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
