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The interpretations that I offer in the following pages are very tentative, though not, I hope, obscure; and I feel myself wide open to further persuasion on any of them. But unless someone worries some of Vitruvius' more difficult passages and reaches conclusions that are fairly clear, however provisional, we shall make little progress at this stage. His actual text is now surprisingly well known, and Soubiran and Fensterbusch are pushing their labours on it as far as is humanly possible. It is his architecture that now needs discussion. I begin, however, with a small textual question.
I. Vitruvius v. xi. 2
‘In palaestra peristylia, quemadmodum supra scripturm est, ita debent esse perfecte distributa’ (Rose's text). ‘Perfecte’ edd., ‘Perfecta’ GH.
C. Ruffel and J. Soubiran, on p. 29 of their ‘Recherches sur la tradition manuscrite de Vitruve’ in Pallas ix (Toulouse, 1960), suggested that ‘perfecta distributa’ could be a tautology, one word glossing the other.
It does not seem a very obvious gloss to me, and I wonder if the right reading could be ‘perpetua’, in the common Vitruvian sense of ‘continuous’. For this see, e.g., v. i. 10—‘ipsae vero columnae in altitudine perpetua sub trabes’, or ‘the carrying of the columns themselves in unbroken height directly up to the beams’, as Morgan translates it. Or take the Greeks with their ‘emplecton’ wall in II. viii. 7: ‘e suis frontibus perpetuam et unam crassitudinem parietum consolidant. Praeterea interponunt singulos crassitudine perpetua utraque parte frontatos, quos diatonous appellant’, etc.
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References
1 I use the 1867 edition, as being most generally accessible.
2 Krohn, in his Preface, assumes that they must always do so in Vitruvius, and uses the instructions to make wooden architraves three ‘tigna’ thick (‘ex tribus tignis bipedalibus compactis trabes’) as his chief argument against Vitruvius' basilica at Fano (v. ii. 8).
3 Fig. 1 shows how a mere architrave between two tiers could be combined with a contignatio, a timber floor, as early as c. 500 B.C.
4 Fig. 2, a fairly typical Ionic capital, from Sardis, should remind readers of its various members and their treatment; and Plate 45a, a good copy of the Temple on the Ilissus, of the whole order, treated somewhat austerely.
5 ‘Qua crassitudine fecerunt basini scapi, tanta sex cum capitulo in altitudinem extulerunt.’
6 ‘Vitruvius and the Ionic Order’ (AJA 1926, 263). ‘If the ovolo begins flush with the extreme projection of the astragal (bead and reel), … there will be less than two modules left over for the projection of the egg and dart, whose outermost point is fixed [111. v. 7, proiectura cymatii]. The echinus therefore need not exceed two modules in its height.’
7 For the capitals of Teos, , see Antiquities of Ionia iv (1881) pl. 25.Google Scholar The example I show on Plate 45b I photographed in 1960.
8 See, e.g., Charbonneaux, J., Sculpture grecque archaique (Paris, 1938) 27 and pl. 28Google Scholar: ‘Cette figure, d'une dignité héroique … cette transposition du corps féminin, posé sur la base ronde comme une colonne’, etc.
9 Bacon, and Clarke, , Assos 145.Google Scholar Åkerström and Dinsmoor both date this temple about 540. But I sometimes wonder if this is not rather too late. The terracotta ‘antefix’ (Assos 161—really perhaps, a ridge-tile, for its lower face does not seem to be preserved and it sits rather unhappily as an antefix, as Assos 153 shows) is evidently much older than its direct descendant, the ridge-tile of the second Temple of Aphaia (Furtwaengler, , Aegina pl. 48Google Scholar); how much older it is difficult to say. But in addition the capitals are spreading, like those of the earlier sixth century, and the mutules over the metopes, in a highly archaic fashion, are narrower than those over the triglyphs, as shown in Assos 153 and stated on p. 167—seven-eighths of their width on the fronts and only three-fifths on the sides of the temple. (Dinsmoor is quite wrong to suppose on p. 88 of AAG that they are all equal.) Moreover, the hawksbeak on the corona (Assos 155) sweeps backward considerably at the top. The krepis, too, has only two steps, which may be due to Ionic influence, but could also be a sign of early work, like the low krepis of the Dörpfeld Foundation's outer peristyle at Athens (see my article in JHS 1960, 131). For all these reasons, I should not myself want to put Assos after 550. In some ways it resembles the Temple of Artemis at Corcyra. The Doric Order was perhaps first given its name in Ionia; so that even in IV. i. 5 Vitruvius would not be wildly wrong.
10 In Vitruvius, of course, the more widely one spaces the columns, the stouter one has to make them (111. iii. 10).
11 From Graben Abb. I.
12 ‘In der Rekonstruktionzeichnung (Abb. 39) wurden die grösseren Koren auf der Ecksäule eingezeichnet, obwohl sie dort sicher nicht hingehören, um die Wirkung der Säulenreliefs am Bau anschaulich zu machen.’
13 From Antiquities of Ionia, part iv (London, 1881), pl. xxii.
14 These are also the proportions in the little building on Plate 45a.
15 See, for a careful exposition of Burke's theory, J. T. Boulton's edition of the Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1958) esp. 99–100.
16 Her figure is almost girlish. But that she must be Hera is maintained by Lullies, and Hirmer, (Greek Sculpture (London, 1957) 41)Google Scholar, and made likely by the inscription down her robe.