How to Study Architecture

by Charles H. Caffin

Palace of Cnossus.—The palace of Cnossus occupies an area of about six acres, surmounting the debris of human settlements, which go back, it has been estimated, to a distance of from 12,000 to 14,000 years before the Christian era. The remains show that the palace formed a hollow square, constructed around a central court. The principal entrance was upon the north, though what appears to have been the royal entrance was upon the west, opening on to a paved court.

The west wing contained a small council chamber, or office, in which was found a throne, made of gypsum in a design curiously Gothic, around which were lower stone benches. The walls of this chamber were decorated with sacred dragons represented in a Nile landscape. They were executed, like the other paintings found in these Cretan palaces, in fresco; that is to say, in water colours mixed with some gelatinous medium, laid on the still damp plaster, so that as the latter dried the colour became incorporated in the actual material of the walls. To this council chamber was attached a bathroom, probably for ritual purposes.

Near it was also discovered a small shrine, containing figures and reliefs, exquisitely fashioned in faience, one of which shows a snake goddess and her votaries; this being one of the aspects of the chief divinity. The walls and pillars of these chambers are repeatedly decorated with the sign of the Double Axe, while miniature frescoes on the walls exhibit pillared shrines, with double axes stuck into some of the wooden pillars.

For the remains of the palace itself show that the pillars used in this construction were of wood, rounded like posts. The circular sockets still remain in the stonework and a comparison of the top and bottom ones shows that the pillar tapered downward, the diameter at the bottom being six-sevenths of the top one.

Another feature of this west wing is a series of eighteen magazines or storerooms which contained quantities of clay documents and great stone jars. The latter are decorated with horizontal bands, connected by diagonal ones, like the straw work on a modern ginger jar. This design, wrought upon the stone surface of these colossal jars, is an interesting memento of one of the primitive methods of clay modelling. For, before the invention of the potter’s wheel, the method of shaping, almost universally adopted, was one of the three following: (1) scooping out from a ball of clay; (2) or coiling, in which the clay was rolled out into thin ropes, which were coiled round and round upon one another and then smoothed over; (3) or the building up of the form upon a shape of basket-work or matting.

A large bathroom was discovered in the northwest corner of the quadrangle but the actual residential quarters seem to have occupied the east wing. There are the remains of a Megaron, or great hall of state, approached directly from the central court, near which were found painted reliefs, illustrating scenes of the bull-ring, with female as well as male toreadors. These and other reliefs, some of which also commemorated incidents of bull-fighting, were not carved upon the stone, as in the Egyptian temples, or executed in tiles, as in Assyrian or Persian temples, but applied to the wall with hard plaster. This method, known as gesso work, was used later in Byzantine decoration and by the Italians of the Renaissance, for decorative details; by Pinturricchio, for example, in the Borgia apartments of the Vatican. It has been revived by modern mural decorators; John S. Sargent, for instance, employing it in some of his panels in the Boston Public Library.

To the south of the great hall a staircase, of which three flights and traces of a fourth are still preserved, descended to a series of halls and private rooms. Attached to one of these, identified as the “Queen’s Megaron,” was a bathroom, decorated with frescoes of flying fish. The drainage system in this part of the palace includes a water-closet and is of a complete and modern kind.

The character and features of this palace are repeated on a smaller scale in those discovered at Phæstus, Hagia Triada, and other spots in Crete, and resemble in the main those of Mycenæ and Tiryns.

A glance at the map of ancient Greece shows that these last two cities, situated at the north of the rich plain of Argolis, commanded the approaches to the peninsula of the Peloponnesus; Mycenæ occupying a strategic position on the highroad; Tiryns, on the sea. They were equally important in resisting invasion from the North across the Isthmus of Corinth, and in the struggle for supremacy that was waged between Argolis and the Peloponnesus. Accordingly, the distinguishing feature of each city was that it occupied an acropolis, the natural strength of which was increased by fortifications built with irregular blocks of stone of great size, in the style known as Cyclopean.

Mycenæ.—Those at Mycenæ surrounded an area which is roughly triangular in plan, the main entrance being through the above mentioned portal of the Lion Gate. Its side posts and lintel are composed of monoliths and surmounted by the famous lion-relief, which fills the triangular space formed by the gradual projection of the stones of the wall. The pillar or fetish-post corresponds to the alabaster columns, now in the British Museum, which flanked the entrance of the Treasury or Tomb of Atreus, just outside the Lion Gate.