The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (19 page)

Phidias (born c.490
B.C.
), skilled as a sculptor, owed his prominence to Pericles, who chose him to supervise all the building on the Acropolis. Still, we cannot surely identify Phidias’ own work on the Parthenon, except for the statue of Athena that the Parthenon housed. When Pericles no longer controlled Athens, Phidias became a target for Pericles’ enemies. First, as Plutarch recounts, they accused him of stealing the gold supplied for the Athena Parthenos. “There was nothing of theft or cheat proved against him; for Phidias, from the very first beginning, by the advice of Pericles, had so wrought and wrapt the gold that was used in the work about the statue, that they might take it all off, and make out the just weight of it, which Pericles at that time bade the accusers do.” When they failed in this, they charged him instead with impiety, “especially that where he represents the fight of the Amazons upon the goddess’s shield, he had introduced a likeness of himself as a bald old man holding up a great stone with both hands, and had put in a very fine representation of Pericles fighting with an Amazon.” Plutarch tells us that “Phidias then was carried away to prison, and there died of a disease; but as some say, of poison, administered by the enemies of Pericles, to raise a slander or a suspicion at least, as though he had procured it.”

The architect builders put up their canonical temples all across the mainland and the Peloponnese, producing the remarkable uniformity of classic Greek architecture. After leaving the Parthenon, Callicrates found a half-dozen
other assignments outside Athens, building temples at Sunion, in Acharnai, at Rhamnus, and on Delos. Ictinus, too, followed his completion of the Parthenon by work on the temple of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, and the temple of Apollo at Bassai. Perhaps Phidias did not die in jail, for there is evidence that after the date of his trial he was working on an enormous ivory-and-gold statue of Zeus for the temple at Olympia. Despite the battles between the poleis and the intestine conflicts of politicians, all the gods still dwelled in houses of strict Doric or Ionic order.

T
HE
most un-Greek thing we can do, philosophers tell us, is to imitate the Greeks. Yet the great works of Greek art that invited imitation did not inspire creation. The legacy of Greek architecture was “classic” forms and their arrangement in “orders.” This was appropriate too, for, as we have seen, their architecture followed a few well-known traditional models. The last will and testament of Greek architecture was written not by a Greek but by a Roman, four centuries after the building of the Parthenon. The author was Vitruvius, a Roman military engineer and architect of the Age of Augustus in the first century
B.C.
We know so little about him that even his name is in doubt. Vitruvius was only his first name.

Though not an eminent man of letters, he writes self-consciously about himself. Unlike other architects, he says, he could not appeal to clients by his good looks. He probably served as engineer-architect on Julius Caesar’s far-flung expeditions in the Maritime Alps, in Spain, and in Africa. And after Caesar’s assassination in 44
B.C.
, he seems to have served Octavian, to whom he dedicates his
Ten Books of Architecture
(
De Architectural
).

This work, in which he “disclosed all the principles of the art” (about three hundred printed pages in English translation), had an uncanny power over later centuries. But Vitruvius’s name as architect was definitely associated with only one building, the basilica and shrine in honor of Augustus at Fano in Umbria. While most of the architectural monuments of his age disappeared, Vitruvius survived in his words. Since none of his illustrations remained, he exerted his influence as the prime exponent of classical
architecture through his verbal instructions, observations, and word pictures of the model orders for Western architecture. Later editors had to supply or to invent their own illustrations, and they did.

The accidents of history conspired to make Vitruvius’s work the West’s primer of architecture for a millennium and a half, with a fertile and vigorous afterlife. Did it survive because it was important in its time? Or is it important because it happened to survive? Classical scholars condescend to his style and try in translation to preserve the “crudities” of his language. But for the modern lay reader it is one of the few seminal works of technical literature that can be read for entertainment.

Reading Vitruvius today, we are not surprised that he remained the messenger of classical architecture. He helps us understand, too, why and how the Romans made architecture their master art. For Rome was a civilization of organization and mastery, and architecture was Vitruvius’s name for the arts of shaping and organizing the whole man-made environment. “In architecture,” observed Nietzsche, “the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power.” And it was never more so than in ancient Rome. Cicero, Vitruvius’s contemporary, classed architecture with medicine and teaching, and Vitruvius called architecture a great profession. But in his time, even in Rome, it was not yet organized as a separate profession. The master builder, the environment-shaping artist, was not distinguished from the engineer, the planner, or the interior designer. Nothing that concerned space or time was alien to him.

The architect’s work, according to Vitruvius, was the most comprehensive and most liberal of the arts, “for it is by his judgment that all work done by the other parts is put to test.” A man of natural ability and quick learning, the architect must “be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.” His treatise covers, in turn: town planning and the siting of cities; the primordial substances (and building materials); the principles of temple building, symmetry, and the classic orders; public buildings, theaters, baths, and gymnasia; domestic buildings; stucco, fresco, pavement, and coloring; water, its collecting, supply; acqueducts and wells; geometry, astronomy, the measuring of time by sundials and water clocks; machines for hoisting, moving, and measuring; military machines and defenses.

The architect could not properly site the streets of a city unless he knew the directions of the prevailing winds to avoid their blowing through the alleys. “Then let the directions of your streets and alleys be laid down on the lines of division between the quarters of two winds.” Since there were
“only eight” winds, houses could be sited to avoid their worst bluster. History had to explain the familiar elements of classic architecture:

And so, too, a knowledge of botany and medicine would help the architect understand when to cut the
timber
for his buildings.

For the modern historian Vitruvius provides a treasury of ancient Roman ways. But to centuries of builders he delivered the Greek commandments for designing and constructing the three orders—Doric, Ionian, Corinthian. For Vitruvius these genera had the distinctiveness of the kinds of creatures in the organic world. And his rules for the orders, though drawn from the
actual proportions of classic Greek buildings, he claimed to be “founded in the analogy of nature.” The beauty of the Greek temples, he insisted, was not the product of any architect’s imagination. Rather, it embodied the symmetry and proportion found in all nature, and especially in the human body.

Vitruvius then ingeniously showed that the human body provided the elements of architectural symmetry—the circle and the square. The figure he described came to be known as Vitruvian Man, and cast a spell over the visual imagination of many centuries—from Leonardo da Vinci to William Blake. The dimensions of the human body, by defining both circle and square, provided the elements of all other symmetry. “For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom.” And so, too, may the figure of the perfect square be defined. “For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.”

It was not surprising, then, “that the ancients had good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole scheme.” He reminds us that
all
units of measurement were simple applications to the whole material world of the natural proportions of man—the “finger,” the “palm,” the “foot,” and the “cubit” (the length of the arm from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow). And, whether we chose, like Plato, to say that the “perfect number” was ten (the number of the fingers of the hand), or with others to say that it was six (a man’s foot being one sixth of his height), Vitruvius noted that we still followed the symmetry of nature.

For the architecture of temples, the buildings of greatest dignity and authority, there were only three original orders. The subtle natural symmetry of each had an aura of divinity. “The Doric was the first to arise, and in early times. For Dorus, the son of Hellen and the nymph Phthia, was king of Achaea and all the Peloponnesus, and he built a fane, a temple to Pannonian Apollo which chanced to be of this order, in the precinct of Juno at Argolis, a very ancient city, and subsequently others of the same order in the other cities of Achaea, although the rules of symmetry were not yet in existence.” For their model they turned to man himself.

Later, when they wanted to build a temple not to the male god Apollo but to the graceful Diana, “they translated these footprints into terms characteristic of the slenderness of women, and thus first made a column the thickness of which was only one eighth of its height, so that it might have a taller look.” In the capital they put volutes, “hanging down at the right and left like curly ringlets,” and ornamented in front with festoons of fruit in place of hair. The flutes on the columns they brought down all the way, falling like the folds of the robes worn by matrons. And this became the second order, the Ionic.

The third order, the Corinthian, was “an imitation of the slenderness of a maiden,” which invited its own prettier effects by adornment. He recounts that when a maid of Corinth died, her mourning nurse put on top of her tomb a basket with a few things that the girl had cherished and covered the basket with a roof tile. The basket happened to cover the root of an acanthus plant. When spring came the acanthus sprouted, and as the roof tile prevented stalks from growing up in the middle the leaves curved out into volutes at the edges. When the sculptor Callimachus passed by he was inspired to make the sprouting acanthus leaves his model for a “Corinthian” capital. This set the style and helped define the other proportions for a whole Corinthian order with its own proper maidenly symmetry.