Good evening everyone. This is the first lecture
in a series that we've decided to do on the history
of Western architecture. The idea behind the series was
that these were going to be basic lectures - introductory
lectures for people who have little or no background in the subject, but also that might be suitable for people
who do have background in the subject but like an occasional refresher. So they're going to be pretty basic. And one thing I want to say at the outset, particularly pertaining
to tonight's talk on Greek architecture, is that there is a lot of uncertainty about almost every aspect of
ancient Greek architecture. There is uncertainty about attributions to architects and artists.
There is uncertainty about dating. If for example, you're interested in a particular Greek
building and you go online in search of its dates, you're going
to probably come up with, in any given case, 10 different
dates. You consult books, you're going to find
different dates. Tomorrow, some scholar is going to
decide that we were off by 50 years or off by 120 years about a particular building. Also architectural historians
and archeologists fight fiercely in the pages of
scholarly journals about interpretations of this or that, how to interpret basic architectural
elements on their derivations, how to interpret the content of freezes, what have you. And I want to say that
it's not my purpose tonight to stake out any ground in
these debates whatsoever. I'm going to give you what
I think are the basics with which to begin and with
which to begin your own explorations into these subjects.
So if you were, for example, to do some further reading about one of
the buildings that I talk about tonight and it completely contradicts
what I tell you, that's good. I'm giving you the starting point not the definitive answer. Now as you can see, behind me is the main reading room
of the New York Public Library. I've been using this as
my Zoom background ever since I began to live on Zoom, which was two months ago, and I've now done about 50
- counting my classes at NYU and lectures and this and that
- I've done about 50 of these Zoom presentations. I know you're probably already thinking
that I should be better at it than I am, but it's probably gonna take
another couple of months before I'm fully adept. But in any event, I
chose this background because it's, well, one of my favorite rooms
in the world. But beyond that, it's appropriate for tonight. It's
not what you'd call a Greek room. There are many, many elements to this building
that derive from classical sources that are post-Greek. But that said, the Greek elements are still
all here: decorative elements, ways of using the orders. If we were to go downstairs in
this building to the corridors that lead off from the Astor Hall - main entrance hall of the New York Public
Library - the walls are actually lined with Pentelic marble imported from
mountain Pentelikon in Greece. This is the marble that was used
for the buildings of the Acropolis. The point that I'm making that I'm
going to make several other times during tonight's talk is that we
live with ancient Greece every day. We live with ancient Greece
in so many different ways. We live with ancient Greece
politically and emotionally. We live with it, as well, architecturally. And so this isn't a remote subject matter. This is something that
should actually help you to derive greater enjoyment and understanding from the city
or cities - since we have an international audience tonight: that's one of the things you can
do with Zoom - the cities around you. So without further ado, I'm going to do what in Zoom
lingo is called 'sharing my screen.' The architecture of Classical
Greece: An introduction. The picture that you see, by the way, is from a painting which I'm going to show you a little bit later by a man named Leo von Klenze, who was an excellent German/Bavarian architect in the mid 19th century. Here we see Greece. I'm sure that you all already have
some basic notion of Greek geography. You know that there's the
Aegean Sea on one side, the Ionian Sea on the other. And if you sort of focus on the center of this map and
then move down and to your left ever so slightly, you will see Athens. A great deal of what I'm going to be
talking about tonight is about Athens, but not all of it. And
where I thought appropriate, I'm going to show you maps so
that you have a sense of where in the Greek world the buildings
are that I'm talking about. And I say the Greek world
because the Greek world comprises much more than just Greece. It encompasses the islands around Greece,
but also if you look to the right, you see where it says, Asia Minor: Turkey. Many of the greatest, most important
Greek buildings are in Turkey. And although it's not
visible on this map, also, this is the case with
Southern Italy and Sicily where there were long
standing Greek settlements. So Greek architecture spans quite a realm, not as vast as Roman architecture
that I'll be talking about next week, but pretty vast, nonetheless. So as I said, some basics: real basic basics. These are the three periods that
you need to know abou if you want to talk about classical Greek architecture. There's the period that we
call the Archaic period, and there is a period called the
Classical period which follows that. And what's a little bit odd
is that there is a lot of architecture from the Archaic period
that we nonetheless referred to as classical. And of course all the architecture
of the classical period is classical. And then the period
that follows upon that, the Hellenistic period is also classical. But historians and archeologists do divide Greek history into these periods. Basic list of names: famous Greeks and their dates. These dates are very approximate.
If I were being very scholarly, I would put "c." in front
of every number that you see. But I just want you to have
kind of the basic lay of the land. Thales of Miletus, the
top name on this list, is the person recognized
generally as the father of Western philosophy. There are the great playwrights:
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. And right in the middle of those names
is the name of the great Athenian statesman, Pericles, the man
who gave his name to a whole period in Greek history
that we call Periclean Athens, which will get kind of
disproportionate play in tonight's talk. The name
after Euripides is Phidias, the great sculptor among the Greeks. And then there are the great
philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the last name on the
list, Zeno of Citium, the father of what we
call Stoic philosophy. Some major events. And when you're thinking about the
architecture of ancient Greece, you're not necessarily always going
to be thinking where they fall in relation to these major events. Suffice it to say that
the golden age of Greece, as we often think of it, Periclean Athens, was a very short-lived period in between wars, massive bloody wars. There were a lot of
those in Greek history. But it is the sort of
peaceful interregnum that accounts for that
disproportionate share of what is most important in Greek
architecture and art. And you'll note also that
Athens experienced a plague. I just thought that I would throw
that in because these days we're very conscious of the
history of infectious diseases. This is Raphael's great
painting, The School of Athens, which depicts many of the
great Greek philosophers. There is a key to this that
you can find on Wikipedia which is a great deal of fun. You can see who all of
the philosophers are. What's so interesting about
this painting, of course, is that although these are
all Greek philosophers, note the setting in which
Raphael places them: it is a very un-Greek setting. It is really an Italian
Renaissance setting based on Roman and not Greek precedent. Why would he have done that? Why wouldn't he have shown
them in a Greek setting? There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I think he wanted
to make the point that his philosophers, though remote in
time are, in an important way, our contemporaries. It's
kind of like, you know, Shakespeare in modern dress, right? But there's another reason as well, and that is Raphael had no idea what a
Greek setting looked like and if that seems remarkable, given that he was working in Italy
and that isn't so very far from Greece, you've got to realize that our
understanding of Greek settings of Greek architecture, of the artifacts of Greek
civilization was extremely limited until the 18th century. And this is another theme that I will be discussing a little bit as we proceed because it's actually rather important. There is a closeup showing
the two giants of Greek philosophy the two giants,
indeed, of Western philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. It was the British philosopher,
Alfred North Whitehead, who said all philosophy since Plato is a foot note to Plato. And I think that there's much
to be said for that view. And it reminds us of
just how important the Greeks were. This is now
a map of Periclean Athens. Here you see the basic layout of the city. It wasn't a large city
by present day standards. It was perhaps half the size of
Greenwich, Connecticut. How is that? This is not a megalopolis
that we're talking about. We're talking about something that
our present day definition would be a town, not a city. Nonetheless, by the standards of its day, it
was a very important place indeed. It was the administrative
center of a large, much larger realm. And knowing that it was actually a rather
small place makes it all the more impressive to us. When you think of sort of the
concentration of genius in this small place the ratio of genius to the population, it's actually mind boggling. So just a little bit down
into the right of center, you see the Acropolis about
which you will learn more. To the left of the
Acropolis the Areopagus. And just above that is the Agora. And these are all places
that are going to feature in what follows here. I have
arrows pointing to these things. The Agora was the market place. That's where the sort of real
life of the city took place. That's where you would go if you
wanted to experience the hustle and bustle of Athens. If you wanted to run into
people in the street, that is where you would go. The Acropolis, the religious center, by a contrast, would have been rather dull. It wasn't where you went in order
to experience the pulse of the city. It is rather where you went
to commune with the gods. I have arrows pointing
to the locations of the Academy, which is associated with
both Socrates and Plato. That was in the suburbs,
just outside the city. And then lower right, you see the Lyceum where
Socrates hung out and which was later, of course, taken up by Aristotle. And you also see the an arrow
pointing to the Areopagus, the assembly of elders. More sort of the political
heart if you will, of Periclean Athens. Now
I'm going to begin with brisk survey of building types in ancient Greece. I'm not going to jump right in with
the discussion of temples and the orders. That's going
to come a little later. I want simply for you to
know that there were indeed a variety of building
types in ancient Greece, that this story isn't
entirely about temples. It's only about 80% about
temples. So there are, for example, the stoas. The stoas of ancient Greece. They were to be found in all
the towns and cities in Athens. These were very important places. This is a stoa from
the Hellenistic period, and one which was actually re-built. And here I should sound another
very important theme at the outset, which is that none of these buildings exist intact.
Some of them have been reconstructed. Some of them we know only
through artists' renderings. Some of them we know really
only through their ruins. And this is what accounts
in large measure for all the sort of disputation and controversy about, you know, the buildings, their purposes,
their dates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the stoas where central to
the public life with Athens. If you went to the Agora,
you would find, for instance, that there were many
stoas all round the Agora. These were covered walkways. They serve basically as places for people to get out of the sun or
the rain places for people to mingle, to hang out, and various other purposes besides. I'm sure that on a rainy day, it's where you would find the, the
Senegalese guys selling umbrellas, for instance, it would be in the stoas.
If you look at the top, there is a stoa called Stoa Poikile. And this was where the philosopher
Zeno of Citium hung out and publicly philosophized in a way
that would probably get him arrested today. But his school of philosophy
became known as stoicism, which derives from the
word "stoa." And there were, as you see all
around, many of these stoas. The one which we just saw and which
we're seeing again, the Stoa of Attalos was a later one, as I say,
from the Hellenistic period, not from the Classical period.
It was a two-storey stoa, which was not uncommon at that point. And it was a rather grand. You can see that this reconstruction
of the Stoa of Attalos is a building that if you were
to plunk it down in say, the middle of Pittsburgh today, would be probably the most
distinctive building in the city. This is what it looks like on the
inside of a stoa. It's very nice. And in addition to stoas
we all know that the Greeks were very big on theater. We know that Greeks basically invented a Western drama in the names
of the Greek playwrights still are very meaningful to us. Many of us still attend
productions or read the works of Aeschylus or
Euripides or Aristophanes. And these were the works that
were performed in these theaters. The theaters of ancient Greece
were very impressive structures. They had seating for thousands of
people. Some of the larger theaters, like the Theater of
Dionysus at its height, could seat 18,000 people. Basically these theaters could seat
the number of people lived in the city, which is quite a remarkable
thing and shows the centrality of theater to the lives of
the people of the city. Theaters were often located
near religious sanctuaries, and that too sort of underscores the importance, the centrality of theater to
people's lives at the time. The theaters of ancient Greece
had a basic common layout with that semi-circular seating plan, the raked seating
for the good sight lines, and then it had that
large circular area in front of the seats where the chorus held forth and we call that area
by the name of orchestra. And then beyond that was the main stage. Here's the Theater of Priene
in present day Turkey. The theaters have survived remarkably intact because that's sort
of the nature of the beast, I think, all the stone seating
and the open space of the orchestra. It's just the sort of
thing that survives the centuries pretty well. You feel when you see one of these
Greek theaters that you could stage a performance in it as it is
and you don't get that feeling about very many of the other ruins
that you encounter in the Greek world. The theater at Miletus
in Turkey, another view. You can see just how grand these theaters were. And this is an illustration
of what the theater of Dionysus (or Dionysos), which was in the
southeastern corner of the Acropolis, looked like, you
know, one of the things that I, a theater lover likes to do when
he walks around New York where I live and passes the theater is to think
of the great productions that are placed there. I walk around
and I think to myself, "True West by Sam Shepherd
at its world premier." Just to mention one recent experience
that I had walking past the Cherry Lane Theater on Commerce Street. When you're in Greece you can actually
walk past theaters and think, you know, "wow, this is where
Aristophanes' Clouds..." We don't know where it
was first performed at, but one of its early performances
was there and it kind of puts things in perspective for you. And then there is that building
type called the bouleuterion. What is a bouleuterion? It was sort of the "council house" is how
it's often translated, like the city council, the civic council. Kind of like the city
council chamber in an American city. In the democratic city
states of the Greek world, this was a very important
place where issues were discussed and debated
and various things where adjudicated. This is the
bouleuterion in Priene, again. See, very much like a
theater: seating all around. And then there was a sort of
central well where speakers held forth. So, as I say, similar to theaters. This is an illustration showing
what the bouleuterion in Miletus probably looked like. And as with the theaters and as with the stoas it was rather grand. The structure. Everything was rather grand, except
as we shall soon, see the houses. This is the plan of
Pireus, the port of Athens, by the fellow named Hippodamus of Miletus, whom we sometimes call the
father of urban planning, of Western urban planning. He is the person who absolutely
was the father of the grid iron street plan. So if you're
a New Yorker, for example, you know the New York's street grid that
was the result of the commissioner's plan of 1811. Well the roots of that New
York city street plan come from the city layouts of
Hippodamus of Miletus. He was also - I think we could
probably say - the father of zoning: the person who felt that
it should be official policy to separate one function from another within a city, not to jumble them all up. He's the father, in other words, of pretty much everything
Jane Jacobs disapproved of. Well. So anyway, you can
see here the grid iron plan. Here's another view - simplified,
schematized - of the same thing: the grid, that rectilinear
grid iron street plan, that is one of our
inheritances from the Greeks. Now this is a house in a
part of Greece where some really interesting archeological work
has been done. Olynthos in Chalcidice, which is in the Northern
part of the country, is very near the fabled Mount Athos. And here you see the courtyard of a house. The houses that people lived
in - I said that most of the buildings of these Greek
cities and towns were rather grand. And I said, that is, with the exception of houses - much
has been made of this over the years. It's been suggested that the Greeks simply weren't sort of home bound people. They lived their lives in
public and they viewed their homes as dormitories. May be some truth to that, but I think that the story is
probably a little more complicated. Houses, very often, were
two stories, as you can see. And at first blush you might think,
"houses built round court yards. How nice. That courtyard must've been
pleasant." You see the second story, it's like a balcony overlooking the
court yard and this seems rather elegant to us. But do bear in mind that
the courtyards were not pleasant places. They may have
provided some light and air, but they were also places where, you know, people chopped up
chickens and where people defecated, and so on. So,
you know, they weren't great. And so it might be - there's the
location, by the way, of Chalcidice. And this is the street plan of Olynthos, which was either by or inspired by Hippodamus of Miletus. Here we see the houses. And we've been able - "we," not me personally - but
archeologists have been able, through study of building
foundations in Olynthos, to reconstruct the whole pattern of houses and
streets of ancient Olynthos, which is pretty fantastic. But one of the things that Olynthos is
very famous for - and perhaps you've been there - one of the things that has survived are these remarkable floor mosaics from the houses. Now the houses,
I should point out, were built of mud brick and wood. They were not the sorts of
grand permanent structures that many of the principal stone
buildings of the city were. And yet, there are instances where we
know that they had some very rich decorative effects. Indeed, I
think everybody here would agree, that these floor mosaics count
as rich decorative effects. This one depicting Bellerophon. So the floor mosaics of
Olynthos are really one of the major attractions for globe trotting, cultural enthusiasts. And there was always
that room in the house where in the evenings the men would retire and conduct that soiree that we call a symposium. Perhaps you have read Plato's Symposium. My favorite of all his dialogues. And what was a symposium? Well, it's not what we would call a
symposium. It's not like, you know, ICAA sponsors a symposium on
postmodern architecture. No, it was not that kind of symposium. It was rather a certain
kind of - how shall I say - party where the men sort of hung out. They drank prodigious
quantities of wine. And indeed, the ancient Greeks in general, certainly the Athenians, drank a lot. And women were permitted in the role of servants or in this case musicians. A girl playing the aulos, which
was a woodwind instrument. And of course at a symposium, as we know
from Plato, as we know from Xenophon, great conversation might take place,
might or might not take place. But certainly the Greeks liked to
converse and they liked to philosophize. What about women? The symposium
was an exclusively male thing, and it was a rather
male dominated society. But there was one building
type in Greek cities known as the fountain house that were female preserves. The fountain house is, as its name suggests, place
where the fountain was located. It's where you went to get water. And that was women's work. Women were the household members
who went out and got water. But these fountain houses, which could, as you can see from this model,
be very attractive buildings. They were also important places in
the lives of these women because this is where they met and communed
with other women and did so on a regular basis. So this
is where women talk. This is where women
shared child-rearing tips. This is where women complained
about their husbands. This is, in other words, this was the
place where women got to sort of be on their own with other women. And thus they were very
important places in the city. In this map detail from the map
that I showed you earlier, we see the locations of two
fountain houses on the left, the southeast fountain
house and on the right, the southwest fountain house
in relation to, in this case, the South Stoa 1, and also the Aiakeion, which was sort of the court house. And this is a hydria. You see lots of these in the
classical departments of our museums, like the Greek and Roman galleries of
the Metropolitan Museum, or in this case, the British Museum. And it
depicts a fountain house scene. So the figures are women. This is sort of a better
view of the same thing. So let us move on to temple
architecture because temples were the place where people, well, I mean they were where
the city's invested the greatest resources in building. The top talent was put to work on temples. Greatest sums were expended on temples. And this is pretty much a theme throughout
the history of Western architecture recently. For example, I taught a course on American
architecture and urbanism. And at a certain point
one of the students said, "are you ever going to talk about
anything but churches?" And I thought to myself, you know, you kind of like go a years and
you're studying architectural history, nothing but churches. And
there's a good reason for that. It's that these were where the
greatest resources were expended. This is where a very, very disproportionate
share of the culture's architectural energy was put. And so it was with the
Greeks and their temples. This is where the greatest architectural energy was invested: was
in temple architecture. Now this is something that
I kind of don't want to get into because it
actually becomes rather specialized, but mention
of it must be made. The earliest Greek temples, all the way up to the Archaic
period were constructed not of stone. They were not stone buildings.
They were wooden buildings. And we have a conjectural
wooden temple visible at the top of this slide. It looks like
a log cabin, doesn't it? Well, it is a log cabin basically. But it has a very distinctive form. It has that porch. It has the columns all
around the building and you can see that it was built
that way because that is the way you built with wood. It was a post and lintel construction of the sort that is suited
to wood construction. And so it is that our understanding
of the great Greek temples is that their forms and many of their details derived from wooden architecture. That is the ultimate source of the orders, which I will be discussing in just moment. And then on the bottom half of the
slide, you see the Temple at Isthmia in the Peloponnese. This is an Archaic period temple. It's rather grand and it
shows the extent to which wooden temples could indeed become grand. And the wooden temples achieved
a certain grandeur before a stone construction came in.
This slide, believe it or not, this comes from a video game.
And I don't play video games. I've never - I'm going to come clean
with you - I have never played a video game. But I found this, there's a video game called - maybe you know it
- Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. I've never heard of it
before, frankly from 2018. But various ancient Greek settings
were recreated for it. Now, I don't know how much scholarship went into this, but goodness,
these are vivid images! This is that temple that I just
showed you. The Temple at Isthmia, a wooden temple. And you can see that it is certainly rather grand. But the temples with which
we are most familiar, the temples - the ruins of which
still exist - the temples that are the canonical works of Western
architecture are stone temples. And there was that certain
point where the Greeks decided that wooden temples wouldn't do. Wooden buildings seldom do because they are prone to deterioration
and burning down and what have you. And
so they were, as it were, translated into stone. And the translations were
pretty literal translations. The post and lintel architecture that
was suited to wooden construction was simply transposed to the new stone idiom. And we call this by
the name of trabeation. So there is probably your
first big vocabulary word that you need to remember in relation
to classical Greek architecture. It simply means post
and lintel construction. And this is wooden
architecture that has been, as I say, translated or transposed to stone. Okay, vocabulary
words. These are basic. They are very, very basic. If
you don't know them at all, they may seem a little
daunting, but they're not. Basically we use these words in describing buildings and describing
temples or anything which has a temple-like form. If a building, in the front of it, has two
columns, we call it distyle. There's three columns, tristyle.
Four columns, tetrastyle. Then pentastyle, hexistyle,
heptastyle, and so on. As I say, very basic and very easy
to find such a list on the internet. And here are a few other
common terms that are very basic in the identification
of a temple or temple-like buildings. A building that has columns
only in the front we call a prostyle building. If it has columns in the front and
in the rear we call it amphiprostyle. If there is a single row of columns
that surrounds the building, we call it peripteral. I
don't know if you're like me, but I just love words
where a T follows a P. They're just such a pleasure to enunciate. And then dipteral means a double row of columns all around the building. Ah, but then there is what we
call pseudo-peripteral. And that means that there are
columns in the front and rear, but they are not free standing columns, but what we would call engaged columns, or columns that are
embedded into the wall, or something that kind of
faintly evokes a column on the side so that it's not really a peripteral temple. But we
call it pseudoperipteral. And then there is that
thing called the tholos, which is columns in the round. And we will see an example
of that in just a moment. Here are the plans of many of those. You see at the top
center there is a tholos. Now when you look at the
plans of a Greek temple, you look for those big black dots. Big black dots are always columns. Those are where the columns are. And this ancient Greek architecture
is a matter of columns -and above all else it's about columns. So there you see the
columns are in a circle. To its right, you see a prostyle
temple and because there are four columns in the
front, that's actually a tetrastyle prostyle temple. And that's
how we say it. That's how we say it. You know, you actually like
get up in front of a classroom. You say this is a
tetrastyle prostyle temple. And you have the four dots at the bottom,
that's the four columns in the front. And then to the right of that,
four columns on the bottom, four columns on the top,
meaning front and back. So tetrastyle amphiprostyle
temple, and so on. You see the second from the left in the bottom row that's peripteral. And you see that there are the black
dots all around the building that completely surround the building. But they are set out from the wall.
So those are free-standing columns. You see that to its right, there's pseudoperipteral and you see
that the columns - the black dots - aren't separated out from the wall. The black dots are kind
of embedded in the wall, sort of half embedded in
the wall. Pseudoperipteral. This is the Parthenon, the most
famous of all Greek temples. Maybe the most famous
building in the Western world. And you see its plan: the
Parthenon is an octastyle peripteral temple. And I do have a red arrow that I've
drawn on the slide pointing to the central space within
the temple: the cella. And more on that to come. So here is a photograph
of a peripteral temple, the temple of Hephaestus in Athens. And you can see what I mean, there
are the columns supporting the roof, but the cella is inside those columns. It's almost like an open
space, almost like a stoa, all the way around the temple. And then there is this
structure in the middle. Of course it's part of
the general structure, but it's also something
which is set apart. It's a very specific enclosure
which is surrounded by those columns. On the left there is
a pseudoperipteral hexastyle temple, the temple of Zeus in Agrigento. And then on the bottom
peripteral hexastyle temple. Agrigento was part of Magna Grecia, the Greek settlements in Italy. As the temple of Concordia: tetrastyle. The temple of Athena Nike
in the Acropolis in Athens: a hexastyle temple. The temple of Hera at Paestum from circa 460 BC. Hexastyle, six columns
in the front. Here's seven columns, just in case you
were thinking to yourselves, I can't imagine a temple front with an odd number of columns. There
are. There is such a thing. This is a heptastyle temple, which we
just saw Zeus Olympias in Agrigento. The Parthenon is, as I
said before, octastyle. And here is an example plan and the foundation of a decastyle: 10 columns across the
front. Decastyle dipteral. In other words, this was the
real column lovers temple, the temple of Apollo Didyma near Miletus in present day Turkey. Now look
at this. This has two columns. So you all already know that
we would call that distyle. A distyle. Two columns.
"Style," by the way, means column. Think of a stylus. A stylus is a narrow cylindrical thing like the Stylus, the Apple
pencil that you use with an iPad. We also call by the name stylus. And and so when we use
the words - the word style of course has many meanings
- but basically it refers to columns, and when a
building is called astylar, it doesn't mean, oh, this
building doesn't have a style. It means this building has no
columns. That is what astylar means. So distyle, two columns, is what that means. This is the
Athenian Treasury at Delphi. And it has two columns, but
it also has, on the sides, those sort of big blocky
piers, if you will, that we call by the name "antae." Ante,
singular, antae, plural. Now the antae are the forerunners of something which
you will learn next week. The Romans developed into what we call pilasters. The Greeks did not use pilasters as such, although they began
development of their antae as, we'll see, in that direction. But this particular kind of temple front, we call distyles in antis: two columns between sort
of bookending antae. And here is the ruin of a tholos. At the sanctuary of
Athena Pronaia in Delphi. Right next to the Treasury. You can see that there are
the columns stubs all round. And this is an artist's rendering
of what that might've looked like and what a remarkable
structure it is. I mean, this really seems quite well on the road to the Romans. But it
is a circular building. We just don't think of the Greeks as
being circular people. But they were, and you'll see that in
a moment. Here, again, a map of the Acropolis - not again, I don't think I showed a map
of the Acropolis earlier. I showed a map that the Acropolis was
on, but this is the Acropolis itself, that religious center of Athens. And you see that on the left is the
gateway, which was called the propylaia. Below that it says Temple of Victory, that is what we call the
temple of Athena Nike. There was a theater just below that. And then when you pass
through the propylaia, you came to the two great buildings, the Parthenon and the Erechtheum. And then in the lower right hand corner
you see the Theater of Dionysos. This is quite an ensemble of buildings. Here we see it in an
isometric rendering. And we're going to spend a little bit
of time on the Parthenon and on the Erechtheum. This is that painting with which we began.
But here you get to see it in color. This is the Acropolis at Athens
from 1846 by Leo von Klenze. And this is another marvelous
picture by Marcel-Noël Lambert showing the Acropolis as he
believed it looked circa AD 161. This was from 1877. Lambert was an instructor at the
École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and a Prix de Rome winner. And here based on the
Leo von Klenze painting, we see the locations of the
propylaia, the Erechtheum, and the Parthenon. So let's
begin with Doric temples. I'll talk a little bit about Doric
temples and about the Doric order. And then I will talk a little bit about
Ionic temples and about the Ionic order. And then I will finish up
with some odds and ends, particularly tombs and choragic monuments. Here
we see the three orders. And when I just said, I'm going to talk about the Doric order
and then I'll talk about the Ionic order. You may have
thought to yourself, Whoa, isn't he going to talk about the
Corinthian order? And not really. I'm going to mention it. Don't worry. But I'm not going to
spend a lot of time on it. Today I want to sort of reserve
discussion of the Corinthian for next week and the Romans. And the reason for that is that all the
Greeks invented the Corinthian order, they did not use the
Corinthian order very often. The Romans, on the other hand, fell in love with the Corinthian
order and it basically became the symbol of their
glory. They used it all the time. For the Greeks, however
it was Doric and Ionic. And everybody can identify
the orders by the style of column capital. You can usually identify
the Doric order by that very simple slab-like capital. You might run into some problems later
on when you learn that there is an order with a somewhat similar capital
called the Tuscan order. You needn't worry about that
now. And then, of course, you identify the Ionic
order by those scrolls, the voluted capital, and you identify the Corinthian
by that sort of great mass of foliage at the top. And these all have
a different effect on us. We know that the Doric is very, You know, kind of rough and ready and soldierly, to use a word that has been
applied to it over the years. The Ionic is this sort of very elegant but still reserved thing. And the Corinthian is this kind of more go-for-broke kind of thing, which has been variously identified over the years
with the Virgin Mary, or in the words of Horace
Walpole "wanton courtesan." This is the Parthenon, the most
famous Doric building in the world. Most famous Greek temple. As I said, arguably the most famous
building in the Western world. We know who its architects
were: Iktinos and Callicrates. We know that the sculptor Phidias, the greatest of Greek sculptors, was in charge of the decoration. And may indeed have been sort of like
the overseer of the whole project. And you figure that the
Parthenon is a ruin today because it's so old, right?
It rains and you know, this and that, and
buildings just deteriorate. But a great part of the reason for
the present state of the Parthenon is that was actually, bombed to rubble by the Venetians in 1687. We needn't go into all the
whys and wherefores of that, but had that not occurred the
Parthenon would be much more intact than it is. We know a lot about what the Parthenon
looks like because of sort of scholarly reconstructions in images: images that are based
on ancient descriptions of the Parthenon, images which are based
on deductions from what exists of the Parthenon, whether it be in Athens or in
the British Museum, and so on. So that we have actually
pretty good idea of what Parthenon looked like when
the Parthenon was new. And it looks very little like the
ruin of the Parthenon. People, first and foremost, whom we have to thank for
our understanding of what
the Parthenon is really all about, were a couple of
Englishman in the 18th century: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett or Revett: you will hear his name
pronounced both ways. Americans tend to say Revett,
English tend to say Revett. But however that may be,
let's call him Revett just to make things easy. Stuart and Revett were young men who, in the 1750s, set out for Greece. They were both very
cultured young gentlemen. Stuart had actually work in Italy, as a tour guide, or Cicerone, and together they ventured Greece. Why should this be remarkable? Greece,
you've got to understand, wasn't part of the grand tour. Well-born young Englishman
went on the grand tour, they visited Europe, they visited the cultural sites of Italy, of Switzerland, of France.
They would go to Germany, they would go to Spain. But
they wouldn't go to Greece. And they reason they didn't go to Greece
and the reason, or one of the reasons, that we knew so little
about Greek material culture is that Greece was a
very dangerous place to go. It was a difficult place to go. And if you did go to Greece as
Stuart and Revett did in the 1750s, it was a very adventurous thing to do. But following Stuart and
Revett, this would change. Stuart and Revett spent
a good chunk of time in and around Athens. They drew the ruins. They produced remarkably
evocative drawings such as this of the Parthenon. You can see, through
the screen of its colonnade, the mosque that existed at the time that
Stewart and Revett were there. And if you look at the details
and Stuart and Revett's drawings, the people who are
depicted - it's just such a marvelously evocative thing. I could look at these pictures all day. But truly what is - and then they produced several volumes. The first two are the ones
which are crucially important folio called The Antiquities of Athens. And you cannot really spend much time on Greek architecture without
consulting The Antiquities of Athens. God knows that after these
volumes were published architects consulted them regularly. The Philadelphia architect
William Strickland, who designed the second bank of
the United States in Philadelphia, once said that the
architect need go no further than The Antiquities of
Athens. In other words, who would even think of designing a
building that wasn't based on one of the plates in The Antiquities of Athens? But they're just wonderful
volumes to browse in and also to learn from. And this is why: it's not just those marvelously evocative scenes such as the one
that I just showed you, but the measured drawings that
they produced of these great Greek monuments that showed
what they looked like originally. And this is what the Parthenon
looked like originally. You can see that it's very different,
both from the ruin of the Parthenon, but also very different from the
countless buildings that were built in "imitation" of the Parthenon
such as we find right here in the United States and you
find all over the world, because there was a certain
misapprehension about Greek art. This was shared by the
father of art history, Winckelmann, that Greek art was to be prized for its quality of chasteness and purity, almost as though you were talking
about Mies van der Rohe. No. Greek architecture wasn't like that. Greek architecture may have
been a trabeated architecture, but it wasn't chaste. It was a highly decorated architecture
and this is a point that can't be stressed too much. Everybody knows this who's visited
the Elgin marbles in the British museum. But here we see, for example, in the triangular
pediment of the building, the wealth of sculptural
detail and all of it figurative sculpture. Human form and animal form are paramount in the sculpture. So when you look at the
front of a Doric temple, here are the things that
you are looking for: first of all, a point needs to be
made. When we speak of the orders, we are not speaking of the column, much less of the column capital. We're speaking of an
ensemble of vertical and horizontal; we're speaking of the columns plus
the thing that the columns hold up. The table top as it were, the
thing that we call the entablature. And if you look at the
word you see that it is "en" the T A B L like table, which is what entablature means. That is, it means "table." So it's like the table top the
columns are like the table legs. An entablature, in
classical architecture, is divided into three horizontal sections. And each one of these sections has a name. There's nothing in architecture
that doesn't have a name. The three horizontal divisions
of the entablature are - right above the columns - the architrave. Right above that, the frieze.
And in the Doric order, the frieze is decorated.
We'll get to that in a second. And then above the frieze is an
overhanging eave that we call a cornice. And everybody knows, from
cornices, right? Then there is, a bit above the cornice, is the
gable end of the roof. Okay. The gable end of the roof can be, as we say in architecture, it can be articulated in
a particular way if you sort of enframe it in cornices. And when the cornice slants
as it does on both sides of this gable end of the roof, we call the cornices raking cornices. And this transforms the gable into something that we call a pediment. And within the pediment is a space, the space that is framed by the cornices. And that space is called a tympanum. The tympanum was conceived by Greek architects generally to
be a space for sculptural imagery, for relief sculpture, sculpture based on the human form. And what an art pediment
sculpture is. Indeed, there are a few things in
life that are more thrilling than good pediment
sculpture. Seriously. And very hard to do. Hard to do because when
you get the far ends you've got those very narrow spaces and you've got to make people lie down and you see that over and over and over
again in these pediments sculptures and the ingenious ways in which
sculptors have managed this feat is, as I say, nothing short of thrilling. And then just below that in the
part that we call the frieze. The frieze, in a Doric
temple, in the Parthenon, consists of two basic elements. One arrow, on the bottom left you
see a word, "triglyph." "Three marks" is what that means. And those three vertical bars, which the red arrow points, that is a division in the
frieze, we call it triglyph. And then in between the
triglyphs is a square space. And in the lower right, you see the word M E T O P E,
which we pronounced metope, and the red arrow, which points from that
word points to another relief sculpture. So the Parthenon the metopes
are filled with relief sculpture. So these are the important terms to note. This is a model of the Parthenon - there
are models of the Parthenon all over the place - but this is a
nice model of the Parthenon, which is to be found in the
Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. And this is our model of the
Parthenon. This is in Nashville, Tennessee. They went and rebuilt the Parthenon. And people make fun of this all
the time. And I don't know why. I don't know why people make fun of
it. And people say, Oh, you know, have you seen the Parthenon in Nashville?
It's a marvelous thing. I mean, there's nothing else in the
world that gives us as vivid a sense of what the Parthenon was, was like. This is just like that model
in the Carnegie Museum, but it's writ large, and there's
a place for this sort of thing. So I don't chuckle at the
Nashville Parthenon at all. I tell people to go see it. It is, as I say, a marvelous scene. I'm just throwing in this picture
because I happen to be a big fan of the architectural renderings of
Alexander Jackson Davis from the first half of the 19th
century. And he drew this. Lovely picture of the Parthenon. So here we see up close the columns
of the Parthenon and you can see that they are very
simple. They're very plain. But the longer you look at them, the more complex they are. Here are some other terms
that you should know. First of all, at the bottom are three terms
with red arrows pointing to different parts. The top of the column: one word is neck. Neck, like your neck, which points do the neck of the column. And then there's the word echinus, which points to the swelling bit that circles the
column top above the neck. And then the sort of
square slab-like form at the top of the column, we call an abacus. And then in the entablature,
right underneath the frieze, you always see these things in
architecture and people tend to use the all-purpose word
"doohickey" to describe these things, but you see these sort of little peg-like forms
that are called - guttae is the plural, gutta is the singular. And then in between them, the narrow horizontal band, which we call a taenia. And then this sort of
rectangular or square blocks under the cornice are called mutules. This is a Parthenon column
capital in the British museum, can be studied up close. And
what a marvelous thing it is. Just look at how delicately it is modeled. The carving of
it, the surfaces of it. Although this is a rather
plain and even severe order of architecture, the sort of the almost very
sensual way in which this is carved sort of betrays that. And it's really very, very elegant. It's a beautiful thing. Now here we must say something about -
something that you'll often have heard people say, which is that although a building
like the Parthenon seems so rectilinear, it is in fact not. You'll hear it said, perhaps by a tour guide on the Acropolis
that there are no straight lines in the Parthenon. It's designed so that it looks
like there are straight lines, but it's an optical illusion
because there are a lot of optical corrections that are made in
order to keep the building from looking like it is not rectilinear. And these are done through the raising of the cornice, the raising of the architrave,
the raising of the stylobate. And then there is that
beast that we call entasis. You will often hear people pronounce
this word entasis or entasis, but the correct pronunciation is entasis. Entasis is from Greek word which
means to stretch or to strain. And we're always taught, always taught,
that this tool is an optical correction, which clearly it often is. It keeps the column looking
straight. What is it? It is that sort of slight, or in the
case of the temple of Hera in Paestum, not-so-slight bulging of the column. Look at those columns and you'll see
that they hand out straight up and down! They bulge. And if it's an optical correction, why in some instances is the bulge so pronounced? Why? There's the Vincent Scully thesis. He was a great architectural
historian at Yale, and he suggested that the
real purpose of entasis was less to correct optical illusions than it was to create a greater sense of weight. Hence the
derivation of the word, "to stretch" or "to strain." The
Greeks wanted their buildings to have a feeling of
weight, to have a feeling to make you feel rather as
though you were holding up the building. This we place under the general heading of empathy in art or architecture: that projection of the
states of the human body to buildings. This, at least,
was the Scully thesis. There is the Parthenon. There you see, ah!
This worked. Oh, I'm so excited. You see there's the ruin in there. We see the completion of the
building and the way that it actually was meant to be. Every time I get one
of these effects to work in PowerPoint, I get so excited. Anyway, this is a wonderful painting
by Lawrence Alma-Tadema: Phidias showing the frieze of
the Parthenon to his friends. And speaking of the
frieze of the Parthenon, the British ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire between 1799 and 1803 was this fellow named Thomas Bruce,
the seventh Earl of Elgin. And he was, how shall we say, a thief? This too is a very controversial
thing. A can of worms. You don't really want to get into. But the point is that if you
want to study Greek architecture, you don't have a choice. You
have to go to London. Now, you not only have to go to
Greece, you have to go to London, you have to go to the British Museum
where it's like this treasure house of Greek architecture, elements that were basically
made away with by Lord Elgin. And there were others as
well. He wasn't the only one, but he got this great bounty
of stuff from the Parthenon, which include the so-called Elgin Marbles and much more. There is the plan of the Parthenon. This is a rendering of
the propylaia from a book by - Oh, we'll get
to that - this is in British museum. Okay. Late
Archaic, really classical, the temple of Aphaia at Aegina. And this is a rendering
of what that temple might originally have looked like. Aegina is just in a little bit south of Athens. And this is a reconstruction of the
east pediment of the temple of Aphaia. And if you were to go to
the Glyptothek in Munich, you'll see a lot of artifacts
from that particular temple, including this fallen warrior. And here we see where
the fallen warrior is. But look at the figures in the pediment
and you see that not only is that pediment à la the pictures
in The Antiquities of Athens showing us that the pediment is filled
with sculpture, but the sculpture, moreover, was polychrome:
as we say, it was colored! And another term for you to note: the ornaments which are placed
at the ends and at the apex of the pediment are called acroteria. Singular is acroterion and
the plural is acroteria. So, Temple of Hephaestus in Athens. This was illustrated in The
Antiquities of Athens and something which is quite remarkable is
that the coauthor of The Antiquities of Athens, the British
architect James Stuart, who was known as "Athenian Stuart" - although the Temple of Hephaestus would
be a very influential building once it was published in the
second volume (1787) of The Antiquities of Athens, its name would
spread throughout the Western world. Athenian Stuart, who had not yet
published it, but who'd seen it, who'd drawn it, borrowed from, it when he created this folly in
this garden in Worcestershire. And if you want to see the
Temple of Hephaestus as through the influence of
The Antiquities of Athens, you can do so right here in New York. This is the 13th street
Presbyterian church, where, by the way that's all wood. And this comes from a book
by Julien-David Le Roy, a Frenchman who actually beat
Stuart and Revett to Greece, published his own book before Stuart
and Revett could publish theirs. So there was this great competition
between Stuart and Revett and Le Roy. And man, they really
bad mouthed each other. But that's a story for another day. Let me simply try to get through the
rest of the material as quickly as I can here so that you can
all you know, eat dinner. But this is the Ionic order. May be based on whelk shells. Eh, why not? And this is one of the
early great Ionic temples. This is the fifth Temple of Artemis at
Ephesus. This is a reconstruction of it, which is in Istanbul.
Ephesus was in Turkey. And the fourth Temple
of Artemis at Ephesus is the one which actually has the pride
of place in architectural history for having been one of the very
small handful of first Ionic temples to be built. But the fifth which has
been reconstructed here, is actually very similar to
the fourth in appearance. There it is up close and you can see
the distinctive voluted capitals of the Ionic order. This is the image from Sir
Banister Fletcher's A History
of Architecture on the Comparative Method. And you see that it has not only
the distinctive voluted capitals but unique column bases with relief sculpture, which you can study up close -
guess where - at the British Museum! And this is the greatest Ionic
building of them all, the Erechtheum. Le Roy's rendering of the
Ionic order of the Erechtheum. I think that the Ionic columns of
the Erechtheum are one of the most beautiful things in the history
of Western civilization. Let me - what a great picture. This is one of those sort of vignettes
from The Antiquities of Athens. Just great. But here's the
column. Look at the column. This is - naturally - this is in the
British Museum where you can really study this stuff up close. And you
see how distinctive this is, all the detail. You see, for example, that the abacus is ornamented
with an egg and dart molding. You see the volutes, as we call them, of the capital - the sort of
scrolled reels - and you see how precise and tight the channeling of those volutes is. They look like they're
really sort of wound tight. You see that wonderful braided band, the bead and reel moldings, which are on the sides of the volutes. You see that the necking
with the palmettes, and you see that echinus
is an egg and dart molding. Now these things are not
standard in the ionic order. The volutes are standard
in the Ionic order, but there is a whole host of
embellishment that goes on in different interpretations of the Ionic order. And this is the Ionic of the Erechtheum, as we call it. And it's a very influential Ionic order, which was widely imitated. But also on the Erechtheum are
these things that are column like, but not actually columns. They are statues in place of columns, female statues in gowns.
We call them caryatids, and they are astonishingly beautiful. Study them up close in the
British Museum. I mean, you know, Lord Elgin really made away
with a lot of stuff. More - oh, these are actually an Athens. These are in the Acropolis Museum. The originals which were
not taken by Lord Elgin have been moved indoors and
there are replicas outside. And you can see marvelous
caryatids in New York that are, to some extent, inspired by
those of the Erechtheum, they're by J. Massey Rhind at Macy's, the 34th Street entrance. This is a frieze fragment in
the British Museum. And again, you see the classical moldings,
the palmettes, the bead and reel, the leaf and dart, and
the egg and dart moldings. And here we see that
Athenian Stuart applied the Ionic of the Erechtheum to
a house that he designed on St. James's Square in London, Lichfield House. But Theophil Hansen, a Danish-born architect was asked to
design a new building for the Academy of Athens in 1859 and he employed the Ionic of the Erechtheum, but he also chose to use polychrome in the manner that he thought was
used originally at the Erectheum. This is a very valuable thing to see. And right here in New York,
there is this townhouse, 926 Fifth Avenue between 73rd and
74th Streets by C.P.H. Gilbert. And what do you have? A beautiful
rendering of the Ionic of the Erechtheum. Now here is my view: when I've looked at the Ionic capitals
of the Erechtheum and then I have looked at the caryatids - one of the
things that I love about those Ionic capitals is the tight
channeling and then the rather fabric-like quality.
It's like a drapery, the way that in the center, the drapery droops. And then when I look at the
caryatid I see the woman's gown, and I see that it's all
drooping - the drapery - is right in the center under her neck, just like in the column
and it's almost at the same pitch as in the column. And then the fabric pulls
up and sort of wraps round her breasts, which are like the volutes of the capital. And I am struck, you know? No particular interpretation
to place upon this, but I am struck by the
parallel between those two things. And they're both just so gloriously beautiful. This is in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis. It's not the one at Ephesus, but
Sardis. And here, right in New York, you can study - there's great, originally 58 foot high Ionic column right in the Met. And you can sort
of pick out its elements. It's a very elaborate order, but it isn't anywhere -
anywhere - near as beautiful as the Erechtheum columns.
And we them side by side. Just look at that beautiful, elegant way that the volutes sort of lead to that drop in the
middle and then compare it with the one from Sardis, which just by
comparison seems so workman-like. Bottom of the capital is the torus. And we see that those can be
decorated in very different ways. Now the temple on the Ilissus is another temple that was illustrated by Stuart and Revett. It is a very much simpler Ionic order from that of the Erechtheum. But it has at the abacus
level of the column, what we call an ovolo. That word
derives from, obviously, "egg." Egg. So it has that egg-like swell. And then that same ovolo
molding appears at the taenia. And other than that, the column is very much
simpler than the Erechtheum. And this became - see them side by side. You see how comparatively simpler the
temple of Illisus is from the Erechtheum. And the temple of Ilissus order was sort of illustrated from Stuart and Revett by people who produced pattern books
in America, like Minard Lafever. And it became the basic, the basic Ionic order, which was applied all over the new world. We see it, for example, in this row house on Washington
Square North in Greenwich Village. And then there is the
Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae in the Peloponnese, which is an intriguing
temple because it is the only known temple to employ Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns. There's a map showing where Bassae
is located. This is what its ruin stabilization looks like today. Marble frieze in - guess where - the
British Museum. This is the temple plan. Now you'll notice that there
are the black dots around the perimeter. Those were Doric columns. And then the columns right in the
center in the interior where Ionic. But then you notice that
lone and lonely dot, which is just left of center between the numbers 2 and 3,
that lonely black dot. That was a single Corinthian column. And we see that it was illustrated
by the great 19th century British architectural Robert Cockerell, who, by the way was the fellow
who coined the term "Greek Revival." First known use of the term
Greek Revival was in a speech or lecture by Cockerell. And this is Cockerell's rendering of what
the inside of that temple looked like. There are the Ionic columns and
there is that lone Corinthian column with a statue off centered. Just to its right. Now, this was based on very sound
conjecture about what this temple actually looked like. And isn't it
fascinating? He visited by the way, Cockerell, Bassae in 1811-12, and sort of in the spirit of Lord Elgin
made off with all sorts of things. But it's the ionic order of
Bassae which is so interesting. Here is a third after the Erectheum
and after the temple on the Ilissus, there is the Ionic of the temple of Apollo Epicurius. We see that
that order - I always think of it as this very flouncy sort
of Ionic was employed by Cockerell at his most famous building,
the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. But we can see it as well at
Union Station in Washington DC and illustrated in an American book, The
American Vignola, by William R. Ware. So a few things with which to conclude -
and I'm going to conclude at some point - are ornaments. People use the words anthemion and
palmette interchangeably and I don't think they should. I think that anthemion
is based on a honeysuckle. A palmette is based on a palm. And what this means to me
is that in the anthemion, the leaves are inward
turning. In a palmette, the leaves are outward turning. And then the third thing that
you see here is an acanthus leaf. Acanthus is a Mediterranean plant. The Greeks rendered the acanthus a
little bit differently from the Romans, a little bit differently from the
Italians of the Renaissance, but acanthus, it all is. And it has been said that there is
nothing that is more distinctive to Western art and architecture
than the acanthus leaf. We see it everywhere, but I will
talk about it more next week. And to make my point, a Mediterranean dwarf palm on
the right with the leaves outward spreading and an Etruscan
honeysuckle on the right with the inward turning. Tombs. And we're very nearly done. And artist's recreation of the tomb
of King Mausolus and Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the
ancient world as, by the way, was the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. So tonight we've seen two of the
wonders of the ancient world. This was a very grand Ionic tomb. And if you want to see statues, probably (we don't know for sure!)
of Mausolus and his wife Artemisia, you've got to go to the British Museum. And this, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus was the
model for John Russell Pope's Temple of the Scottish Rite in Washington
DC. But this, this everybody, even more than the
Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, this is what I call an altar. This is a Pergamon Altar in
the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Some of you maybe saw that
incredible show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just a few
years ago on Pergamon and Hellenistic art. They weren't able to transport
this from Berlin where much of Pergamon is now to be seen in a wonderful museum. But this altar is absolutely staggering
and it reminds us - the reason that I'm showing it - is that the
centrality of sculpture to Greek architecture is a key thing.
Always to bear in mind, and something to bear in mind going
forward as we study other forms of classical architecture. And finally there are these
things that we call - now, this is another word for which
there are variant pronunciations. I was taught 40 years ago to say choragic, but some people say choragic. I was at a conference recently
and people said choragic. But choragic, let's just for
simplicity sake, say choragic. The choragic monument of Thrasyllus from Athens. What was a choragic monument? It was a monument built
in honor of a choragus, which was a choir master. So this is a simple monument topped off by a statue. And it's interesting because it
has something that you don't often see. Normally, guttae are very discreet. You see the continuous on the left
top left, the continuous taenia, and then the guttae below it, which are - you see a few of
them and then there are none, and then there are a few, and then
there are none. It's discontinuous. But bottom right, you see - if you look very closely where
the red arrow is pointing - you see that the guttae are
continuous all the way across. This was taken up by Henry Bacon when
he designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. The guttae are continuous and
he also employed the wreaths that are to be found on the
choragic monument of Thrasyllus. So Henry Bacon was probably looking at
the plates in The Antiquities of Athens. And this was as late as 1914. This isn't in the heat of
the Greek Revival in 1832. This is in 1913. There's the statue and if you
want to see the actual statue, guess where you gotta go?
To the British Museum. And then there are antae. This is another thing that I find very
interesting about the choragic monument of Thrasyllus. And that is that the antae
which are normally in Greek architecture - just simple
piers - actually are given capitals. And this is where we sort
of see the beginnings of the pediments - not the
pediments - the pilasters. Sorry. God knows how many times
tonight I've said the wrong word, not knowing that I was doing it. Pilasters that the Romans would run
with, as we shall see. And then there's the choragic
monument of Lysicrates. What a great picture from
The Antiquities of Athens. When Stuart and Revett visited Athens
in the 1750s - it was published in 1762 but they were there in the fifties - the choragic monument was actually
sort of embedded in the middle of a French monastery and
there's the sleepy-eyed monk in the front. God, what
a great picture this is. This is what it looks like
today. The monastery's gone, but the choragic monument is still
there. What's special about this? It certainly doesn't look
like anything special. So much of the detail has worn off
over the years. It's a little sad, but this is how Stuart and Revett
figured it looked originally. And what it features so prominently and so beautifully are these
things: Corinthian columns. A very beautiful and florid version of the Corinthian column. And I thought that that was the
best place with which to conclude tonight's talk about Greek architecture
because the Corinthian will figure very largely in the story
of Roman architecture. And here we see one of the
greatest of all Roman buildings, the Maison Carré in Nîmes, a building about which
I will talk next week. And I very much hope that you
will all be back next week and for the talks which
have not yet been announced, but will be, and that will follow. Thank
you very much for joining me tonight.
