R. Blomfield: Ancient Greek Architecture

Page 14

A scheme such as this (if it is possible to accept a conjectural restoration), thought out in all its bearings, meant a real advance in the range of architecture. It is useless to look for the faultless beauty of the fifth century, but the resourcefulness and skill of the Hellenistic architects gave a new meaning to the art; and indeed they might almost be said to have established the first stage in the development of its modern practice. It was from these able Hellenistic architects that the Romans learnt the monumental planning of their cities, and for centuries the architects most frequently employed were Greeks of Asia Minor. At this point, Hellenistic architecture merges into Roman, and loses its distinctive character. Through Roman it passes on to modern architecture, and so in a sense the chain is complete; but between this later art and pure Greek architecture there is a great gulf fixed, differences not only of technique but of outlook, of ideal, and of temperament. The mighty Doric of Paestum, Selinus, and Segesta, the Theseion and the Parthenon, remains for all time the perfect expression of the soul of ancient Greece.

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! They, at least, would have caught a glimpse of the beauty of abstract form and perfect harmony, the secret of which seems to have been revealed to the Greeks alone among the peoples of the world—and to them for only a transient period of their history. Unfortunately, when Greek architecture was discovered in the second half of the eighteenth century, it became the shibboleth of the 'virtuosi'. The national traditions, both of France and England, were lost, Greek architecture became the fashion, and the misguided enthusiasm of pedants and amateurs insisted on literal reproductions which completed the extinction of architecture as a vernacular art, and replaced it by the series of revivalisms from which it has suffered for the last one hundred and fifty years. Conscious and deliberate tinkering with the art of architecture ended by destroying it.

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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