The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods

Greek Sacred Architecture

Vincent Scully

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781595341778
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

When The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods first appeared in 1962, it was hailed by the critics for it erudition, historical imagination and boldness. Subsequently, this comprehensive study of Greek temples and site-planning has been widely accepted as a landmark of architectural history, for it offers an inspired and arresting insight into nature and function of Greek sacred architecture. Vincent Scully, one of America's most brilliant and articulate scholars, understands the temples as physical embodiment of the gods in landscapes that had for the Greeks divine attributes and sacred connotations. He explores the meanings inherent in the calculated interaction between man-made sculptural forces and the natural landscape, and he relates this interaction to our understanding of Greek culture from the pre-Greek Aegean to the Hellenistic period.Years of research and travel were devoted to The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. Scores of sites were restudied on the spot, including many lesser-known sanctuaries throughout the Hellenic world. The study includes reconstruction drawings, plans, and maps along with its richly illustrated, detailed discussions of major sites.

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Chapter 1

LANDSCAPE AND SANCTUARY

As for this place, it is clearly a holy one.

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (Fitzgerald)1

The mountains and valleys of Greece were punctuated during antiquity by hard, white forms, touched with bright colors, which stood out in geometric contrast to the shapes of the earth. These were the temples of the gods. Unlike the Roman Pantheon, with its ideal “Dome of Heaven,”2 or the medieval cathedral, a “Celestial City,”3 the temples were not normally in­tended to shelter men within their walls. Instead they housed the image of a god, immortal and therefore separate from men, and were themselves an image, in the landscape, of his qualities. Because they offered no comforting interior space, the temples have been catalogued by some modern critics as non–architectural.4 Because their forms were also simple, abstract, repetitive, and apparently canonical, others have seen them as creating a purely hermetic order and thus as overly restricted in expressive variation and conceptual breadth.5 Yet it is our critical opinion which is restricted, not the temples. A romantic desire, paradoxically classicizing in intention, to see them as static, perfect shapes, pure and so divorced from the problems of life, has been te­naciously held since the beginning of the modern age in the eighteenth century, as it also was during later antiquity; it has so doubly played its part in obscuring the much greater facts of the intellectual and emotional engagement which produced the temples and of the specific kinds of force they exerted.6 They in fact functioned and, in their fragments, still function as no build­ings before or since have done. They not only created an exterior environment—which it is one of architecture’s primary functions to do—that was wider, freer, and more complete than other architectures have encompassed, but, as sculptural forces, peopled it with their presences as well, in ways that changes of outlook and belief generally made inaccessible to later ages. They were capable of embodying states of being and, sometimes, of action, by whose character and results they are to be judged. Therefore, in order to know them it is necessary to know what they were intended to be and to do.

All Greek sacred architecture explores and praises the character of a god or a group of gods in a specific place. That place is itself holy and, before the temple was built upon it, embodied the whole of the deity as a recognized natural force. With the coming of the temple, housing 2its image within it and itself developed as a sculptural embodiment of the god’s presence and character, the meaning becomes double, both of the deity as in nature and the god as imagined by men. Therefore, the formal elements of any Greek sanctuary are, first, the specifically sacred landscape in which it is set and, second, the buildings that are placed within it.

The landscape and the temples together form the architectural whole, were intended by the Greeks to do so, and must therefore be seen in relation to each other. Edith Hamilton echoed Choisy and put the problem in simplest visual terms when she wrote:

to the Greek architect the setting of his temple was all–important. He planned it seeing it in clear outline against sea or sky, determining its size by its situation on plain or hilltop or the wide plateau of an acropolis…. He did not think of it in and for itself, as just the building he was making; he conceived of it in relation to the hills and the seas and the arch of the sky…. So the Greek temple, conceived as a part of its setting, was simplified, the simplest of all the great buildings of the world …7

This point of view, though it may seem obvious to most of those who have visited Greek sites, has not gone unquestioned by criticism. One objection which has been widely raised is that the Greeks of the archaic and classic periods are not supposed to have cared much for landscape, since they did not carve it or paint it or describe it at length in their literature. The statement as it applies to literature is of course not strictly true, especially as certain landscapes are de­scribed in the Homeric Hymns and many other places as appropriate to or expressive of various gods. The quotations with which this book is sprinkled attest to that, and there is, beyond a few quotations, a deep sense of the action and effect of landscape to be found among most Greek writers from Homer on. Similarly, the very absence of landscape background in most, in the larger sense all, vase paintings and reliefs may better be taken as indicative of the fact that the archaic and classic Greeks experienced the landscape only as it was, at full scale. Indeed, one might go on to say that all Greek art, with its usual sculptural concentration upon active life and geometry, may be properly understood and adequately valued only when the Greek’s counter–experience of his earth is kept in mind. In this way the forms he made can be seen in their uncompromised logic and true dimension: as compact images of act and will—of what, that is to say, men are and can make—nakedly separate from the natural environment but to be understood in balance with it. The landscape should therefore be regarded as the complement for all Greek life and art and the special component of the art of Greek temples, where the shape of human conception could be made at the landscape’s scale.

Such a supposition can be defended in terms of the history of ancient and modern culture as a whole, because it is only when the older, more intense belief in the gods tends to flag by the fourth century b.c. that romantic, picturesque poetry, nostalgically descriptive of landscape delights, like the idylls of Theocritus, makes its appearance, to be joined later by some tenta­tive landscape painting. Again, it is only when the gods finally begin to die completely out of the land and when many human beings begin to live lives totally divorced from nature—at the beginning, that is, of the modern age—that landscape painting, picturesque architecture, and landscape description, like that of the romantic rediscoverers of Greece itself, become the obsessive themes of art. Because of this shift the Greek’s view of the earth and his ritual use 3of it have become opaque to us. Therefore, any intended relationship between temples and landscape has been ignored by most modern critics and denied by others. One highly compe­tent historian, for example, dismissed the subject of temple–landscape relationship by writing:

First, as to topographical considerations in Greek design, it is so difficult to form any con­clusions that we must practically dismiss the question. Hellenic lands abound in effective natural locations for the display of buildings; of these many were utilized, and others were ignored while less appropriate places were chosen. Furthermore, in view of the rigid tradition of type forms of building, we find no variation in design that could be related to natural setting.8

The fallacy implicit in this statement has been maintained by many of the sensitive and in­formed persons who have studied Greek architecture during the past two hundred years. They, too, have looked at landscape (and, as in the quotation above, architecture as well) with the contemporary picturesque eye, seeing it as simply a more or less “effective” picture, devoid of specific shapes and integral meanings. But, despite certain partial movements in that direction which can be detected in architecture and painting during the post–classic centuries, that is not the way the Greeks basically saw it.

In point of fact, the historic Greeks partly inherited and partly developed an eye for cer­tain surprisingly specific combinations of landscape features as expressive of particular holiness. This came about because of a religious tradition in which the land was not a picture but a true force which physically embodied the powers that ruled the world, and although it may be ob­jected that some of the landscape forms I shall define as holy are common in Greece, still the temples are many also, and their consistent appearance in relation to the sacred forms in ques­tion is never coincidental. Steps have already been taken by other scholars toward the elucida­tion of this fact. Lehmann–Hartleben, in a crucial article of 1931,9 identified certain general combinations of features such as mountains, caves, springs, and so on as characteristic of Greek holy places, and Paula Philippson, in a beautiful short work of 1939, which does not deal with architecture, attempted to describe her informed impressions of a limited number of landscapes as embodying particular aspects of the goddess of the earth and of the relationship of men to her.10

We must now go further to recognize that, not only were certain landscapes indeed re­garded by the Greeks as holy and as expressive of specific gods, or rather as embodiments of their presence, but also that the temples and the subsidiary buildings of their sanctuaries were so formed in themselves and so placed in relation to the landscape and to each other as to en­hance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict, the basic meaning that was felt in the land. From this it follows that the temples and other buildings are only one part of what may be called the “architecture” of any given site, and the temple itself developed its strict gen­eral form as the one best suited to acting in that kind of relationship. But in order to act to the full, it too had to become an embodiment, not merely a construction, or an abstractly perfect shape, or a pictorial element. Therefore, the specific variations in form which each temple ex­hibits derive both from its adjustment to its particular place and from its intention to personify the character of the deity which it, too, is imaging there. So each Greek sanctuary necessarily 4differs from all others because it is in a different place, and each varies from the others in certain aspects of the forms of its temples and in their relation to each other and to the landscape. This had to be so, because Apollo at Delos, for example, was not exactly Apollo at Delphi, nor Hera at Paestum Hera at Olympia. On the other hand, a deep general pattern runs through all sites, both in the chosen shapes of their landscapes and the constructed forms of their temples. A pro­found repetition, at once the echo of ancient traditions and the syntax of a new art, informs the whole and sets off the specific statements which irradiate it and which, by the classic period, pro­duce an unmatched dialogue between oneness and separateness, men and nature, men and the facts of life, men and the gods. So Apollo at Delos shares characteristics, in his landscapes, his temples, and their arrangement, with the Apollo of Delphi in his. So too does the Hera of Paes­tum with her of Olympia, while the Zeus there differs from, but is related to, him of Dodona.

My insistence upon a willed form in the organization of the sanctuary as a whole brings us to another point which has received considerable discussion. It involves the question of whether or not the relation of the buildings to each other in Greek temene of the archaic and early classic periods can be considered as having been consciously planned. Diametrically opposing views have been advanced. Von Gerkan, who begins his consideration of Greek town planning with the development of the Hippodamian grid in the fifth century, sees the earlier sanctuaries as un­planned conglomerations of buildings,11 and this view is more or less shared by other authori­ties.12 Von Gerkan’s denial of planning to the archaic and most of the classic temene would seem partly to derive from a restricted idea of what architectural planning may be conceived to be, in which those solid elements that are regularly disposed in space are planned, those disposed irregularly being considered unplanned and haphazard. This criterion, certainly a foreign one to the Greeks, who did not conceive of solids and voids in such easily mutual terms, as we shall discuss later, can be carried to absurd lengths, as by a recent writer who remarks of Olympia:

buildings were sited without concern for any niceties of relation, among an outrageous multiplicity of statues of all periods. Yet the layout dates more from the fifth than the sixth century and the site is flat, two circumstances which should have encouraged a better ordering.13

Such pallid judgments, based upon a priori conceptions of “order,” can be destructive to our perception of the depth of Greek intentions, as when the same writer says of Delphi: “the lay­out … was complicated by the steep slope of the ground.”14 The answer is clearly that the steep slope did not “complicate” the “layout” for the Greek. Instead, it was the occasion for it; it created it.

Doxiadis, to go to the other extreme, has worked out a system of Greek temenos planning which he sees as consistently in use from the seventh century and which was modified but never entirely superseded by the tendency toward axial regularity that developed from the fifth cen­tury onward.15 He works out his system according to the views of buildings offered from the propylon of the sanctuary, and he sees it based upon the Greek conception of the universe as circular and of human vision as extending across a 180° arc of that circle, as it in fact does. Building solids are then set within the arc for maximum individual visibility and at rhythmically 5related intervals, the latter based upon an Ionian ten–part and a Dorian twelve–part divisioning of the circle as a whole. According to Doxiadis the system had further refinements and some de­velopment, but the essentials remained as I have rather crudely outlined them above.

Doxiadis’ theory has much to recommend it: first, insofar as it insists upon the wide arc of vision, thus removing Greek sanctuaries from criticism based upon the restricted, rectangular window of Renaissance perspective, with which Greek conceptions had little to do—indeed, until the fourth century, nothing to do; second, as it asserts that the eye of the participant is normally led out of the temenos toward the landscape beyond it. As he rather beautifully puts it:

So fühlt jeder Mensch, der eine Anlage betritt, sofort ihre Strucktur, er wird unvermittelt zu seinem Ziel geleitet, klar und rein sieht er alle Formen, das Ganze vor sich, seinen Weg kann er erkennen, frei bleibt er aber, sich zu bewegen; sein Weg führt zu keinem Gebäude, er ist nicht durch die schwerste Masse betont, er ist frei, und nach der Natur ist das Ganze ausgerichtet, natürlich ist die Anlage gebaut.16

On the other hand, Doxiadis’ presumed lines of sig...