The Parthenon

Of surviving monuments, none characterizes this Classical moment in Greek art better than the Parthenon, which still dominates the city of Athens and the surrounding country for many miles (4.14)- Bold in outline, delicate in detail, majestically imposing, yet built to a scale of proportion so carefully regulated by the physical and mental capacities of humanity that it is not at all overpowering, the Parthenon is so designed that all the parts are intimately adjusted in scale and size to one another and to the whole. It is a product of that rare combination of abstract thought and sensual feeling which typifies the Greek achievement. Though sadly damaged (mainly by the explosion of a Turkish powder-magazine in 1687) and robbed of most of its sculpture (now in the British Museum), it still retains the timeless quality which Plutarch ascribed to the buildings on the Acropolis (4,15) some 500 years after their erection. 'They were created in a short time for all time', he wrote.'Each in its fineness was even then at once age-old; but in the freshness of its vigour it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought.' The significance of this extraordinary group of buildings cannot, however, be fully understood without reference to the circumstances in which they were erected and the earlier history of Greek architecture.

The first temple of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis seems to have been built between 570 and 560 BC. But even before the Persians demolished it another more grandiose temple had been begun on an artificial platform raised above the summit of the hill. After the defeat of the Persians the first building task for the Athenians was, naturally, the repair and reconstruction of dwelling-houses and the city's fortifications. Nothing is known as to what efforts were made to repair the damage to the Acropolis and although it is possible that work was resumed on the Parthenon in the 460s, the building we know today was not begun until 447 BC. Its structure was completed in 438 BC and the sculpture set in place in the pediments in 432 BC. Two architects are recorded: Callicrates and Ictinus (author of a long-lost book about the building). Phidias, who created the colossal chryselephantine - i.e. gold and ivory -statue of Athena placed inside the temple, is said to have supervised all the sculptural work.

The promoter of the whole undertaking was Pericles, an aristocrat by birth who won the support of the poorer classes, gave Athenian democracy its definitive form and led the state from 460 until his death in 429 BC. His ostensible and closely related aims were to glorify the city of Athens and to honour its divine protectress. The birth of Athena and her struggle with Poseidon for the land of Attica were the subjects of sculpture in the pediments. On the metopes carvings of combats between gods and giants, men against centaurs and Amazons - the civilized versus the savage or barbarian - may well have been intended as an allegory of the Greek war with the Persians. To finance it he diverted funds subscribed by the allies and subject-states to Athens for mutual defence against further Persian aggression. This was denounced at the time as dishonest, especially as the Parthenon was one of a number of public works initiated by Pericles as a means of providing well-paid employment for the class on which he relied for political support - the demos or free citizens. It is, however, likely that some of the men were slaves hired out by their owners.

The Parthenon is the supreme example of the Doric temple, a type of building evolved in the course of the preceding two centuries - and one made so familiar by later imitations throughout the Western world that its original purpose and peculiarities are too often overlooked. Greek temples were not designed for ritual. Religious ritual was focused on the open-air altar where sacrifices were made to the gods, not on the temple which stood behind it. Other altars proliferated in public and private places, in town and in the country. The temple was built to enshrine the statue of the deity to whom it was dedicated - a statue which could be seen through its open doors and was sometimes carried outside. Essentially a show-piece, the temple testified to the piety, and also to the wealth and power, of the city which lavished funds on it -Greek writers record the great importance attached to the mundane value of objects dedicated to the gods. It was a static type of architecture: the visitor passed round and into, not through, a Greek temple. Emphasis was placed on its exterior rather than - as in Egypt - its interior.

Greeks learned the technique of building with posts and lintels, or rather stone columns and entablatures, from Egypt. But to answer their own needs they turned the Egyptian temple inside out, using columns mainly to support the outer framework of the roof, which was also carried by the walls of the chamber or cella, with further columns inside only when necessitated by width. (In form it may possibly have derived from the megaron, see p. 85.) The sequence in which a Greek temple was built is instructive. First a stepped platform of stone was laid out, then the columns (composed of drums held together by central pegs) were erected and the blocks of the entablature set on top of them. Only then did work begin on the walls of the cella.

The origin of the embellishments of the Doric order is more than a little obscure. In Roman times it was stated that they were derived from the tradition of building in wood, that the tapering column followed the natural shape of a tree-trunk and the concave grooves of fluting repeated its rough shaping with an adze, that the triglyphs of the frieze represented the ends of planks bound together to serve as rafters, and that the guttae beneath them acted as pegs to keep them in place (see Glossary under Order). In fact, however, there is no evidence that wooden columns were roughly fluted with an adze; triglyphs do not appear in a Doric temple where rafters would end in a wooden building, nor indeed is it conceivable that beams would ever have been cut into planks and then joined together again. Nevertheless, these elements of a Doric temple were obviously derived in some way from carpentry, and it seems likely that they were used quite deliberately to give visual intelligibility and an appearance of structural soundness and coherence to buildings in what was, for Greece, a new medium. For Doric is quintessentially stone architecture, conditioned by the potentialities and limitations of blocks resting on one another without mortar (concealed metal clamps were used to resist lateral thrusts). The decorative elements have only an apparent functional significance, though they soon became the distinguishing features of the style.

Little survives of the earliest known Doric temples built about 540 BC, at Corinth, but that at Paestum in southern Italy of about the same date shows how robust and massive they were (4,16). By the early fifth century BC a more athletically trim version had been developed in Attica, facilitated perhaps by the fine local marble which needed no stucco coating to give a smooth, sharp finish but permitted effects of great delicacy and precision. Much of the beauty of the Parthenon derives from the wonderful bloom and texture of the marble, though it must have looked rather different when the moldings were brightly painted.

The Doric temple, especially when seen obliquely - the lay-out of sanctuaries reveals that the oblique view was that envisaged by the architect - appears to be perfectly rectilinear and regular (4,14). This is a carefully contrived illusion. The lines are not straight nor are the columns equally spaced. Appreciating that true verticals appear to slope and true horizontals to sag in the middle, Greek architects introduced what are called 'optical refinements' to compensate for what might have been disturbing visual effects (though doubts have been expressed as to the precise intentions of the architects). The optical refinements of the Parthenon are so effective that they pass unnoticed until they are pointed out. The whole platform, for example, is very gently curved down from the centre -like the tip of a vast dome. The sides of the platform and the steps beneath are convex curves (the centre of each long side is about 4ms, 10cm, higher than its ends). This line is repeated, but with the curve slightly reduced, in the entablature. The columns all slope inwards, though by no more than 2 inches (6cm); those at the angles are also a couple of inches thicker than the others to allow for apparent diminution when silhouetted against the sky. To compensate for another optical illusion the columns are shaped on the principle of entasis (see Glossary) so that they do not taper directly to the top but bulge out very slightly (by % of an inch, 1.7cm) about two-fifths of the way up the shaft. Above them the entablature slants slightly inwards. The columns also appear to be spaced regularly, but the three at each corner are closer together than the rest and the six in the centre of the front and back are wider apart than those down the sides.

These optical refinements are by no means peculiar to the Parthenon: they were employed with variations only in degree in all Greek temples of the fifth century BC. They do not, however, seem initially to have been worked out, as it were, on the drawing-board. (It is not known, of course, how Greek temples and other buildings were designed, but plans and sections and elevations must have been drawn in some way, either on papyrus or other material or in a sand-tray.) The stages by which a temple was erected allowed a fairly wide margin for improvisation while the work was in progress. And this may account for variations from regularity which can hardly have been accidental, which cannot have been intended to correct optical illusions, but do, in fact, give the Parthenon an elasticity, a vitality, the very slightest shimmer of movement, conspicuously lacking in its imitations. There is a free-hand element in the building, as in the sculptures that adorn it. The main proportions are very simple and the entirely satisfying relationship in size between the various parts seems to have been determined not by mathematics but by rule of thumb - or rather, rule of eye. A theorist of the first century AD, Heliodorus of Larisa, may have reflected the attitude of Ictinus and his contemporaries when he remarked:

The aim of the architect is to give his work a semblance of being well-proportioned and to devise means of protection against optical illusion so far as possible, with the object, not of factual, but of apparent equality of measurements and proportion. (Heliodorus, Optica, tr. A.W. Lawrence)

As soon as the structure of the Parthenon was complete a ceremonial entrance-way, the Propylaea, to the sanctuary on the Acropolis was begun, but never finished as work was interrupted by the Peloponnesian War. For an awkward sloping site the architect Mnesicles devised a complex building with two Doric facades like the fronts of temples linked by an Ionic colonnade (4,17). Two later buildings on the Acropolis were wholly Ionic - the exquisite little temple of Athena Nike or Victory (4,18) and the Erechtheum (4,19). As its name suggests, the Ionic style originated in the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the islands of the eastern Aegean which came under their cultural influence. Greek civilization owed much to this area. It was much richer in natural resources than mainland Greece and this may be reflected in an architecture less austere than the Doric and characterized by delicately carved moldings, slender columns and volute capitals (4,20). Doric was regarded by mainland or Dorian Greeks as their 'national' style and seems to have been associated with moral and especially with manly virtues. The first buildings in the Peloponnese with Ionic features were little treasuries constructed by eastern Greeks at the sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi/The presence of temples with Ionic columns beneath the Doric Parthenon on the Acropolis may therefore have had a political significance, to suggest the unity of the Greek world led by Athens against the Persians.

. Little is known about the earliest Greek temples in Ionia. But some eighth- or seventh-century BC capitals found at Larisa and elsewhere in Anatolia are of the so-called Aeolic' type, composed of curling members or volutes. Similar capitals were carved for Persepolis about 500 BC by craftsmen from Ionia, which was then part of the Persian empire (see p. 117). By this time the Ionic capital, which may derive from the Aeolic' (the point is disputed), had already been given its definitive form. Despite their decorative effect, both these types of capital are more truly functional than the square slab of the Doric order, for they spread the bearing surface of the column in line with the horizontal member of its supports (see Glossary under Order). In Ionic architecture the emphasis is, however, on ornament which elaborates structure. The frieze, uninterrupted by triglyphs, provided the field for a continuous band of figurative relief, as in the temple of Athena Nike. Sometimes columns were replaced by statues, as on the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi and the Erechtheum on the Athenian Acropolis. In Doric temples, on the other hand, sculpture seems to have been applied to, rather than to have formed part of, the structure - for example, rectangular reliefs in the metopes and groups of figures in very high relief or carved in the round to fill the pediments. As all this sculpture was placed far above eye-level it called for treatment entirely different from that of Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian reliefs.

The earliest substantial groups of pedimental sculpture come from the temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina near Athens. They date from two periods, before and after the Persian invasion of 480 BC. Both groups represent Homeric battle scenes with figures in similar poses - much more varied than in any other sculpture of the time - but markedly different in handling. A fallen warrior from the earlier pediment has the stiffness of a kouros who has been toppled over, while his opposite number is shown in a far less awkwardly contrived manner (4,21). Similarly, the body of the former is schematically rendered and retains a kind of stoniness; that of the latter seems almost to be of flesh and blood. Moreover, an expressiveness in the face of the second warrior, a suggestion of thought and feeling, links him with the world of the great fifth-century BC tragedies.

The second of the Aegina pediments probably dates from the same years as the bronze Charioteer at Delphi, cast to record a victory in the games of 474 or 478 BC - one of the finest and best preserved of all Greek statues and one of the very few which can be firmly dated (4,22). Here there is no violent movement and the boy's regularly handsome face seems at first to be almost expressionless; yet the figure has an animating inner vitality; an ideal of moderation or the 'golden mean' - 'nothing in excess', the famous saying inscribed in the temple at Delphi - was surely the guiding principle of the creator of the Charioteer. The statue reveals its breathing life in only very slight deviations from regularity. The folds of the lower part of the tunic, which at first sight might seem as rigid as the fluting of a Doric column, are ruffled by a gentle tremor; creases in the clinging drapery of the sleeves are nearly, but not quite, symmetrical; though looking straight ahead, the upper part of the charioteer's body and his head are turned just a little to the right. Again, although the figure's stance is motionless, the spectator feels drawn to move round it. From every angle it reveals a different but equally clear-cut outline, a pattern of three-dimensional forms modelled with such an acutely developed appreciation of the effects of light and shade that nothing is blurred and nothing over-emphasized. (The same could be said of a Greek temple.) Once it has been seen from a succession of viewpoints, the face also takes on intensity and depth, a look of concentrated thought with the eyes unselfconsciously trained on the horses.

The subtlety of the modelling of the Charioteer, the extreme refinement and sensitivity of his strong, highly-bred hands and feet would all have been lost in a statue placed high up in a pediment. The heroic-scale Apollo, which originally stood some 50 feet (15m) above ground level on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, for instance, was carved to be seen from a distance and from only a limited number of viewpoints (4,13). The subtleties of the

Charioteer would have been out of place here. The gesture is bold, the turn of the head emphatic, the body is rendered in broad flat planes. Standing in the centre of the pediment (4,24), quelling a struggle between drunken centaurs and lapiths (members of a mythological Thessalian tribe) raging on either side, this Apollo seems to symbolize divine order - the triumph of light over darkness and, perhaps, culture over savagery. Victory is gained simply by his radiant presence as a perfect embodiment of the Greek ideal of physical beauty at its simplest and severest. The figure has all the sublime imperturbability, the remote aloofness and arrogant self-assurance that we associate with the word Olympian.

The statues from the pediments at Olympia are carved in what has been called the 'severe style' (or 'transitional' or'early Classical'), with which the Delphi Charioteer and other sculptures of these years (now known only from copies) are associated. The draperies of the stern-faced female figures, for instance - quite unlike the light and ornamented clothing of earlier korai - seem to be made of thick, heavy material which falls in regular folds (though coloring may originally have made them look less austere). All these statues retain traces, nevertheless, of an Archaic hardness of form and rigidity of pose which were eliminated from sculptures carved little more than two decades later for the Athenian Parthenon. A few are still in place, but the majority, often called the 'Elgin Marbles', were removed in 1799 by the Earl of Elgin and sold to the British Museum in 1816. Comprising free-standing statues from the pediments, several high-relief metopes and a long low-relief frieze, from the exterior of the cella, this group of work illustrates the mastery attained by Attic carvers. In conception and style they seem to reflect a single artistic personality and Phidias, the leading Attic sculptor of the time, has been named, but without evidence. Whether the figures are shown in action or at rest they are all at ease -too much so, perhaps, in the metopes where lapiths battle against centaurs, gods against giants, Greeks against Amazons, without overstraining a muscle or ever falling into an inelegant posture (4^9).

The Delphi Charioteer

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 762