FOR OUTLINE ARCHAIC GREEK
ARCHITECTURE AND ARCHITECTURAL
SCULPTURE
The foremost architectural expression of ancient Greek culture was always the peristyle
temple. This kind of temple is rectangular in plan, usually consisting of three rooms
placed one behind the other in the following order: the pronaos or frontporch, the naos or
central cult room, and a storeroom at the back called an opisthodomos or an adyton
depending on how the room is entered. This type of building seems to have been inspired
by the throne room in Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces on mainland Greece and is called
a megaron (See the example at Pylos and Mycenae, ca. 1250 B.C. in Stokstad, fig. 419 and website images. n.b. The ground plan for the megaron at Pylos, which
contains a 4th room for storage at the rear, is incorrect in Stokstad). The seemingly
illogical placement of a peristyle or colonnade around the megaron has practical origins.
Before Greek stonemasons learned from the Egyptians the technical ability to render
these buildings in stone, the walls were made of unbaked mud brick, and the roof was
made of heavy thatch. In order to protect the mud brick walls from wind- driven rain, the
eaves of the heavy thatch roof were broad, extending out as much as 15 feet from the
wall, and necessitating a row of wooden posts beneath the edge of the eaves to help
support the overhang as in the Protogeometric heroon at Lefkandi, ca. 950 B.C.
(website images). Three hundred years later, when the temples came to be made of
stone, there was no longer a need for broad eave overhang, but the Greeks liked the
aesthetics of the peristyle and rendered the surrounding posts into stone, too. Unlike their
Egyptian counterparts who forced the viewer to approach Egyptian buildings on the
central axis, Greek architects always made certain that one's first complete view of a
peristyle temple, after penetrating the temenos (sanctuary) wall, is from the corner, so
that the viewer sees two colonnades intersecting at right angles, thus better defining the
solid geometry of the structure as in the ground plan of the sanctuary of Athena
Aphaia on Aegina, ca. 510-490 B.C. (website image). It should also be mentioned that
most Greek temples did not have a surrounding peristyle, a phenomenon reserved only
for the grandest and most expensive temples, usually built by the central government of
the city state or polis in an attempt to wrest the control of religious power from the
aristocracy.
In the Archaic period, these peristyle temples were erected in two orders, the Doric and
the Ionic. The ground plans of buildings in either order are essentially the same, so the
differences appear principally in detail. Of the two, the Doric order seems to have arisen
first, and though there are clearly differences, both the Doric column and the Doric
frieze (composed of trigylphs and metopes) are, like the megaron itself, inspired by
Bronze Age prototypes. Columns of the Ionic order are more richly ornamented and may
have originated as free-standing columnar bases surmounted by crouched sphinxes as in
the Naxian sphinx and its Free-standing Ionic column from the sanctuary of Apollo
at Delphi, ca. 565 B.C. (website images). The earliest Ionic columns used as structural
elements in a building are those of the Archaic Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, ca. 560
B.C. With their dense, dipteral ordering and drums decorated with relief sculpture, these
columns seem to have a connection with the columns of Egyptian hypostyle halls
(ground plan and partial elevation - website images) hypostyle halls turned inside
out.
The Greeks decorated temples in both orders with sculpture, but it was always felt by the
Greeks to be most important that the sculptural decoration augment the form of the
building rather than overwhelm it, i.e. too much sculpture on a building visually
overloads it and detracts from the viewer's appreciation of its architectonics. In the Doric
order, could sculpture appear in the pediments or gabled ends of the buildings as in the
temples of Artemis at Corfu, ca. 580 B.C. (Stokstad figs. 5-8, 5-9 and website
images) and of Athena Aphaia on Aegina, ca. 510-490 B.C. (Stokstad figs. 5-12, 5-13
and website images), in the metopes of the Doric frieze, and occasionally as akroteria
above the three corners of the roof at each end of the building. Like vase painting, the
subject matter of pedimental sculpture tends to be mythological. Early Archaic
pedimental sculpture invariably contains crouched lions and may have been inspired by
yet another Bronze Age prototype, the Lion Gate at Mycenae, ca. 1250 B.C. (Stokstad
pp. 100-101 and website images). Over the course of the Archaic period, pedimental
sculpture develops in three ways: 1. From relatively low relief to sculpture in the round.
2. From multiple narratives to a single unified narrative filling the entire pediment. 3.
From figures of varying scale (depending on their position in this awkward low,
vertically depressed triangular figure field) to figures having the same size. Because
buildings in the Ionic order had such richly carved moldings, it normally seems to have
been thought that putting sculpture in the pediments or including a sculptured frieze
would, as mentioned above, detract from the building's architectonics as in the
reconstructed facade elevation of the Archaic Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, ca. 560
B.C. (website image). There were, however, exceptions such as the Treasury of the
Siphnians in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, ca. 530 B.C. (Stokstad figs. 5-10, 511 and website images). Considered from the ancient Greek point of view, this building
really does approach the outer limits of good taste. Karyatids, statues of women (korai)
act as the posts or columns. There is a continuous Ionic sculptured frieze course (i.e.
no division into triglyphs and metopes) the subject of which is a Gigantomachy or battle
between the gods and the giants. There is a sculptured pediment, and there appear to have
been akroteria, too. The giant being mauled by one of the lions pulling the chariot of
Dionysos in the frieze is one of the great passages in Greek pictorial art of the Archaic
period, again communicating not only the mythological event, its commemorative
function, but intense emotional response, too.
Though the pedimental figures in Doric temples came to be carved completely in the
round by the end of the Archaic period, they behave in a pictorial manner, like figures in
relief, because they are placed against a wall (called the pedimental or tympanum wall)
and act out a pictorial narrative that moves perpendicular to the viewer's line of vision.
Thus, for the sake of visual clarity, all the forms of the bodies of these pedimental statues
tend to be arranged on a single plane, i.e. the composition of the figure, its relationship to
surrounding three-dimensional space tends to be very two-dimensional (See Stokstad
figs. 5-12, 5-13 and website images). Nevertheless, because these statues were attached
with metal rods and dowels to the pediment wall behind and shelf below, the sculptor did
not have to worry about the tensile strength of the stone and could represent figures in
positions other than the conservative walking ones of the kouroi and korai types without
worrying about breakage. Thus pedimental statues formed the workshop in which Greek
sculptors experimented with "action figures." The two dimensional compositions of these
pedimental statues, the arrangement of the forms of the body on a single plane, will have
a surprisingly long-lasting impact on the composition of Greek free-standing statues, both
in the late Archaic period as in the hollow-cast bronze statuette of the god, Zeus,
hurling his thunderbolt, from Ugento in southern Italy, ca. 510 B.C. (website
images) and in the ensuing Early and High Classical periods.
Copyright by John F. Kenfield 2008