CHAPTER II

LATER GREEK AND ROMAN DESIGN

In chapter one there was discussion of the simplest Greek architecture--that which we call Doric--which reached its culminating point about 450 B. C. Considering now, very briefly, the later and more elaborate Greek buildings we find that they were more generally of the Ionic[17] style, that the most important of them were built along the Asiatic coast by the Greek colonists there, and finally, that not one of the larger monuments remains in any such condition that it can be seen even as an attractive ruin. The only important Ionic building which we can find impressive, as it stands, is the Erectheion at Athens, and this, though a very small building, is admitted to contain the most exquisite details of the Ionic style which are known to us. Plate V gives two views of the Erectheion in its present condition, and Plate VI gives the small portico of caryatides on the south flank of the same building. The views given here shows the curious and entirely unexampled relation of these different parts to one another. The full significance of this combination of small apartments is not understood.

As a general thing the Ionic temples were not different in purpose from the Doric temples; they have therefore the same plan and the same simple structure; but they have a much more elaborate decorative treatment. Thus, we find here architectural sculpture, properly so called, introduced into the building. Plate VII gives a number of separate details of Ionic buildings, and it will be readily seen that here an influence was at work far different from that which ordained the absolutely unmodified square-edged and formal Doric building depending upon proportion and upon brilliant color; and that here

conventionalized leafage, independently designed curvatures and broken lines, and the play of surface given by slight reliefs alternating continually with smooth flat planes, are all introduced. If, farther, we look back to Plate VI and note the treatment of that splendid “Portico of the Maidens,” we shall see what Greek thought was capable of in the way of architectural sculpture. Now there is no difference of opinion about the beauty of the simple patterns, the anthemions,[18] the egg-and-dart[19] mouldings, and the like; but the very greatest difference of opinion exists with regard to the essential propriety of human figures used as architectural members of such great importance as these, and especially when used as supports for a superincumbent weight. The author of this volume admires this portico as, on the whole, the finest thing left us by Greek architectural art, combining as it does the exquisite design and faultless modelling of each separate figure, the successful combining into a group of the four maidens of the front, or of the whole six, with their superincumbent weight of marble, and the exquisite management of the whole structure so that it shall seem light and yet solid, fanciful and yet dignified, graceful and yet enduringly noble. Viollet-le-Duc has pointed out (“Entretiens,” vol. I., p. 293) how successfully the figures are posed and grouped to express their constructional function. There are excellent judges who think differently and who would fain ignore the Pandrosion,[20] as it is sometimes called, or relegate it to the position of a mistake made by that race of artists who were of all races the least likely to make mistakes. In this

connection it may be noted that the buildings of the Ionic style offer other and very curious exceptions to the more usual treatment of sculpture when applied to buildings. Thus in the Erectheion itself, the principal frieze was of dark gray marble in smooth slabs, upon which were fixed figures in white marble in vigorous action, the scale small, and the whole composition much more nearly pictorial than anything in the Parthenon. Again, in the balustrade built about the little temple of Victory on the edge of the cliff at the west of the Acropolis, reliefs of moderate projection are treated with singular vivacity: draped goddesses in active and easily understood movement.

There is also in Greek architecture the beginning of the Corinthian[21] style, of which the best example known to moderns is the totally ruined Tholos[22] near Epidauros in the Morea, and the most familiar, that little monument in Athens, called the Choragic[23] Monument of Lysicrates: but for this style we must refer to the Roman buildings in which it reached its highest development.

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. Indeed it has been shown, and is accepted as true, that the chief mission of the great Roman empire was in preserving Hellenic thought in art and literature for the future. It is because of this, as has been truly said, that the works of Homer and Æschylus and of the Greek sculptors are plants growing in our own garden. They might have been, and but for the Roman empire they would be, as foreign to the modern world as are the thought and literature of Persia and India. It is therefore necessary to consider what Greek architecture was to the five or six centuries which followed its greatest epoch, and again what it was to the five or six centuries which followed the Middle Ages, in Europe. From 450 B. C. to 400 A. D., and again from 1400 A. D. to recent times, Greek thought in these matters of fine art was the central thing, the spring of life. To the peoples of antiquity Greek architecture was a guide and inspiration, even under the much altered conditions of a foreign and irresistible rule: it was constantly and uniformly the model. To the peoples who have built and 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. At the time of the first explorations and discoveries of Stuart, Revett, Penrose, Cockerell, Pennethorne, Texier, Renan, and the other explorers of the years from 1760 to 1850, the Greek buildings were in ruins. Not one single roof remained in place. Not one single building was so far preserved that the question could be definitely answered whether the temples had openings in the roofs for light in all or in any cases: so that the hypæthral[24] theory remains a theory only, and is apparently incapable of verification. On the other hand, the details, not only the mouldings and flutings and channelings, but also the carving in conventionalized leafage, were plainly to be seen and were capable of exciting the most enthusiastic interest. Thus Plate VIII shows the order and some other details of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor: the drawings having been made about 1766 under the direction of Dr. Richard Chandler and the architect Nicolas Revett. The general plan remained doubtful, but as it was evident that the buildings had received the most careful thought, with a view to their artistic character, and as, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, proportion in the larger distributions of the building was esteemed the most important element of architectural greatness, it was taken for granted that the Greek buildings would be found to have also such excellence of proportion; and it was believed that this particular beauty could be enjoyed and judged by those who were patient and shrewd enough to combine the shattered ruins and deduce from them the original form of the buildings which they represent. What one temple would not give, another supplied. What one temple had lost, another had preserved. The height of the columns could be ascertained and the diameters of their shafts at top and at bottom: the distance apart of these columns could be ascertained: the shapes of the capitals were there to be noted: the entablature could be restored by a mental process and drawn out with almost perfect certainty. In this way the Greek temples were put into shape for the modern student. No such student had ever seen one except in the state of apparently hopeless ruin: but no such student could fail to grasp the evident significance of the original building when presented to him as a work of pure form, white and colorless, simple in construction, refined in detail beyond anything that later times had ever achieved, presumably faultless in proportion, and invested with minute and delicate decoration in conventionalized leaf form and the like. We have then to keep in mind two different ways of judging of the Greek buildings; first, the truly historical and also truly critical way, in which we take them as buildings once very real and really put to use, made rich by splendid color and abounding variety of detail, much of this detail being in paint or in gilding alone without form to represent it; and the other way, the modern traditional way, by means of which a small body of writers and lecturers swayed architectural opinion for a century and a half, and until the accurate examination and close study, given to the subject in the second half of the nineteenth century, had produced its effect.

In the later chapters of this little book there will be found frequent reference to this professional or technical view of pure Greek architecture. Still, what has been thought about it since its discovery in the eighteenth century, is of less importance to our inquiry than the similar assumptions with regard to the architecture of Imperial Rome; for that architecture influenced the peoples of Europe at all times during the Middle Ages, and more especially at the important periods of revival or of change in the fifth, the eleventh, and the fifteenth centuries.

The early architecture of Rome, that is of the city and its neighborhood, is not under consideration; it is very little known even to modern archæologists, and it was not known at all to the people of the Risorgimento[25] or their successors, upon whose work the modern traditions and feeling about architecture have been based. The buildings which directly influenced the world of the Middle Ages, and then that later world of the fifteenth century, the time of Italian imitation of antiquity, were those of the early Emperors. There was, as has been discovered within the last quarter of a century, a special art introduced in the reign of Augustus, a beautiful art made up of sculpture not exclusively Greek in character; and, in its architectural form, of an enlarged and more decorative handling of the Greek system of design. In both of these innovations some loss in refinement comes with the gain in splendor and in utility: but we can see this Augustan architecture to have been a splendid decorative art. It is also true that somewhat more of it than we now see remained in place, and nearly complete, in the fifteenth century. The great buildings which partly remain to us from the Imperial epoch are generally later than the time of Augustus. The famous Pantheon (see Plate IX), as we now have it, with its huge rotunda, dates from the time of Hadrian (117-138 A. D.): the magnificent Forum of Trajan with its accessories, a group of buildings inconceivably vast and splendid, was completed during the same administration of Hadrian. The best preserved Roman memorial arch, which is also fortunately very rich in sculpture, that of Benevento in South Italy, was also built after Trajan’s death and in the time of Hadrian: the best preserved buildings of Palmyra and of the North-African cities are of the time of the Antonines, those of Heliopolis (Baalbec) of the same epoch and later. The temples on the old Forum--the Forum Romanum as distinguished from the later or imperial Fora--were restored and altered many times before the final collapse of the imperial power in Rome: the temple of Castor, apparently under Tiberius (14-37 A. D.), the temple of Saturn, with the State treasury in its basement, perhaps not later than the time of Augustus (30 B. C. to 14 A. D.), the temple of Vespasian, much rebuilt, under Severus and Caracalla, at the beginning of the third century, A. D. The buildings named as being in Rome itself, together with the Temple of Antoninus Pius, that of Mars the Avenger in the Forum of

Augustus, the enclosing wall of the Forum of Nerva, and other fragments now wholly destroyed, were the pieces of architectural art which most especially influenced the studies of the men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Plate X gives what now remains of the Temple of Castor, and also what remains of the Temple of Mars; but as late as the sixteenth century there was much more to be seen and studied about these ruins. The building behind the Temple of Castor in the Forum, now entirely stripped of its architectural decorations, retained its interior order of marble columns until the sixteenth century, and this building also was of great importance to the earlier restorers of antique art: it is thought by modern archæologists to have been the Temple of Augustus, which is known to have existed in this neighborhood.

The buildings named above were generally columnar in character. The memorial arch and the Pantheon are the only two of them which were certainly vaulted structures. Now, the memorial arch required only one or three simple barrel vaults, and the example of the Etruscans must have made such work as that familiar to the people of Rome, but the Pantheon is a very different thing. This, as rebuilt under Hadrian, with the rotunda which we know, must have been one of the earliest Roman buildings in solid mortar-masonry. Its walls are very thick, faced on both sides with brick, but built actually of small stones laid in strong mortar, and it is roofed with extremely massive vaulting of the same materials. Other such buildings of which large parts exist are, in the city of Rome itself, the great Halls of the Thermæ of Caracalla (probably built about 205-10 A. D.); those of the Thermæ of Diocletian, built a century later, and that of the basilica of Maxentius and Constantine on the north side of the Forum Romanum, built between 312 and about 330 A. D. In these buildings a vaulting as massive as that of the Pantheon but of wholly different shape was used. The Pantheon, a circular building, is roofed by a circular cupola[26] which is kept in place by a ponderous superstructure carried up from the haunches of the vault, so that the thrust of the cupola could not, however great it might be, affect the stability of the structure. In the great halls of the Thermæ and the basilica above named, the conditions are very different, for the groined-vaulting[27] of these halls would, if built under ordinary conditions, exert a formidable pressure outward upon all its points of support. In these Roman examples, however, there were two influences at work to save the buildings from possible injury: the skillful disposition of walls and piers to take up or absorb the thrust from each point of support, and the fact that these vaults were built in such a fashion, with horizontal beds of stone laid in strong cement mortar, that there could not be much thrust when once the mortar was dry and the vault consolidated. The vault could not thrust outward without breaking: and it was too homogeneous to break. Buildings whose actual construction was carried out in this fashion exist throughout those Mediterranean lands which once were included in the great empire. This system of building gave the world those great permanent interiors which were the first in the world’s history to be of architectural importance. Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, both those of Greece and those of the Colonies--none of these great building nations had ever conceived of interiors prepared and designed for their own sake, and as the chief part of the building. The Assyrian kings in their palaces came nearer to understanding the possible effectiveness of the interior: but even they were satisfied with long and narrow halls shaped like what we call corridors. It was left for the Romans at once to develop their system of vaulting and at the same time to improve the construction of their roofs of wood and metal, so that halls fifty feet, sixty feet, even eighty feet wide, could be built with roofs of effective and beautiful form high above the floor. Under these conditions the most splendid possible interior effects were producible. Such vast columned interiors as that of the Ulpian basilica and that of the Septa Julia must have given an effect of stately grace absolutely unknown to the modern world; the true evolution of Greek art in one direction was assuredly to be found there. On the other hand the imperial dwellings on the Palatine Hill in Rome with their numerous vaulted halls, the temples of pure Roman design, like that of Venus and that of the City of Rome, built back to back, near the Colosseum, and the great halls of the basilicas and baths, as above suggested, were capable of being adorned in a permanent and strictly architectural way as none of the buildings of earlier races had been. The basilica of Maxentius had its middle division, its nave,[28] about eighty-three feet wide and roofed with a groined vault, although the span of that vault is less than this, about seventy-eight feet, because carried by immense columns which stand free of the wall on either side. This great hall was one hundred and twenty-five feet high to the top of the vault: and it was flanked on either side by an aisle[29] made up of three rooms, each about fifty-three feet square, opening into the central hall; and the barrel-vaults[30] even of these six minor divisions rose eighty feet from the pavement. (See Plate XI.) This building dates from the declining days of the Empire and of classical civilization, when sculpture had already become a feeble and barbarous thing, without character, and when what we consider the Byzantine feeling in matters of decoration had already obtained the mastery throughout the greater part of the Roman world. The strong hold which the system of building had upon the engineers of the empire can be judged from this fact.

That which we are undertaking here is not a history of architecture, but in a sense a history of the modern way of judging of architecture. What then is the origin of those traditions and accepted doctrines upon which are based all our ways of criticising a building? This and the previous chapter are a partial answer to that question. The contribution of the Roman Imperial world to this tradition has been, by much, the greatest of all. It is upon the Roman practice that all subsequent European systems of decorative building have been founded, except the lightest and slightest--the wooden-framed houses of mediæval Europe and those of modern America, and their like. Apart from fortification, and from structures built by engineers without artistic intention, there is not a single form of building in masonry since the fifth century which has not been developed from the practice of the Imperial builders. Now it appears that those builders not only built in two different ways, but that they undertook the curious twofold task of constructing their buildings with massive walls and vaults of mortar-masonry (thereby abandoning wholly the example of the Greeks who never used mortar at all in the buildings we admire, and who had no arches nor windows nor interior designing of any sort in our modern sense), and of decorating these buildings within and without, by means of a borrowed Greek system of the Orders, which had nothing whatever to do with the actual structure. They allowed themselves to take certain liberties with the Greek Orders. They raised the column on a pedestal, they made the shaft of costly and beautiful material, of porphyry or granite or pavonazzetto marble or cipollino; and consequently, because the material was precious and also hard, they did not try to adorn the shaft with channels or flutes. They made the capital of bronze, cast hollow and gilded richly, and put such capitals around the top of the shaft as a mere ornamental jacket, concealing the actual supporting member. They built the horizontal architrave of wedge-shaped stones, making of each span between two columns a flat arch instead of a simple lintel of one block, and they protected this built-up lintel by a second arch above, a discharging arch to throw the weight upon the columns and relieve the centre of the lintel. Finally, they increased the amount of carved ornament upon all parts which seemed capable of receiving it. This they did, not only by making the sculpture of any one moulding very elaborate and rich, but also by increasing the number of sculptured mouldings. Thus in Plate XII, there is given, that it may be compared with the carved work of Athens (see Plate VII) a part of the entablature of the Temple of Vespasian in the Roman Forum. And the differences between Greek and Roman practice in this respect are not limited to the amount of sculpture in a given moulding or a given monument: they affect also the very nature of the ornament itself. Plate XII gives one side of the imperial arch at Benevento; a monument intended primarily as a pedestal for a great group of bronze figures; the reliefs on the arch showing Trajan in war and in peace, sacrificing, conquering Dacians and Armenians. It is evident that no such use of human subject in sculpture had ever suggested itself to the Greek builders of the temples. It is historical: and it is also strictly decorative, and subordinate to the architectural design. For any similar conception arising among Greek peoples we moderns must go to buildings which were utterly unknown to the European artists who built up the neo-classic system, the men of the fifteenth and subsequent centuries. Such a building as the famous tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassos, now Budroun, on the coast of Asia Minor, may indeed have influenced greatly the Roman architects of the time of Hadrian. That Emperor, who was a great traveller, may have seen the Mausoleum; his favorite architect may have been a student of it from childhood; but any ideas which the men who brought classic art back to modern Europe drew from that famous structure came to them through the Roman designers.

However much they might abandon the Greek use, that is to say, the rational and inevitable use of the Orders, the Roman architects still employed those Orders constantly, and in a way more splendid than anything the Greeks had attempted. The Eastern notion of adorning a town by a broad central avenue lined with colonnades two or three deep, an idea developing itself rapidly in the cities of Syria, obtained throughout the empire during its peaceful days. It appears that in the fourth century it was feasible to go afoot from almost any point in the central regions of Rome, north, south, east or west, for a mile or two, while keeping always under cover; except indeed as one crossed a street or avenue, though even at such crossings there was often the Tetrapylon, the four-fronted gateway, to carry the shelter on from portico to portico. This system of colonnaded porticoes, roofed always and enclosed very often with a solid wall on one side at least, was developed in many forms. A temple would stand in a great court surrounded by just such colonnades. A forum of a Roman town like an agora of a Greek town would be faced by colonnades on every side. For the purpose of display, great squares were opened up essentially for the purpose of surrounding them by just such porticoes. Plate XIII gives views of the ruins at Jerash in Syria, east of the Jordan, the remains of the city of Gerasa, whose glory seems to have been of the time of the Antonine emperors. The lower figure gives the great triple archway south of the ancient walls of Gerasa: the upper figure a view of the great oval or semi-oval space, whose shape is not determined, and which we may hardly call either a _forum_ or an _agora_. Plate XIV gives a detail of the _Forum Transitorium_ of Nerva, Emperor from A. D. 96 to 98. The whole enclosure was a massive wall about ninety feet high and built of huge blocks of limestone, the decorative treatment and the sculptures being on the inside and facing upon the Temple of Minerva. The figure

gives a trustworthy plan of the buildings called by the name of Trajan and built during his reign and that of his successor, Hadrian. The modern buildings and streets are shown, and it is seen from these how the actual plan can only be inferred by that which has been discovered by digging here and there, or by investigations in cellars of modern structures. Still the general type of the old design can be seized: a great open square, 270 by 370 feet and this surrounded on three sides by a covered portico fifty feet wide with two rows of great columns in addition to the wall outside, which itself was pierced by many openings filled with columns _in antis_.[31] Across one end of this great square, stretched the Ulpian basilica, as long as the whole square was wide, including its portico, and half as wide as that: in other words, the open interior of the basilica was about 180 by nearly 400 feet and the roof of all this was carried by two rows of columns on every side in addition to the outer wall which again was in parts opened up into a colonnade. The basilica may or may not have been covered in the central part: various conjectural restorations have been made, but nothing is absolutely certain. It is evident that it was very open to persons coming and going--that they were allowed to cross it almost as freely as one crosses through a great cathedral in France or in Italy, going in at the north door and out at the south door, almost at pleasure. Beyond it, was a court where stood the Column of Trajan, still erect, though without its accompanying minor buildings, and beyond that again and across what may have been an entirely open street was the temple erected to the deified Trajan, after his death, by the Senate, which temple was surrounded by another portico and covered nearly as much ground as the great forum itself. In this way a continuous space of nearly a thousand feet in length by a width of from three hundred to four hundred feet was either covered by the roofs of porticoes or open to the sky within belts of these same porticoes. To walk once around the whole, following the outside ambulatory of the porticoes would be to walk the best half of a mile, and this one could do without ever passing out under the open sky, except perhaps in crossing to the temple enclosure. Nor does this account of the whole composition include in the least the great semicircular buildings projecting from the forum and from the basilica on the northeast and southwest. Now as all of this vast congeries of splendid buildings must be assumed to have been entirely of trabeated[32] structure, a mere series of columns and horizontal lintels resting upon them with superstructure, it is evident that the Greek spirit and the Greek taste controlled all parts of this vast composition.

Mile upon mile of colonnades, as Greek in taste as the later age would allow, enclosed and led up to superb interiors of a dignity and magnificence immeasurably beyond anything conceived by the Greeks. This is the Roman signet, as it were, the stamp which the great Empire put upon the world.