For Greek art, as we have already said, was not an expression solely of the senses; but of the sensations guided by the intellect; and it was just as much a part of a Greek’s intellectual training to know and understand and feel—in a word, appreciate—art, as it was to fit himself for other services to the State. Yet, do not forget it, the Hellenes were a race of traders and manufacturers, like the backbone of our communities to-day.
CHAPTER II
HELLENIC ARCHITECTURE
We have noted in the previous chapter that Hellenic art, like Hellenic culture generally, was a product of the senses guided by the intellect—the expression of intellectualised sensations. To his crude sensations the artist applied very much the same process that the modern scientist has applied to crude oil, until, through experiments guided by observation and reasoning, he has developed refined oil, which gives the purest and intensest possible illumination. Thus the Hellenic artists, through generations, refined upon the forms of their architecture, to create a unity, distinguished by fitness, proportion, harmony and rhythm, until they brought it to the highest degree of expressional capacity; appealing alike to feeling and to reason. It reached its highest expression in the temple, the supreme monument of the community’s civic consciousness.
The developed form of the Hellenic Temple resembled the Egyptian in being a product of the “post and beam” principle of construction; but differed in its purpose that the outside rather than the inside should present superior dignity of design. The chief feature of the latter was the Order, as it is called in Hellenic and Roman architecture, or combination of columns and entablature. It might be confined to a portico at the entrance or supplemented by another portico in the rear, or still further extended by a colonnade that surrounded all
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HELLENIC ORDERS