The work done by Nature in various archways, some pointed and many round-headed, is a surprise to many persons. Yet Nature’s custom is to build in curves and circles, as in the trunks of trees, and the shapes of flowers, and the forms of birds’ nests. She hates angles, and particularly right angles; these she makes in her moods of violence, when she flashes into zigzag lightning, or splinters trees and rocks with an earthquake. We ourselves are accustomed from early youth to squared shapes in handicraft, yet our actions often speak to us of mankind’s primitive fondness for circular huts and round pit-dwellings. We find it difficult to walk forward in a straight line, the steps we take having a tendency to curve; and untaught boxers never hit straight from the shoulder, their arms swing in segments of a circle. Art students, again, begin by drawing “too round,” so they have to be shown how “to square their touch.” Are you tempted to believe that the spinning of our globe has transmitted to all living things the routine of its movement?
In any case, let us keep well in mind the different symbolism implied by curves, angles, straight lines, and circles. Squares and oblongs denote repose and weight, while circles and curved lines are identified with everything in the universe that denotes life, mystery, intelligence, fertility, light and heat, movement and speed, and space illimitable. Human progress itself is a circular ascent along the finest spiral lines, for civilization as a whole never comes back to the same conditions, but creeps above them to some trivial extent. The greatest circular or rounded shapes are the sun, the full moon, our own little world, the human skull, and the human heart; eggs, flowers, nests, the shapes of bones, and the wheel, without which dilatory progress would have been far and away too pedestrian. The first wheel was a rolling stone; afterwards men noticed that a log touched by accident on a hill rolled down for some distance; and at last a person of genius cut solid sections from a tree-trunk and made the earliest wheel of handicraft.
Just one more point ought to be noticed with sympathetic care: that arches in art are more suggestive than circles; they have the mystery of a beautiful part taken from a whole—a whole that looks methodical. We feel this mystery whenever we watch how the moon grows from a silver crescent into a radiant circle. A thing complete dulls an attention that looks on, whereas growth or the suggestion of growth has the stimulus of hope and faith. To culminate is to begin a decline. Even the circle of the sun would be tiresome but for the grey days that renew a truism into a gracious truth. This explains why arches in art make an appeal to the imagination that circles never equal. For example, wheel-windows in Gothic architecture never have the magic of pointed windows. Our eyes travel around them and cannot escape in a flight upwards. Nature, then, when she produced arches, brought into the world a very noble inspiration, and therefore very remote from the dull and slow mimicry of mankind.
In fact, the earliest known vaults of handicraft have but a trivial age in the vast antiquity of human life. Let us take a rapid glance at them, so as to note their rudimentary construction. They are built not with stones directed towards the intrados, but with stones in horizontal courses that jut out one beyond another, just as Nature’s archways in stratified rocks have a succession of layers. At Abydos, one of the most ancient cities of Upper Egypt, there is a vault of this primitive sort in the temple of Rameses the Second, who reigned for sixty-seven years, from about 1292 to about 1225 B.C.[58] Another is found at Thebes in the temple of Ammon-Rē, but the most ancient specimen of all is at Gizeh, in the great pyramid of Menkaura. Now Menkaura belonged to the Fourth Dynasty, so that his date is more than 3000 years B.C. His sepulchral chamber is ceiled with a pointed arch—not a true arch, of course, the stones being merely cantilevers opposite to each other, with their undersides cut to the pointed shape. To understand the structural method, close your hands together at their full length, then open them gradually into the form of a pointed arch: the united finger-tips represent the apex of the vault, and the curving fingers represent the long archstones. Here is a departure from the horizontal layers of stone, but with these also pointed arches have been built.
For instance, Italy has a very good example at Arpino, in Campania. “Arpino occupies the lower part of the site of the ancient Volscian town of Arpinum, which was finally taken from the Samnites by the Romans in 305 B.C..... The ancient polygonal walls, which are still finely preserved, are among the best in Italy. They are built of blocks of pudding-stone, originally well jointed, but now much weathered. They stand free in places to a height of eleven feet, and are about seven feet wide at the top. A single line of wall, with mediæval round towers at intervals, runs on the north side from the present town to Civita Vecchia, on the site of the ancient citadel. Here is the Porta dell’ Arco, a gate of the old wall, with an aperture fifteen feet high, formed by the gradual inclination of the two sides towards each other.”[59]
This ancient gate has a pointed arch; it belongs to the so-called “Cyclopean style.” Sir William Smith gives an illustration of the Porta dell’ Arco, and refers to “the very singular construction,” in which successive courses of stone “project over each other till they meet, so as to form a kind of pointed arch.” Yet the construction is in no respect very singular, being the simplest way in which rude arches can be copied from Nature’s models. With toy bricks of wood a child can build a Porta dell’ Arco.[60] On the other hand, art and science go together in the building of an arch with voussoirs and keystones. A long evolution separates this workmanship from the gateways at Arpino and Tiryns and Mycenae, though we cannot follow it through its gradual improvements. It is an evolution with many breaks, many related forms having perished; but experts note a difference between the Porta dell’ Arco at Arpino and similar vaults both at Mycenae and at Tiryns, where the craftsmanship dates from the Heroic Age in Greece.
The main entrance at Mycenae is called the Lion Gate, from the famed triangular arch and relief above its huge lintel-stone. The arch belongs to the method of laying stones in horizontal courses that jut out towards each other across an opening; and the decorative sculpture represents two lions that stand face to face; they are separated by a pillar and their front legs rest on a low altar-like structure that supports the pillar. The same device occurs in cut gems and in goldsmith’s work of the Mycenaean age; and the lions recall to memory those with which some Chinese bridges have been ennobled (pp. [127], [311]).
Even more remarkable are the beehive tombs at Mycenae; there are eight in all, and some others are found in the neighbourhood. Pausanias regarded them as the places where Atreus and his sons hid their treasures, but now they are looked upon as the tombs of princely families. The most important of them, just outside the Lion Gate, is called the Treasury of Atreus. It has two rooms, a square one cut in the rock, and a round one with a pointed dome. This chamber is fifty feet in height and in diameter; we go to it along a horizontal passage twenty feet wide and a hundred and fifteen feet long, with side walls of squared stone sloping up to a height of forty-five feet. “The doorway was flanked with columns of alabaster, with rich spiral ornament, now in the British Museum; and the rest of the façade was very richly decorated, as may be seen from Chipiez’s fine restoration. The inside of the vault was ornamented with attached bronze ornaments, but not, as is sometimes stated, entirely lined with bronze. It is generally supposed that these tombs, as well as those excavated in the rock, belong to a later date than the shaft tombs on the Acropolis.”[61]
In the Treasury of Atreus there are two points that interest architects more than any others. The first is the contrast between admirable decoration and hugely primitive stonework; and the other is the fact that the annulary courses forming the domed and circular chamber have this particular character, that the lateral joints of the stones hardly tend at all towards the centre. Moreover, again and again the stones are separated by a space, and this interval is filled up with small rubble which seems to have been pressed together with the greatest care. These irregular courses, whose inside diameter grows less and less as the circular wall grows higher and higher, forms at last a sort of pointed dome over the great tomb. M. Degrand says very well: “A vault of these proportions must count as a memorable work. Its construction here and there makes use of colossal stones, and it subsists almost intact after more than thirty centuries of existence. At a pinch its architect and workmen could have erected some masonry bridges in accord with the same technical method.”
In wide arches of this sort the resistance of good mortars would have been called upon to play the leading part; but in arches of narrow span the stones could have been used dry, and such arches may well have displaced many a primitive footway of logs that rested on stone piers.