Читать книгу How to judge architecture: a popular guide to the appreciation of buildings - Sturgis Russell - Страница 5

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IN trying to train the mind to judge of works of architecture, one can never be too patient. It is very easy to hinder one’s growth in knowledge by being too ready to decide. The student of art who is much under the influence of one teacher, one writer, or one body of fellow-students, is hampered by that influence just so far as it is exclusive. And most teachers, most writers, most groups or classes of students are exclusive, admiring one set of principles or the practice of one epoch, to the partial exclusion of others.

The reader must feel assured that there are no authorities at all in the matter of architectural appreciation: and that the only opinions, or impressions, or comparative appreciations that are worth anything to him are those which he will form gradually for himself. He will form them slowly, if he be wise: indeed, if he have the gift of artistic appreciation at all, he will soon learn to form them slowly. He will, moreover, hold them lightly even when formed; remembering that in a subject on which opinions differ so very widely at any one time, and have differed so much more widely if one epoch be compared with another, there can be no such thing as a final judgment.

The object of this book is to help the reader to acquire, little by little, such an independent knowledge of the essential characteristics of good buildings, and also such a sense of the possible differences of opinion concerning inessentials, that he will always enjoy the sight, the memory, or the study of a noble structure without undue anxiety as to whether he is right or wrong. Rightness is relative: to have a trained observation, knowledge of principles, and a sound judgment as to proprieties of construction and design is to be able to form your opinions for yourself; and to understand that you come nearer, month by month, to a really complete knowledge of the subject, seeing clearly what is good and the causes of its goodness, and also the not-so-good which is there, inevitably there, as a part of the goodness itself.

It will be well, therefore, to take for our first study some buildings of that class about which there is the smallest difference of opinion among modern lovers of art, namely, the early Greek temples. There is no serious dispute as to the standing of the Greek architecture previous to the year 300 BC, as the most perfect thing that decorative art[1] has produced. It is extremely simple: a fact which makes it the more fit for our present purpose: but this simplicity is to be taken as not having led to bareness, lack of incident, lack of charm: it has merely served to give the Greek artist such an easy control over the different details and their organization into a complete whole, that the admiration of all subsequent ages has been given to his productions.

It must be noted, however, that nothing of this complete beauty is now to be seen above ground. Plate I shows the famous temple at Pæstum on the west coast of Campania, southeast of Naples: the temple called that of Poseidon, to which god (called by the Romans, Neptune) the ancient town which stood on this site was dedicated. This is the most nearly well preserved of the Doric[2] temples, with the single exception of the small building in Athens called the Theseion, or Theseum, see Plate III, and it is larger and more interesting than that. Plate II gives the Parthenon at Athens from the northwest

PLATE I.

HEXASTYLE DORIC TEMPLE, PAESTUM, SOUTHERN ITALY, CALLED “TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE.”

PLATE II.

PARTHENON, ATHENS, FROM THE NORTHWEST.

PARTHENON, ATHENS, FROM THE NORTHEAST.

and from the northeast. This building by common agreement of modern students was the most perfect in design and the most highly elaborated in detail of all the Doric temples of early time. The Parthenon as we see it now in its decay, dominating the town of Athens from the top of its rock or looked at close at hand, lighted by the Grecian sun or by the moon for those who are romantically inclined, is unquestionably a most picturesque and charming ruin; it is imposing in its mass, interesting still in its details, and invested, of course, with an immeasurably great tradition, historical and poetic. That fact must not be forgotten for a moment: but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that this admiration, this enthusiasm, is not given to the work of art. It is not at all to produce such a ruin as we now see that the Grecian artist thought and toiled. Admire the ruin to your heart’s content: but be careful that you do not allow too much of this romantic association to enter into your love of the artistic entity, of the lost Parthenon, which we have to create out of the air, as it were. And beware of the admiration of ruins as you would of the “tone” given to a picture by time: it is not that which the artist proposed to himself or even thought of, and it is the artist’s purpose that you must ask for, always. That is the first thing. Until you are sure you know that purpose, fully, it will not do to find fault with the work of art, or even to praise it too unreservedly.

On the other hand, it is extremely important to consider the probable ancient surroundings of the building in question. The upper figure of Plate III may show, not only the interesting building itself from a good point of view and with its peculiarities strongly accentuated (as is pointed out below), but also as showing how, except for its coloring, the temple must have been seen by the Athenians in the days of Conon. The modern houses are very like what the ancient houses must have been, for, although the ancient houses had even less door and window-opening upon the street and more upon a court or yard, yet we may imagine ourselves in such a yard of antiquity, and the red-tiled roofs, the homemade chimney, the humble and unkempt aspect of the whole may be assumed to stand very well for the humbler quarters of Athens in antiquity. This temple also is a ruin: but the fact that, as seen in Plate III, there are still visible the sculptures of the metopes,[3] and the fact that the roof of the pteroma[4] is still in place, so that there is no sunshine coming down behind the columns where sunshine was never meant to be—these conditions go far to give us a peep at the building as it stood in those great days. No other photograph can give a better idea of how the columns are set closer near the corner; nor a better idea of the reasons for this peculiarity; for the sky is seen between the columns at the right hand; and the dark wall of the naos[5] in the same relative position on the left hand, and the chief cause for the smaller intercolumniation at the corners is obvious enough, as shown below in connection with the model Plate IV.

Look back at Plate I, and Plate III, upper figure, and note that these buildings have six columns on the front instead of eight and, therefore, according to the general proportions of Greek temples, should have a greater height relatively to width than the Parthenon, Plate II. Note, farther, that the columns are very much higher and more slender in the octastyle[6] Parthenon than in the Italian hexastyle[7] building, and the relative height of the entablature[8] greater, or as one to two and a half in Pæstum, one to three in Athens. The Doric Order[9] is capable of just about as much diversity in relative heights and other dimensions as is shown here.

The comparatively short and thick columns of the Italian temple are characteristic of an earlier and less developed style than that denoted by the higher and more slender columns of the Parthenon. In like manner the comparatively great thickness of the superstructure in the Pæstum temple, giving a very broad architrave,[10] and a still broader frieze[11] is also suggestive of an earlier date. Now it is agreed that the more lofty and slender proportions of the Order of the Parthenon must have given to the original building a charm beyond that given by the stumpy proportions of the Pæstum temple: but it is also undeniable that many lovers of architecture, of this as of other epochs and styles, love especially the early work, that which is commonly known as archaic. It is exactly like the great enthusiasm excited in many students of Italian art by the earliest paintings, those of the primitifs: in each case the very single-minded and diligent work of the early men has a charm peculiarly its own.

Although the Parthenon is, as mentioned above, a ruin and nothing else, there are still to be found in the shattered stones of that ruin a certain part of that theoretical beauty, that imagined glory of the destroyed work of art, which we are gradually building up in our thoughts. Thus it is in the existing ruins that there have been discovered those curious curves where straight lines had been supposed to exist. If you stand at one end of the stylobate[12] and look along it towards the other end, you will see that it curves upward in the middle with a decided convex sweep. (See Plate III.) If you raise yourself on a scaffolding and look along the underside of the architrave you will find that that also rises in a curve, not exactly parallel or concentric to that of the stylobate, but nearly so. Furthermore you will notice, if you walk about the temple and examine it closely, that the two outer-most columns of the front are much nearer together than the others, as noted above in Plate III: or that, in other words, the three columns which form the corner are grouped much more closely than are the others. Furthermore, it has been discovered by minute measurements that these columns slope inward a very little. Of course, it has always been known that the very visible diminution of the shaft in thickness from the bottom to the top is not according to straight lines (that is to say, that the shafts are not conical) but is according to a very slow and hardly perceptible curve which we call the entasis. Great folios of carefully drawn plates have been devoted to the exact curvature of the entasis and to the more recently discovered irregularities: and a minute series of measurements have been made, by which the whole amount of the irregularity in any one case is now easily ascertainable. This is one of the many elements out of which we have to make up our general appreciation of the building, our appreciation of the existence and the character of these slopes, curves, risings, sinkings, slopings: all of them, it is clear, planned in the most careful and elaborate way, and as the result of many previous experiments. Their object is, of course, to add to the charm of the building, to give it in one case the effect of being very broad in the base and therefore very secure and permanent—in another case, to prevent any possible appearance of sagging or depression in the middle of the long horizontal lines; in another case still, to substitute the subtile grace of a slight and almost imperceptible curve for the harshness of a straight line. Still another thing is traceable in these ruins: the unceasing care with which the work was done, the way in which the separate drums or solid blocks, of which the shafts of the columns are made up, were ground together, one upon another, until they fitted with but the slightest visible or tangible separation. The channeling or grooving of the shafts was evidently done after the drums had been put into place, and it is highly probable that the bells[13] of the capitals were also finished, or received their final very delicate curvature, after the blocks out of which they had been cut had been set, and indeed after the superincumbent block, the abacus, had been lowered upon each one of them.

Another feature in this remarkable design is to be traced in the ruins, and was much more plainly discoverable at an earlier, though still recorded and well-known, date: namely, the original painted adornment of the building, in strong primary colors. In the temples built of soft and rough stone, like that in Plate I, there is known to have been a thin coat of fine plastering spread over the whole surface, and the final delicacy of curve and sharpness of edge must have been wrought in that plaster even more accurately than in the stone beneath. But in the Parthenon, built entirely of fine-grained and hard marble, no such coating was necessary, and the paint was applied directly to the crystalline surface itself. This painting covered very large parts of the exterior, nor is it probable that any single foot of the

PLATE III.

THESEUM (THESEION) ATHENS.

CURVATURE OF STYLOBATE OF PARTHENON.

PLATE IV.

RESTORED MODEL OF THE PARTHENON, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.

marble was left in its original whiteness. Where the solid coating of red or blue paint was not applied, the marble seems to have been tinted a dull yellow, as by the application of wax to the surface, which wax, if melted on with hot irons, would act as a preservative for the marble. It appears then that all modern dreams about the whiteness and purity and abstract loveliness of the Grecian temples are mistaken. Browning’s Artemis says that, always excepting Hera, she is the equal of any goddess of them all—

“ … surpassed

By none whose temples whiten this the world.”

The Artemis of any Greek poet would have used a different phrase: to her, the temples erected to the gods of Olympus would not have seemed white objects—they would have been to her the properly sacrificial and devotional embodiment of all that was splendid and gorgeous in the arts of men at that time: sculptured marble and wrought metal indeed, but also color and gold freely and even lavishly applied. Plate IV is a photograph of the restored model of the Parthenon which belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the restoration of which, and the whole work, is due to Charles Chipiez, a well-known and very competent archæologist in the direction of classical architecture. But this restoration is extremely reserved and quiet; it assumes almost nothing; it is restrained quite beyond what is to be expected of a modern enthusiast in Greek art. If, instead of this, we were to study the careful and conscientious drawings published by that French student who has made a special study of the buildings in Epidauros (Alphonse de Frasse) or in Olympia (Victor Laloux) we should find the decoration by means of painting and by the application of golden shields or other members in gilt metal, assumed as very much more elaborate and rich. Thus the restored façade of the temple of Asclepios at Epidauros and that of the temple of Zeus at Olympia are shown as having been painted in the most elaborate way, with figure subjects of conventionalized form and distribution on all the larger flat surfaces, and patterns of leafage and scroll-work on the small ones. It is known that very rich mosaic floors existed in many of these cases and known also that the ceilings, such as those above the open galleries (pteroma) behind the great colonnades, were adorned very richly, sometimes with painted and gilded terra cotta.

There is still to be considered the sculptured ornament, painted, indeed, in vivid colors, but also planned with care, and executed with vast knowledge, minute skill, and what seems to us faultless good taste. In the Doric temples there was no leaf-sculpture, no scroll-work, no carved ornaments of any sort: we shall find a different condition of things in the Ionic style, but even in the elaborate and very costly Parthenon there were only the human and animal forms, expressed in statues and reliefs made as perfect as was possible to the artist of the time. Some temples had none of this: others had the metopes of the frieze (see footnote, Entablature) carved with high reliefs: others had reliefs in the great triangular panel of the pediment:[14] others again had this panel filled with statues, standing and seated, forming a group, and expressing some legend of Greek historical and religious life. Finally, there are instances of long unbroken bands of sculpture in very low relief. The Parthenon had all of these: a horizontal band along the top of each wall of the naos filled with bas-reliefs; high reliefs in the metopes, statues in both pediments.

If, then, our opinion of ancient Greek architecture is to be formed, and a relative judgment of any two fine specimens of it is to be reached, we have to study with some care what is known about their appearance and character when intact. What statues did they have? What high reliefs in square panels, or bas-reliefs in long and narrow strips? Of what value were these sculptures to the general effect of the structure? What seem to have been the proportions of the building? If we can call up an image of it before the mind, is this an image of perfect proportion, or is it clear that greater height or other change in dimension would have been an advantage? It is true that we generally accept Greek buildings of the best time as faultless: but it is also true that there were great differences among them. The hexastyle temple is necessarily more high and more narrow than the octastyle building. If we consider that the temple with six columns at each end has only thirteen on each side (that is, eleven without counting the corner columns which form part of the two fronts) while the wider Parthenon has seventeen columns on each side, we find that the comparative height of the temple of Poseidon at Pæstum, or of Zeus at Olympia, or of Athena at Sunion, is very much greater when seen from one corner, in perspective, than that of the Athens temple. Suppose that we trace from Plate IV so much of the colonnade as will leave out two of the end columns and four of those on the flank, and then put a corresponding pediment and entablature, which proportion shall we prefer? Which building is nearer to perfection? The Parthenon, as the very flower and glory of Greece? If so, why was the hexastyle form so very much more common? There are no other octastyle Doric temples known to us: and, if it be said as an explanation, that of course the heights of column and entablature would be varied for the change from the 8 × 17 peristyle to the 6 × 13 type, the question still remains for us—was it practicable to make an octastyle temple as perfect in proportion as were numerous hexastyle examples, large and small, scattered over Greece, Southern Italy and Sicily? These doubts are suggested in order that the reader may see in this commencement of his studies what kind of unsettled and never to be settled questions will come before him at every step of his inquiry. He will be equally uncertain whether he is to prefer the east end of Reims cathedral or that of Bourges, or that of Paris. As with the important Greek temples, so the Gothic cathedrals just named are the very flower of their epoch and represent in the highest perfection known to us their respective styles. So much the student will be able to discover without too great a mental effort: and once sure of this he will understand that no further mental effort in this direction is even desirable, and that comparison among works of very high excellence can never cease—can never be brought to an end by any authority or any outside decision whatsoever, and that here the student’s own preferences must be perforce his only guide.

There is still one point of view from which the Greek temples must be regarded. It is to many persons the most important consideration of all. Those who are realists in architecture are always inclined to favor the utilitarian plan and the logical structure and to hold these as of even greater value than the abstract proportion or the beauty of detail. On the other hand, writers like Ruskin never suggest the importance of the destination of the edifice, nor its merit as a piece of intelligent building: nor do the students of proportion, as in Neo-classic[15] buildings, think much of this matter. In the case of the Greek temples this practical consideration can be stated in a very few words. No large roofed hall was ever desired; no interior effect, as of a great vaulted room, was thought of; no room for a congregation or an audience within the solid walls was ever proposed. The naos of the temple served only to house the great image of the Divinity with other minor statues of the same or of kindred significance together with the gifts presented to the shrine. The people gathered in front of the great portico; public sacrifices were performed there; the temple itself, like the choir[16] of a Christian church long afterwards, was for the priests alone. Moreover, the buildings of different character left us by the Greeks, even in ruins, are so very few that we are unable to establish with certainty their character; and those which, like the famous Meeting-hall (Telesterion) at Eleusis, must have accommodated a number of persons seated to listen to the words of speakers, were obviously of extreme simplicity—involving no new principles of plan or of design. Next, as to the construction: that as the photographs show, was of the simplest possible character. Uprights of stone carried horizontal beams of stone, and these again cross-beams to span the width of the portico, which cross-beams might be of stone, or of wood encased perhaps with terra cotta slabs. As for the interior of the naos, in the larger temples it was divided into a wider middle hall and two narrower ones, like the nave and aisles of Christian churches: and all roofed with timber, in simple framing, which carried a roofing of tile: but whether the roof was always complete and solid, or whether, as some persons think, a part of this was often omitted so as to allow the light of day to enter from above, is uncertain.

It appears then that, as suggested in the first page of this chapter, the requirements and the structure of the Grecian religious building were so very simple that no long examination into the matter is needed to show the connection between the plan and the exterior effect, or between the structure and the exterior effect. We have no Greek interiors to study and the exteriors at once tell us how the whole structure was brought into being, and also that it could not fail to serve its daily uses in a very perfect manner.