Beacon Lights of History, Volume 03: Ancient AchievementsLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 03: Ancient Achievements
Lord, John
History
"They [the Romans] deemed that lightness and grace were to be attained
not so much by proportion between the vertical and the horizontal as by
the comparative slenderness of the former. Hence we see a poverty in
Roman architecture in the midst of profuse ornament. The great error was
a constant aim to lessen the diameter while they increased the elevation
of the columns. Hence the massive simplicity and severe grandeur of the
ancient Doric disappear in the Roman, the characteristics of the order
being frittered down into a multiplicity of minute details."
When the Romans used the Doric at all, they used a base for the column,
which was never done at Athens. They also altered the Doric capital,
which cannot be improved. Again, most of the Grecian Doric temples were
peripteral,--surrounded with pillars on all the sides. But the Romans
built with porticos on one front only, which had a greater projection
than the Grecian. They generally were projected three columns, while the
Greek portico had usually but a single row. Many of the Roman temples
are circular, like the Pantheon, which has a portico of eight columns
projected to the depth of three. Nor did the Romans construct hypaethral
or uncovered temples with internal columns, like the Greeks. The
Pantheon is an exception, since the dome has an open eye; and one great
ornament of this beautiful structure is in the arrangement of internal
columns placed in the front of niches, composed of antae, or pier-formed
ends of walls, to carry an entablature round under an attic on which the
cupola rests. The Romans also adopted coupled columns, broken and
recessed entablatures, and pedestals, which are considered blemishes.
They again paid more attention to the interior than to the exterior
decoration of their palaces and baths,--as we may infer from the ruins
of Hadrian's villa at Tivoli and the excavations of Pompeii.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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