La Route Catholique vers la nouvelle RENAISSANCE

Abstract

The word architecture goes back through Latin to the Greek for “master builder”. The ancients nor only invented the word, they gave it its clearest and most comprehensive definition. According to Vitruvius – the Roman writer whose Ten Books on Architecture is the only surviving ancient architectural treatise – architecture is the union of “firmness, commodity, and delight”; it is , in other words, a structural, practical, and visual art. Without solidity, it is dangerous; without usefulness, it is merely large-scale sculpture; and without beauty, it is not more than utilitarian construction.

Architecture commands our attention throughout history only as a visual art for only the monumental forms of buildings constantly evolve with changing times and conditions, and in response to the powers of artistic volition and the needs of society. A great building is not a finite entity like a painting or sculpture – historically serving mostly to decorate architecture – but it is almost a living being of protean character. It is capable of affecting us aesthetically as no other work of art: it takes us in, surrounds us, shapes our lives, and protects us; it looms over us, changes with the hours, the weather, and the seasons; it may dominate the landscape. Because of its size and complexity, a building can accommodate the ambitions of the individual artist in an unparalleled fashion; because of its material basis, its cost, its importance in our lives, its high visibility, it captures as no other form the spirit of its times.

Some periods were structurally innovative – Roman, Gothic, the nineteenth century – while others of equal intrinsic importance, such as Greek and Renaissance, tended to accept inherited structural methods with comparatively little advancement.

This thesis comprises four periods before Christian: Persia of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Roman, who left us a large number of monumental architectures. These great buildings are considered as the visual art that is the most sensitive, powerful touchstone of the cultural. Meanwhile, they also present the special characters of culture of themselves. After the introduction of the historical background, the thesis gives one or two examples for explicating the situation of architecture in one whole period, including: Hall of 100 Columns of Persia, Hypostyle Hall of Egypt, Hera I of Greece, Pantheon of Rome, etc.

What the thesis emphasizes are the templelike buildings which show great insight into the religion, even the history. The columns, as the structural and practical construction, express the style of the temples and the human knowledge of the beauty.

Key words：Persia, Egypt, Greece, Roman, monumental architectures, temples, columns.

TEMPLES AND COLUMNS

COLUMN AND COLONNADE

A column is a cylindrical, upright pillar that has three sections: a base, a shaft, and a top, called a capital. Most columns are freestanding and are used to support weight, usually a roof. When used decoratively and attached to a wall, a column is referred to as an engaged column or attached column.

A colonnade is a row of columns supporting a horizontal member.

PERSIA

  In the sixth century BCE, the Persians, a formerly nomadic, Indo-European-speaking people related to the Medes, began to seize power. From the region of Parsis(modern Fars), southeast of Susa, they eventually overwhelmed Mesopotamia and the rest of the ancient Near East and established a vast empire. The rulers of this new empire their ancestry to a semilegendary Iranian King named Achaemenes and are known as the Achaemenids. Their dramatic expansion began in 559 BCE  with the ascension of a remarkable leader, Cyrus II (called the Great, ruled 559-530 BCE). By the time of his death the Persian Empire included Babylonia; the land of the Medes, which stretchde across northern Iran through Anatolia; and some of the Aegean islands far to the west. Cyrus’s son Cambyses II (ruled 529-522 BCE) added Egypt and Cyprus. When Darius I (ruled 521-486 BCE), the son of a government offiaial, took the throne, he proclaimed: “I am Darius, great King, King of countries, king of this earth.” Darius and his successors went on to rule for nearly two centuries, expanding the Achaemenid Empire to both east and west.

  Darius, like many powerful rulers, created monuments to serve as visible symbols of his authority. He made Susa his first capital and commissioned a 32-acre administrative compound to be built there. In about 518 BCE, he began construction of Parsa, a new capital in the Persian homeland in the Zagros highlands. Today this city, known as Persepolis, the name the Greeks gave it, is one of the best-preserved ancient sites in the Near East. Darius imported materials, workers, and artists from all over his empire for his building projects. He even ordered work to be executed in Egypt and transported to his capital. The result was a new style of art that combined many different cultural traditions, including Persian, Mede, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek. This artistic integration was simply a side effect of Darius’s political strategy.

    In Assyrian fashion, the imperial complex at Persepolis was set on a raised platform and laid out on a rectangular grid, or system of crossed lines. The platform was 40 feet high and measured 1,500 by 900 feet. It was accessible only from a single ramp made of wide, shallow steps to allow equestrians to ride up rather than dismount and climb on foot. Construction was spread out over nearly sixty years, and Darius lived to see the erection of only a treasury, the Apadana (audience hall), and a very rest of the complex on a second terrace, had open porches on three sides and a square hall large enough to hold several thousand people. Darius’s son Xerxes I (ruled 485-465 BCE ) added a sprawling palace complex for himself, enlarged the treasury building, and began a vast new public reception space, the Hall of 100 Columns, with its own guard gate. Most of the remaining work was done under Xerxes’heir, Artaxerxes I (ruled 464-425 BCE ).

  The multicultura composition of imperial Persia is evident in the varied appearance of the many hundreds of columns found in Persepolis. Although they were all executed with a distinctly Persian flavor, the columns reflect design ideas from Mede, Egyptian, and possibly Greek sources. They stood atop bell-shaped bases (foundations) decorated with leaves. Their shafts, or vertical supports, were carved with evenly spaced vertical channels called fluting, which exaggerated their height and gave them a feeling of delicate refinement. The capitals, the top section of the columns on which ceiling beams rested, were lavishly decorated with a combination of palm fronds, papyrus flowers, other plant forms, double vertical scrolls, and the heads and forequarters of kneeling creatures placed back to back. Traces of pigment revel that the Persepolis structures were originally richly painted in red, green, yellow, and blue. Large relief panels from Persepolis also show influences from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek cultures. In those panels, the garments that reveal the body beneath and have fine, knife-edged pleats especially reflect Greek sources and may indeed have been done by Greek sculptors.

  Like some Assyrian palace reliefs, those at Persepolis were concerned with displays of allegiance and economic prosperity rather than with heroic exploits. In one relief Darius holds an audience while his son and heir, Xerxes, listens from behind the throne. Such panes would have looked quite different when they were freshly painted in rich tones of deep blue, scarlet, green, purple, and turquoise, with metal objects such as Darius’s crown and necklace covered in gold leaf, or sheets of hannered gold.

EGYPT

  At the height of the New Kingdom, rulers undertook extensive building programs along the entire lenth of the Nile. Their palaces, forts, and administrative centers disappeared long ago, but remnants of temples and tombs of this great age have endured. Even in their ruined state, they grandly attest to the expanded powers and political triumphs of their builders, Early in this period the priests of the god Amun in

Thebes, Egypt’s capital city through most of the New Kingdom, had gained such dominance that worship of the Theban triad of deities-Amun, his wife Mut, and their son Khonsu-had spread thoughout the country. Temples to there and other gods were a major focus of royal art patronage, as were tombs and temples erected to glorify the Kings themselves.

  Temples to the Gods at Karnak and Luxor. Two temple districts consecrated primarily to the worship of Amum, Mut, and Khonsu arose near Thebes, one at Karnak to the north and the other at Luxor to the south. Little of the earliest construction at Karnak survives, but the remains of New Kingdom additions to the Great Temple of Amun still dominate the landscape. Access to the heart of the temple, a sanctuary containing the statue of Amun, was through a principal courtyard, a hypostyle hall-a vast hall filled with columns-and a number of smaller halls and courts. Massive gateways, called pylons, set off each of these separate elements. The greater part of Pylons II through VI and the areas behind them were renovated or newly built and embellished with colorful wall reliefs between the reigns of Tuthmose I (Dynasty 18, ruled c.1506-1493 BCE) and Ramesses II (Dynasty 19, ruled c. 1279-1212 BCE). A sacred lake to the south of the temple, where the king and priests might undergo ritual purification before entering the temple, was also added in this period. Behind the sanctuary of Amun, Tuthmose III erected a court and festival temple to his own glory. Amenhotep III(Dynasty 18, ruled 1390-1352 BCE) laterplaced a large stone statue of Khepri, the scarab beetle symbolic of the rising sun and everlasting life, next to the sacred lake. 

  Religious worship in ancient Egypt was not a matter of daily or weekly rituals performed in the presence of a congregation of laypeople. Only kings and priests were allowed to enter the sanctuary of Amun for the required devotions, in cluding washing the god’s statue every moyning and clothing it in a new garment, as well as providing it with tempting meals twice a day. The god was thought to derive nourishment from the spirit of the food, which the priests then removed and ate themselves. Ordinary people were rarely permitted beyond the forecourts of the hypostyle halls, where they found themselves surrounded by inscriptions and images of kings and the god on columns and walls. During religious festivals, however, they lined the routes along which the statues of the gods were carried in ceremonial barks, or symbolic boats. At such times they even submit petitions to the priests that they wished the gods to answer.

  Between Pylons II and III at Karnak stands the enormous hypostyle hall erected in the reigns of the Dynasty 19 rulers Sety I (ruled 1294-1279 BCE) and his son Ramesses II (ruled c. 1279-1212 BCE). Called the “Temple of the Spirit of Sety, Beloved of Path in the House of Amun,” it was perhaps used for royal coronation ceremonies. Ramesses II referred to it in more mundane terms as “the place where the common people sxtol the name of his majesty.” The hall was 340 feet side and 170feet long. Its 134 closely spaced columns supported a stepped, flat stone roof, the center section of which rose some 30feet higher than rest. The columns supporting this higher part of the roof are 66feet tall and 12 feet in diameter, with massive lotus flower capitals. The smaller columns on each side have lotus bud capitals that must have seemed to march off forever into the darkness.

  In each of the side walls of the higer center section there was a long row of window openings, creating what is know as a clerestory. These openings were filled with stone grillwork, so they cannot have provided much light, but they did permit a cooling flow of air though the hall. Despite the dimness of the columns, walls, and cross-beams with reliefs.

GREECE

  The simplest early temples consist of a single room, the cella or naos, with side walls incorporating pillars projecting forward to frame two columns in antis (literally, “between the pillars”). In a prostyle temple the columns form a portico, or walkway, only across the building’s front. An amphiprostyle temple has a row of columns (colonnade) at both the front and back ends of the structure, not on the sides. If the colonnade runs around all four sides of the building, forming a peristyle, the temple is peripteral; if the surrounding colonnade is two columns deep, the temple is dipteral.

The three classical Greek architecural orders are the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. The Doric and Ionic orders were well developed by about 600 BCE. The Doric order is the oldest and plainest of the three orders. The Ionic order is named after Ionia, a region occupied by Greeks on the west coast of Anatolia and the islands off the coast. The Corinthian order, a variation of the Ionic, begin to appear around 450 BCE and was initally used by the Greeks in interiors. Later, the Romans appropriated the Corinthian order and elaborated it, as we shall see in Chapter 6.

  The basic components of the Greek orders are the column and the entablature, which function as post and lintel. All types of columns have a shaft and a capital; some also have a base. Columns are formed of round sections, or drums, which are joined inside by metal pegs. InGreek temple architecyure, columns stand on the stylobate, the “floor” of the temple; the levels below the stylobate form the stereobate.

  The Doric order shaft rises directly from the stylobate, without a base. The shaft is fluted but not as deeply as in the other orders. At the top of the shaft is the necking, which provides a transition to the capital. The Doric capital itself has two parts, the rounded echinus and the tabletlike abacus. As in the other orders, the entablature includes the architrave, the frieze, and the cornice, the topmost, projecting horizontal element.

  The Ionic order has more elegant proportions than the Doric, its height being about nine times the diameter of the column at its base, as opposed to the Doric column’s five-and-a-half-to-one ratio. The flutes on the columns are deeper and closer together and are separated by flat surfaces, fillets. The hallmark of the Ionic capital, which has a thin, cushionlike abacus, is the distinctive scrolled volute.

  The Corinthian order was originally developed by the Greeks for use in interious but came to be used on temple exteriors as well. Its elaborate capitals are sheathed with stylized acanthus leaves, and sometimes rosettes, and they often have scrolled elements at the corners and a boss, or projecting ornament, at the top center of each “side.”

  As Greek temples grew steadily in size and complexity over the centuries, stone and marble replaced the earlier mud-brick and wood construction. Temple builders evolved a number of standardized plans, ranging from simple one-and two-room structures with columned porchers to multiroomed structures with double porches surrounded by columns. They also experimented with the design of temple elevations-the arrangement, proportions, and appearance of the temple foundation, the columns, and the lintels. Two standardized elevation designs, the Doric order and the Ionic order, emerged during the Archaic period. The Corinthian order, a variant of the Ionic order, became so popular later that it too is treated today as a standard Greek order.

The side of Paestum, a Greek colony established in the seventh century BCE about fifty miles south of the modern city of Naples, Italy, contains some rare examples of early Greek temples.Although these temples reflect contemporary architectural developments on mainland Greece, they also bear the stamp of their particular colonial setting and are not typical of all Archaic Greek temples. The earliest standing temple there, built about 550 BCE, was dedicated to Hera, the queen of the gods. It is known today as Hera I to distinguish it from a second temple to Hera built adjacent to it about a century later.

  Hera I is a large, rectangular, stone post-and-lintel structure with a stepped foundation supporting a peristyle, a row of columns that surrounds all four sides.

  The elevation design of Hera I was a local varation on the earliest major Greek order, the Doric. The standard form of the Doric order—incomplete on Hera I because of the damage it has suffered—includes fluted columns without bases resting directly on the stylobate.

  Fragments of terra-cotta painted in bright colors have been found in the rubble of Hera I, suggesting that they adorned parts of the temple, possibly the metopes. No sculptural framents have survived. The Hera I builders created an especially robust column, only about four times as high as its maximum diameter, topped with a widely flaring capital. This design creates an impression of great stability and permanence. In a local innovation not part of the standard Doric order, Hera I has an uneven number of columns-nine-across the short ends of the peristyle, placing a column instead of a space at the center of the ends. The entrance to the pronaos also has a central column, and a row of columns runs down the center of the wide cella to help support the ceiling.

ROMAN

  Both Greek and Roman orders—columns with their entablatures—are know as classical orders. Each order is made up of a system of interdependent parts whose proportions are based on mathematical ratios. In Greek and Roman architecture, no element of an order could be changed without producing a corresponding change in the order elements.

  The Etrusans and Romans adapted Greek architectural orders to their own tastes and uses. For example, the Etruscans modified the Greek Doric order by adding a base to the column. The Romans created the Composite order by incorporating the volute motif of the Greek Ionic caoital with other forms from the Greek Corinthian order. The sturdy, unfluted Tuscan order, also a Roman development, derived from the Greek Doric order by way of Etruscan models. The two Roman orders are shown on pedestals, which consist of a plinth, a dado, and a cornice.

Arch，vault and dome

  The basic arch used in Western architecture is the round arch, and the most elemental type of vaulting is the extension of the round arch, called a barrel vault. The round arch and barrel vault were known and were put to limited use by Mesopotamians and Egyptians long before the Etruscans began their experiments with building elements. But it was the Romans who realized the potential strength and versatility of these architectural features and exploited them to the fullest degree.

  The round arch displaces most of the weight, or downward thrust, of the masonry above it to its curving sides and transmits that weight to the supporting uprights (door or window jambs, columns, or piers), and from there to the ground.Arches may require added support, called buttressing, from adjacent masonry elements. Brick or cut-stone arches are formed by fitting together wedge-shaped pieces, called voussoirs, until they meet and are locked together at the top center by the final piece, called the keystone. Until the mortar dries, an arch is held in place by wooden scaffolding, called centering. The inside surface of the arch is called the intrados, the outside curve of the arch the extrados. The points from which the curves of the arch rise, called springings, are often reinforced by masonry imposts. In a succession of arches, calld an arcade, the space encompassed by each arch and its supports is called a bay.

  The barrel vault is constructed in the same manner as the round arch. The outside pressure exerted by the curving sides of the barrel vault usually requires buttressing within or outside the supporting walls. When two barrel-vaulted spaces intersect each other on the perpendicular, the result is a groin vault, or cross vault. The Romans used the groin vault to construct some of their grandest interior spaces, and they made the round arch the basis for their great freestanding triumphal arches.

  A third type of vaulted ceiling brought to technical perfection by the Romens is the hemispheric dome. The rim of the dome is supported on a circular wall, as in the Pantheon. This wall is called a drum.

Pantheon

  One of the most remarkable ancient buildings surviving in Rome is a temple to the Olympian gods called the Pantheon (“all the gods”). It was built under the patronage of Emperor Hadrian between 125 and 128 CE on the site of a temple erected by Agrippa in 27-25 BCE but later destroyed. The approach to the temple gives little suggestion of what it must have looked like when it stood separate from any surrounding structures. Not is there any hint of what lies beyond the entrance porch, which was raised originally on a podium (now covered by centuries of dirt and street construction) and made to resemble the façade of a typical Roman temple. Behind this porch is a giant rotunda (a circular building) with 20-foot-think walls that rise nearly 75 feet. Supported on these is a huge, round, bowl-shaped dome, 143 feet in diameter and 143 feet from the floor at its summit. Standing at the center of this nearly spherical temple, the visitor feels isolated from the resl world and intensely aware of the shape and tangibility of the spaceitself rather than the solid surfaces of the architecture enclosing it. The eye is drawn upward over the circle patterns made by the sunken panels, or coffers, in the dome’s ceiling to the light. Clouds can be seen through this opening on clear days; rain falls through it on wet ones, then drains off as planned by the original engineer; and occasionally a bird flies through it. But the empty, luminous space also imparts a sense of apotheosis, a feeling that one could rise buoyantly upward to escape the spherical hollow of the building and commune with the gods.

  The simple shape of the Pantheon’s dome belies its sophisticated design and engineering. Its surface of marble veneer disguises the internal brick arches and concrete that support it. The walls, which from the strucyural drum that holds up the dome, are disguised by a wealth of architectural detail—columns, exedrae,pilasters, and entablatures—in two tiers. The square, boxlike coffers inside the dome, which help lighten the weight of the masonry, may once have contained gilded bronze rosettes or stars suggesting the heavens.

  Hadrian was a great builder whose undertakings extended beyond public architecture to private dwellings. For his splendid villa at Tivoli outside Rome, he instructed his architects to re-create his favorite places throughout the empire: the Grove of Academe outside Athens in which Plato had founded his academy; and various buildings in and near the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria, Egypt. Hadrian’s Villa was not a single building but an architectural complex of many buildings, lakes, and gardens spread over half a square mile. Each section had its own inner logic, and each took advantage of natural land formations and attractive views. The individual buildings were not large, but they were extremely complex, providing ingenious examples of Roman planning and engineering. They surfaced structures with veneers of marble and travertine and with exquisite mosaics resembling paintings. And they landscaped with pools, fountains, and plants, turning the villa into a place of sensuous and sumptuous delight. An area with a long reflecting pool, celled the Canopus after a site Hadrian had seen at that city on the Nile near Alexandria, was framed by a fanciful colonnade with alternating semicircular and straight entablatures. The spaces between the columns were filled with copies of Greek statues.