellectual dominance. It tended more and more to become a conventional affair, and it was an easy transition from the exuberance of Hellenistic art to the point-blank vulgarity of Roman ornamental architecture.

It was, however, inevitable that the fine simplicity of Periclean art should vanish with its ideals, and one finds a certain compensation in the extension of the range and outlook of architecture, which we owe to the Hellenistic architects of the fourth and succeeding centuries B. C. So far as perfection of form was concerned, it was impossible to carry the art beyond the stage to which Ictinus and Callicrates had brought it; but there still remained something, and something very important, to be done. Axial planning, the consideration of the relation of building to building, seem to have been outside the consciousness of Greeks of the fifth century, and each building was treated as an unrelated unit. But the inconvenience of this, its loss of opportunity, and the necessity of order and method, must have become apparent, as civilization became more complex and more exacting. By the end of the fourth century B. C. the tradition of architectural technique was firmly established, and architects were able to turn their attention to problems of large planning, and these they seem to have handled with extraordinary skill. So far, what had been done in this direction had been due to religious inspiration, as in the processional ways leading to the Egyptian temples or the avenue of figures at Branchidae. What the Hellenistic architects did was to think out consecutive schemes of city planning, in which the dominant motive of arrangement was artistic. They had learnt to treat the temples, the public buildings, the open spaces and approaches, as the elements of one harmonious composition, in which the utmost use was made of the natural opportunities of the site. At Ephesus, for example, there is supposed to have existed a consecutive scheme, larger than anything of the kind carried out even in France in the eighteenth century, though the evidence, it should be noted, is largely conjectural. As presented by sanguine and enthusiastic restorers the scheme was magnificent. Next the port, and facing it on one side, was the Arsenal, a regular building opening on to a court surrounded by a colonnade, which again opened on to the great 'Place', a square enclosure some 850 ft. wide north and south, by 650 ft. east and west,[142] surrounded by a colonnade on all four sides, with exhedrae, or semicircular recesses. In the centre of this Place was an oblong water-piece, about 300 ft. by 200 ft., and on the farther side, opposite the Arsenal buildings, were the Senate House and other public buildings; and behind these and to the right and left of them the Theatre and the Stadium, partly excavated in Mount Coressus. The Arsenal, the great Place with its water-piece, and the public buildings, were laid out on an axis line, and on a regular rectangulated plan.

[142] The Place Vendôme measures 450 ft. × 420 ft.; Grosvenor Square about 650 × 530; and Lincoln's Inn Fields about 800 × 630, measured from wall to wall of buildings.

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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