CHAPTER I.

THE POPULAR APPRECIATION OF ARCHITECTS.

Of all the fine arts none more completely answers for its _raison d’être_ than architecture. In this art alone do we find the harmonious mingling of æsthetical fancy with utilitarian purpose. It is this feature of usefulness that completes its well-rounded perfection, rather than detracts from it, and dignifies its mission of existence. Architecture, in its capacity to draw to its enrichment the other arts, may be compared to the polished orator, whose purpose is to sway the judgment of his audience by forensic effort, embellishing his language with the flowers of rhetoric, adapting his gestures to graceful emphasis, and controlling his voice to suit the light and shade of his thought. So sculpture has been stimulated by architecture and has contributed to its ornamentation; painting has been invoked to the highest accomplishments, and music has awakened within its walls voice and harmony. “The progress of other arts depends on that of architecture,” Sir William Chambers very truly says. “When building is encouraged, painting, sculpture, gardening and all other decorative arts flourish of course, and these have an influence on manufactures, even to the minutest mechanic productions; for design is of universal advantage, and stamps a value on the most trifling performance.”

It is perhaps not a little odd that despite its pre-eminent importance, and the high rank which it has ever assumed, from that early time when the first rays of dawning civilization began to warm the latent germs of culture and refinement in human nature, to the present day, it is the only art that has not, with very rare and isolated exceptions, stamped renown upon those who have practised it as a profession, and lifted the artist into the lasting remembrance and gratitude of the admirers of his works. How greatly the painter, the sculptor, the musician, are identified with their arts, and the products of their brush, chisel or pen! how great has been their praise, how lasting and unstinted the esteem in which they have been held! but how reserved has been the applause that has encouraged the architect who has given to the world the grand and noble results of his skill and genius, and how soon he himself has been forgotten! It happens only too often that it is the name of the distinguished painter that stamps the value of his canvas rather than the merits of the picture itself. The title of a beautiful piece of sculptured marble is not asked with greater eagerness than that of the artist who created it. Bach and Beethoven and Mozart are played and sung to the popular audiences rather than their fugues, their sonatas and their symphonies.

But what is known of the artists who have reared the greatest monuments of enduring architecture? Their personality, and even their names, appear to have faded from popular recollection. This seems to have been the fact from the earliest days of the art in Greece and Rome to the present time. The exceptions are so rare, throughout all the intervening ages, and the waving prominence of the art, that they might almost be numbered upon the fingers of a single hand.

The reader, if he is not a professional architect, or an amateur who has read deeply in his favorite subject, can arrive at the truth of this seemingly exaggerated statement, if he will lay aside this book for a moment and try to recall the names of the designers of some of the more conspicuous monuments of architecture he has visited at home or abroad.

“I will erect such a building, but I will hang it up in the air,” exclaimed Michael Angelo when he saw the dome of the Pantheon at Rome. The reader may remember this boast of the great Renaissance genius, the fulfilment of it in the colossal dome of St. Peter’s, and be satisfied that his memory has captured one architect of celebrity. If the beautiful Florentine campanile of Giotto looms up in his recollection he will think at once also of that early artist, but perhaps not more so in connection with that ornate tower than in association with the Pre-Raphaelites. Of course, he will not overlook Inigo Jones, whose very name is stamped upon the memory by reason of its peculiarity, or Sir Christopher Wren, the creator of St. Paul’s, and the British idol. If he is an admirer of the picturesque architecture of Venetian churches and palaces, the Italian Palladio may not escape him; and if of French Renaissance, the Louvre façade will possibly suggest Perrault, and the Parisian roofs Mansard. If he is a native of our “Modern Athens,” of course, the peril in which the classic front of the State House rested for a time, at the hands of a _fin de siècle_ legislature, will not permit him to forget Bulfinch, and Trinity Church will bring to memory the only Richardson. But aside from a few names such as have been mentioned, with possibly a sprinkling of others fixed in the memory, by incident or association, the average reader, however well acquainted he may be with the numerous luminaries of the other arts, will be unable to say who was responsible for the beauty and nobility of many buildings that have individualized the cities and towns of their location to the art-loving world. Who, for example, can tell of the authors of the cathedrals at Milan and Siena, Cologne and Strassburg, Rheims and Amiens, Wells and Litchfield; the Giralda at Seville; the Church of the Invalides at Paris; the Strozzi Palace at Florence; the Henry VII. chapel at Westminster Abbey; the much and justly admired south façade of the old City Hall in New York; Grace Church in that city; the Capitol building in Washington, or that model of colonial architecture in America, the Executive Mansion?

It is not, however, the purpose to here speculate too extensively upon the apparent lack of justice on the part of the general public which has been done the architects of all climes and times, but to gather together a few facts concerning the Old Masters of early Grecian architecture that are not popularly known, and recall some of the leading lights of that art so inimitably practised by the Hellenic people during their progress from archaic darkness to the zenith of their æsthetic culture.

It is but repeating a well-worn truth to say that the influence of the early Grecian architects upon the followers of their art in all countries of recognized civilized enlightenment, throughout the ages that have succeeded them, has been an almost dominant one. Robert Adam, the architectural authority in the time of George III., says, in the introduction to his work on the ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian: “The buildings of the ancients are in architecture what the works of nature are with respect to the other arts: they serve as models which we should imitate and as standards by which we ought to judge; for this reason they who aim at eminence, either in the knowledge or practice of architecture, find it necessary to view with their own eyes the works of the ancients which remain, that they may catch from them those ideas of grandeur and beauty which nothing, perhaps, but such an observation can suggest.”

It is equally true that no country that has experienced an evolution in intelligence and culture, during the twenty-five hundred years that have fled since the time of Pericles, has succeeded in introducing any new school of architecture, that has not been compelled to draw upon ancient Greece for many of the most important and essential features of the art it could only modify, but never wholly re-create.

The Gothic, or pointed-arch style, that sprung into such beautiful being in the thirteenth century, and reigned a queen within the Christian countries of Europe for several centuries thereafter, came more nearly answering for an original scheme of architecture than perhaps any other of equal importance, and yet had it been deprived of the Grecian props that helped to sustain it, it must have fallen to the ground.

In the Gothic the effort was made to incline the inherited principles of architecture more closely toward the spiritual progress of the people, but when at last it had run its course, and was dethroned, owing to a realization of the fact that even a closer allegiance to classic models could be made to answer still better spiritual requirements, how completely did the artistic temperament of the people revert to Greece and Rome, as the light of their returning inspiration and truth appeared with the dawn of the sixteenth century. Renaissance architecture and Renaissance art swept Europe like a wave, and the people turned with reactionary enthusiasm to the ancient standards of art, as they did to the study of classic authors, and to the writing of even Greek and Latin verses.

The debt of gratitude, therefore, which posterity has owed the originators in ancient Greece of the three noble orders of architecture—namely, the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian—can scarcely be overestimated, for it is to those three orders or styles that all subsequent architects have turned for the fundamental truths of their art. They may not have followed each or all with conventional strictness; but they have not succeeded in escaping from borrowing many of the features there everlastingly fixed by the unerring geniuses of classic times.

“Famous Greece! That source of art, and cultivated thought, Which they to Rome, and Romans hither brought.”

The uses to which the Greek and Roman architectural forms, principles and ornaments have been put since the birth of the Renaissance have broadened largely, and would seem to preclude any possibility of their ever again falling into even partial desuetude. It is not only in the more pretentious buildings, monuments and ornamental structures that abound so plentifully in the populous and wealthy cities that classic models and features are so liberally employed, but even the unpretentious and simple rural homes cannot escape their use. What is more common than the Doric mutule or Corinthian modillion, so frequently seen in the cornices of modern houses, or the Ionic dentils that show their teeth below a piazza roof or over the door casing of a colonial dwelling? The various combinations of the fret, the egg and dart, the bead and fillet, the honeysuckle, the acanthus and many other Grecian _motifs_ of ornamentation, are met with constantly, not only in buildings of a public or private nature, but in furniture and fresco, in interior decoration, and in enhancing the attractiveness of almost any article of use or ornament. Even the simple ogee moulding, which is employed, if nowhere else, about the door panels of the humblest abode, is classic in its origin, and had its archetype in the entablatures of those stately and beautiful temples dedicated to the pagan gods of ancient Greece.

It must not be inferred, however, that all the individual features employed in the Greek orders found their birth in the brains of Hellenic architects. Sir Jeremy Bentham says:

“From Egypt arts their progress made to Greece, Wrapt in the fable of the Golden Fleece.”

This statement, however, though poetical, is much too sweeping to be literally correct as to architecture. The Greeks borrowed a little—a very little—not only from the Egyptians, but from the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Persians, and other western Asiatic races as well; but so altered what they had borrowed, so refined it and entwined it with original conceptions of their own, that the captive features could have returned again to their native lands without fear of detection. Indeed as to the origin of some of the architectural features which the Greeks are supposed to have taken from the countries of a more unrefined people to the south and east of them, and especially as to the volute, so conspicuous in the Ionic capital, which is supposed to have been a Persian conception, there is much dispute.

Professor T. Roger Smith, of London, very truly observes: “We cannot put a finger upon any feature of Egyptian, Assyrian or Persian architecture the influence of which has survived to the present day, except such as were adopted by the Greeks. On the other hand, there is no feature, no ornament, nor even any principle of design which the Greek architects employed that can be said to have now become obsolete.”

In discussing the three primary orders of which mention has been made, and to which he adds the Tuscan and Composite, both of Italian or Roman origin, and closely dependent upon the original three, Sir William Chambers remarks: “The ingenuity of man has hitherto not been able to produce a sixth order, though large premiums have been offered, and numerous attempts been made by men of first-rate talents, to accomplish it. Such is the fettered human imagination, such the scanty store of its ideas, that Doric, Ionic and Corinthian have ever floated uppermost, and all that has been produced amounts to nothing more than different arrangements and combinations of their parts, with some trifling deviations scarcely deserving notice; the whole tending generally more to diminish than to increase the beauty of the ancient orders.... The suppression of parts of the ancient orders, with a view to produce novelty, has of late years been practised among us with full as little success; and although it is not wished to restrain sallies of imagination, nor to discourage genius from attempting to invent, yet it is apprehended that attempts to alter the primary forms invented by the ancients, and established by the concurring approbation of many ages, must ever be attended with dangerous consequences, must always be difficult, and seldom, if ever, successful.” Thus is seen the marvellous discretion and judgment exercised by the Grecian architects in selecting from contemporary art that alone which was best to perpetuate, and thus is well expressed in the statement of indisputable fact, a tribute to their originality and creative genius.

And who were these Old Masters of classic architecture—older in point of service to their art by thousands of years than Giotto and Raphael and Michael Angelo and Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, and many others who might be mentioned, and who in campanile and cathedral, in public building and private palace, in monument and mausoleum, have proved themselves justly entitled to the laurels with which they have been crowned, but who nevertheless are but disciples of Hellenic and Roman masters? Where do we find the biographies of the original Old Masters of architecture recorded? Where can we turn to read of their lives, of their deeds and achievements, of their aspirations and ambitions, of their shortcomings and their foibles? Where are written down those anecdotes and incidents of personal interest, so entertaining in association with their works or their art? What, in fact, were their names? There is comparatively little recorded of the lives of the Greek and Roman architects with which to answer these questions; strange as it may appear, even their names are unfamiliar, and in many important instances are forgotten altogether. Among that large galaxy of brilliant men which Greece in her prime produced, who figured prominently in almost every walk of life, who were great in war and in peace, in philosophy and poetry, in satire and history, in oratory and valor, and as great, if not greater than in all, in statuary and sculpture—a galaxy clinging to the memory in all ages of human progress, because never excelled, the name of a Grecian architect is a strange sound, and does not ring in tune, if it is ever heard at all, with the names enrolled upon the list of Greek immortals.

The sculptors and statuaries of ancient Greece are especially well remembered in the popular mind, and Myron and Phidias and Praxiteles and Polycletus call for no introduction to the ordinarily informed lover of art; not so the designer of the Parthenon or the Temple of Theseus, or the Erechtheum, or the Choragic monument of Lysicrates. It is strange that the artist who modelled or chiselled a bull or a cow or a Faun or a nude Venus, or any pagan god or goddess, however much we may praise the excellence of his skill, should be remembered by posterity, while the artist, his contemporary, who designed the most beautiful and graceful buildings of all time, which in their glory were the pride of their people, and which in their decay and ruin are still the loadstones that attract pilgrims from the most distant lands, is forgotten, and, it would appear, denied almost the humblest mention. Can it not be said of the Grecian architects, as well as the Grecian sculptors, that under the magic of their touch “Stones leap’d to form, and rocks began to live”? Were not the temples they reared in all the pride of surpassing beauty, which tempted the sculptor’s caress on frieze and pediment, and which gave shelter to those works of the statuary’s art which Shakespeare recalls so vividly when he draws the simile:

“They spake not a word. But, like dumb statues, or unbreathing stones, Stared at each other, and look’d deadly pale,”

as much entitled to give immortality to their creators as the works, however competitive, of other branches of art to their authors? And still so incidentally and indifferently have the historians and biographers of their time alluded to the Grecian architects, that little or nothing is to be found to quench that desire to know of them personally, which an interest in their grand achievements may well awaken.

Did we not know it to be otherwise, we might think that they, too, were like the poor architect of whom Goethe speaks: “He is employed in lavishing all the luxury of his fancy upon halls from which he is to be ever excluded, and display his ingenuity in bestowing the utmost convenience upon apartments he must not enjoy.” But it does not appear that any social discrimination was exercised against the Greek architects to cast a shadow upon their present or future fame.

It is popularly believed that the great buildings of the ancient world were very long in the process of construction—that they, in fact, took many decades and sometimes even hundreds of years to complete. If this were true it might in a measure explain the obscurity in which their architects have been left, inasmuch as the original designer of the building might have been forgotten ere the last of his successors had finished the work he had undertaken. But this is not altogether the fact. Even the pyramid of Cheops—that colossal marvel of the creative genius of man—we are informed by some authorities took but thirty years to construct, ten of which were given to the building of a road leading to the site of the pyramid, for the greater facility in handling the huge blocks of stone to be used. Neither were the temples and public edifices of Greece and Rome, as a rule, long in building, being generally undertaken and finished during the influential period of a public man’s career, or the reign of a single emperor. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule, as, for example, the temple of Apollo at Delphi, that erected to Diana at Ephesus, and that dedicated to Jupiter at Athens; but in nearly all such instances it will be found that the temples were destroyed and rebuilt during the long interval which is supposed to have passed from the time when their foundations were first laid, to that which found them again in all respects completed structures; or, if not destroyed and the work undertaken anew, the delay was caused by some political influence which contributed to check the continuous prosecution of the work, implying no procrastination on the part of the original builders. But even in the most of such cases the names of the various architects who were from time to time associated with the work are at least known, if their biographies are not more fully recorded.

It may be stated broadly that both the Greeks and the Romans were rapid builders when the size of their edifices is taken into account. Especially is this true of the time of Pericles, if we are to believe the testimony of Plutarch: “Every architect strived to surpass the magnificence of design with the elegance of execution, yet still the most wonderful circumstance was the expedition with which they [the buildings] were completed. Many edifices, each of which seemed to require the labor of successive ages, were finished during the administration of one prosperous man.” And the great biographer also adds: “... Hence we have the more reason to wonder that the structures raised by Pericles should be built in so short a time, and yet built for ages, for each of them as soon as finished had the venerable air of antiquity; so now they are old they have the freshness of a modern building. A bloom is diffused over them which preserves their aspect untarnished by time, as if they were animated by a spirit of perpetual youth and unfading elegance.”

Another mistaken idea is that the sculptors of ancient times were also architects. Some instances occur where, like the Italian, Michael Angelo, a prominent sculptor of Greece or Rome, made architecture one of his accomplishments, but they were not as numerous as they are supposed to have been, and the rule seems to be the reverse: that the sculptors of antiquity had no technical knowledge of architecture, and that the arts were quite as distinctly practised as professions in early times as they are to-day.

There remains to be presented only one other reason for the indifference shown the early architects by their contemporary writers and public, which is so well expressed by an English historian in his discussion of the Coliseum at Rome, that it may well be quoted as a type of the excuse offered by apologists of the same class: “The name of the architect to whom the great work of the Coliseum was entrusted has not come down to us.[1] The ancients seem themselves to have regarded this name as a matter of little interest; nor in fact do they generally care to specify the authorship of their most illustrious buildings. The reason is obvious. The forms of ancient art in this department were almost wholly conventional, and the limits of design within which they were executed gave little room for the display of original taste and special character.... It is only in periods of eclecticism and Renaissance, when the taste of the architect has wider scope and may lead the eye instead of following it, that interest attaches to his personal merit. Thus it is that the Coliseum, the most conspicuous type of Roman civilization, the monument which divides the admiration of strangers in modern Rome with St. Peter’s itself, is nameless and parentless, while every stage in the construction of the great Christian temple, the creation of a modern revival, is appropriated with jealous care to its special claimants.” In other words, the pupil is a fitter artist to awaken the personal interest of those who admire his works than his master; and the revived imitation of more consequence to the public than the original model. If this were true, why should the Coliseum, “the most conspicuous type of Roman civilization,” upon which the pilgrims of the North, as we are informed by Gibbon, based the longevity of Rome itself, when in their rude enthusiasm they gave expression to the proverb, “As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall,” _divide_ the admiration of the stranger with St. Peter’s? Should it not, rather, be subordinate to the Christian cathedral of Bramante, Raphael and Michael Angelo? Is there not a touch of the _reductio ad absurdum_ in this argument? Such reasoning does not seem to be quite obvious upon other grounds as well. If it is the fact that the ancients regarded the names of their architects as of little interest, and their buildings as wholly conventional, why does Vitruvius speak of four of the principal temples of Greece as “having raised their architects to the summit of renown”? Why is it that Rhœcus and Theodorus, Ictinus, Mnesicles, Dinocrates, Detrianus, Apollodorus and many other architects—to whom more particular mention will be made later—are remembered in ancient history with more or less circumstantiality, not only in association with their works—all conventional, if we are to accept this writer’s judgment—but also on account of their individual merit, while the architects of the buildings which departed most from that same conventionality, both in plan and detail, as, for example, the Erechtheum, the original Odeon of Pericles and even the Coliseum itself, where:

“Firm Doric pillars formed the solid base, The fair Corinthian crown the higher space, And all below is strength, and all above is grace,”

are lost in the ocean of oblivion?

Do not our modern authors overlook the fact that the architects of their own age share, as a rule, in the same popular indifference, and that the period of revival is no exception to the period of inception; that the one has inherited from the other not only the forms and principles of its art, but the same neglect of its artists?

Whether this is true or not, the fact must remain and be accepted with patience or impatience, as we please, that there is little preserved for us by the ancient writers in respect to their architects. Two rather conspicuous exceptions, however, occur to this general rule in respect to Pausanias, the Lydian, and Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman.

Pausanias lived toward the close of the second century after Christ. He was a great traveller and a close observer, his observations having been confined principally to works of art, such as public buildings, temples and statues, which he mentions in direct and simple language. He visited most of the states of Greece at a time when that country was still rich in her treasures of art, and what he has to say of what he saw there would tend to indicate that while he was by no means a critic or a connoisseur, he was still a faithful and minute recorder of what appealed to his taste or excited his curiosity.

Vitruvius, however, was not only a writer on architecture, but a professional architect as well, who resided in Rome about a century earlier than Pausanias, or in the time of Augustus. He is practically the only writer of his time who has given us technical information concerning the ancient buildings. Vitruvius wrote his treatises upon architecture at a very advanced age, and, it would appear, much in defence of the pure Greek models which were even in that time being corrupted. The frankness with which he hopes for fame by reason of his book, and exposes his poverty as well as the unprofessional practices of his brother architects, is not the least attractive feature of his discourse: “But I, Cæsar,” he exclaims, “have not sought to amass wealth by the practice of my art, having been contented with a small fortune and reputation, than desirous of abundance accompanied by a want of reputation. It is true I have acquired but little, yet I still hope, by this publication, to become known to posterity. Neither is it wonderful that I am known to but few. Other architects canvass and go about soliciting employment, but my preceptors instilled into me a sense of the propriety of being requested and not of requesting to be entrusted, inasmuch the ingenuous man will blush and feel shame in asking a favour; for the givers of a favour, and not the receivers, are courted. What must he suspect who is solicited by another to be entrusted with the expenditure of his money, but that it is done for the sake of gain and emolument? Hence, the ancients entrusted their works to those architects only who were of good family, and well brought up, thinking it better to trust the modest than the bold and arrogant man. These artists only instructed their own children or relations, having regard to their integrity, so that property might be safely committed to their charge. When, therefore, I see this noble science in the hands of the unlearned and unskilful of men, not only ignorant of architecture, but of everything relative to buildings, I cannot blame proprietors who, relying on their own intelligence, are their own architects; since, if the business is to be conducted by the unskilful, there is at least more satisfaction in laying out money at one’s own pleasure rather than at that of another person.”

Vitruvius also epitomized in his books on architecture much that had been written prior to his time by his professional brethren of Greece and Rome, and so preserved something of what otherwise might have been entirely lost.

Allusion has been made to these two writers with some particularity, for the reason that they will be more quoted than any others in the course of this volume, but it must not be inferred that they are alone responsible for all the knowledge which has come down to us respecting the Greek and Roman architects, little and unsatisfactory as it is.

Although it has been shown that the historians and biographers of ancient Greece made no attempt to treat architects with especial favor, it would not be just, however, to close this chapter without quoting from Homer to prove that lie, at least, could rank them as among those who, by serving the people in the highest sense, were entitled to unusual hospitality:

“... What man goes ever forth To bid a stranger to his house, unless The stranger be of those whose office is To serve the people, be he seer, or leech, Or architect, or poet heaven-inspired, Whose song is gladly heard?...”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] There is an old ecclesiastical tradition, which is much doubted, that the architect of the Coliseum was a Christian by the name of Gaudentius, who suffered martyrdom in its arena, and that the services of thousands of Jews contributed to its erection.