Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 2

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

Our own branch of civilisation and art may be said to have arisen on the banks of the Euphrates, of the Tigris, and of the Nile, and to have moved westward with a quiet course along the genial shores of the Mediterranean; while the Eastern branch took a contrary direction by India and China, reaching Japan, and perhaps the opposite continent of America. Let us, however, confine our attention to our own branch.

Though the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris were the nursery of our traditions, and though recent discovery has made us in some degree familiar with their architectural monuments, we, nevertheless, fail to trace them back to a period which will compare with the antiquity of the remains on the banks of the Nile. In studying the one we long for relics carrying us back to a date even approaching that of the known history of the inhabitants, while in the other we are perplexed to find chronological room for works stretching back into such unknown regions of the past.

Egypt must, we may fear, ever remain a land of mystery. Its chronology seems inscrutable; its painting, its sculpture, and its architecture alike wonderful and mysterious. One flash of historical light shines upon its early days—like the lightning upon the midnight landscape—in the Scriptural history of those three centuries during which the people of Israel sojourned there, and helped in their slavery to prepare materials for its structures. After this it seems again involved in indistinctness till the period of its decline. Its monuments seem continuous through all these ages, and even onwards to the days of the Roman Empire; but how early they commenced no antiquary has yet been able to show; while the earliest and latest monuments—those preceding Greek architecture by, perhaps, fifteen hundred years, and those erected when that art was in decay—as clearly belong to one and the same style as do the earlier and later of our own Mediæval buildings.

Their character may be said to be threefold. The imitation almost of mountains in the pyramids, the rock-cut tombs, and the architecture proper, which is columnar in its most stupendous form, and whose greatest remaining monument is the mighty Hall of Karnac, with its hundred and thirty columns, perhaps the most impressive of all the works of antiquity. All these were accompanied by painting and sculpture of a highly mythic but most marked and characteristic kind.

An art like this, existing in full perfection in its ancient monuments, and also as a still living art, side by side with the rise of Grecian architecture, could not fail to exercise some influence upon it; yet the evidences of that influence are far from being clear. The genius of the two peoples was absolutely distinct, and Egypt was already a conquered nation while Greece was making its early strides towards fame. They were, too, of wholly different races, so that, though the young nation—during those brilliant strivings which led to its surpassing all races of men in its culture—was familiar with Egypt, and must have looked with wonder at its almost appalling structures, it is, after all, but little that we can trace of actual imitation, and that, strangely enough, not of the productions of its living art, but of a phase which had been extinct fully a thousand years. The inner and earliest sanctuaries at Karnac, and an obscure rock-cut tomb at Beni Hassan, contain pillars to which we trace some resemblance in the Grecian Doric, but whether that resemblance was intentional or accidental no one can say. Curiously, the tomb at Beni Hassan evinces proof of the imitation of timber construction, which gives it an additional alliance with the Doric; but can we conceive of a new art, founded on wood construction, being imitated from an art of a thousand years back, which chanced to evince the same conditions? As reasonable would it be for timber constructors in our own colonies to make pilgrimages to Anglo-Saxon churches which happen to suggest a timber prototype, in search of types for their new structures.

More reasonable, however, it may be to suppose that the latest type of Greek art, the Corinthian capital, may have been suggested by the foliated and bellshaped capitals of Egyptian columns.

Passing, for a moment, from the Nile to the Tigris, we find buried under the Assyrian mounds an architecture as different as possible from the Greek, yet containing a few almost accidental foreshadowings of some of its details. This architecture seems, however, to have influenced firstly that of Babylon (now almost wholly lost), and subsequently that of the Persian monarchy, which brings us again in contact with the Greeks.

Here we find, at last, a direct similarity in taste; for, different as are their capitals, no one can look at drawings of the columns of the Chehil Minar—the great hall or temple built by Xerxes at Persepolis—without being convinced that there was a near relationship in their style to that of Greece. This resemblance, however, is not to the earliest phase of Greek—the Doric—which was its contemporary, but to its second phase—the Ionic—which, putting aside the chronological difficulty, need not be wondered at, as the Ionian cities had long lain within the Persian monarchy. Yet it goes to prove that the influence of Persian architecture was unconnected with the origin of that of Greece, and only affected its more advanced stage.

I view Greek architecture, then, in the main, as an art of spontaneous growth. Its first form, the Doric, as strictly and absolutely Greek; the second, the Ionic, as Greek in the main, but with a few suggestions from the land of the Great King; and the third, the Corinthian, as equally Greek, but with one single suggestion, perhaps from Egypt; the whole as the spontaneous creation of that most wonderful, in intellectual power, of all the races of man—that race, inspired as it would almost seem, of God, to be our instructors in literature and art, and our initiators in science, just as was another people to be the teachers of His holy religion.

The actual origin of Greek architecture is buried in impenetrable obscurity. If the building called the Treasury of Atreus, or the Tomb of Agamemnon, was really of that period, it would distinctly prove that what we now know as Grecian architecture was unknown to the heroes in the “Iliad,” inasmuch as over its entrance remains a little piece of highly-decorative columnar work, bearing no resemblance to the subsequent architecture of Greece, and going far to prove that these early inhabitants of Greece had a style of building which did not evince a timber but a stone original. Of these early structures, including the Cyclopean walls of the Pelasgian cities, Mr. Freeman eloquently remarks:—“These awful remains of the world’s youth stand before us as the relics of unrecorded days, of the dim times of poetic legend, enveloped as they were in religious mystery for ages before a line of what we deem ancient history was penned. The historians and philosophers of the days of Pericles knew no more of the authors of these gigantic fragments than ourselves; all that survived, even to them, were the shadows of fallen greatness, the feeble echoes of a voice long since hushed in death. Our ancients had to explore the remains of these far earlier days by the same faint glimmerings of legend and tradition as ourselves ... and to us, whose early youth is spent among the immortal lays, whose living substance is called up by even the pictured resemblance of these massive piles—monuments, as we would fain believe, of the days of Achilles and the Atridæ, and the old time before them—to us every rugged stone seems vocal with some old heroic legend. Each gateway may have seen the marshalling of heroes arrayed to man the thousand ships of Argos, and to wait upon their chariot-wheels, to whom Zeus had consigned her twofold throne and sceptre.”