Ancient Greek and Roman Architecture - AP Art History

Bas-relief a very ancient artistic form. Bas-relief, from the French for "low relief," is a sculpture that leaves a background in the medium, carving only a portion of the front of the image into the stone being used. Bas-relief was first developed by the Ancient Egyptians, and widely used in Classical Greece and Rome.

Both Kouros (c. 600 BCE) and Dying Warrior from the Temple of Aphaia (500-490 BCE) are works of Archaic Greek sculpture. Kritios Boy is from 480 BCE and is an early work of the Classical period. Laocoon and His Sons (c. first century CE) is from the late Hellenistic period.

The Ionic order was named after the region of Ionia, a smattering of islands between Greece and Asia Minor (modern day Turkey), which were settled by Greeks in roughly the seventh century BCE. While the Ionians were there, they adapted Greek architecture into a simpler form, with more slender columns and less ostentatious ornamentation. This architectural form spread through mainland Greece, with the Temple of Athena Nike, at the entrance to the Acropolis in Athens, being an early example and the first Ionic building on the Acropolis.

Knossus is one of the most important sites in European art history, and one of the first studied for many scholars in basic art history. This question is helpful because it teaches while it asks: most students can recall or relate Knossus with the memorable Minotaur, but often do not correlate it with the Bronze Age or with being Europe's oldest city.

The figure at the top of the Column of Trajan is actually St. Peter. It was previously a statue of Trajan himself, but the statue went missing in the Middle Ages. It was replaced with the current bronze statue of St. Peter by Pope Sixtus V in 1587.

Image accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/RomaColonnaTraiana%26BasilicaUlpia.jpg

Triglyphs and metopes are a characteristic of the doric order temple, but were abandoned by the time the ionic order became the favored architectural tradition in favor of an uninterrupted frieze that could house relief sculpture.

The Doric order was heavy and squat. It was followed in the fourth century by the Ionic, which boasted more slender columns and longer proportions. It was considered more aesthetically pleasant than the Doric order, so Classical Greeks desired it more than the Doric order at the height of the artistic tradition from this period.

You can see that the building is Ionic by noting the bases on the columns (the larger circles around the outside of the circles that denote columns). Most other buildings on the acropolis were made of limestone, but the small size of this temple allowed architects to use pentelic marble.

There is evidence that the white piece found in Greece were actually brightly colored, giving us an image of Greece that is much different than the white marble we think of when we think of Classical Greece.

Temples epitomized the Greek way of life. They formed a balanced and aesthetically pleasing background to the daily lives of the Greeks, not necessarily places of active worship for the masses. They were built to be seen from outside, where their harmony spoke of the rationality of life.

There is a long-standing myth that the Romans invented the arch. This is simply not true, arches can in fact be found among ancient Greek ruins. They were mostly used underground. While the Romans didn’t invent the arch, they were the first to put it to wide use.

While many early civilizations sought to show the importance of a building by its size, the Greeks aimed, not so much for immense structures, but properly proportioned ones. We are still using their standards of proportion on art and architecture today. This doesn’t mean that there were no large Greek temples, but this was not a common characteristic.

The Greeks discovered that the human eye will interpret certain straight lines as curved and vice versa. When someone looks at a long row of columns they will appear to be crooked. To compensate for this they made the columns bulge outward and the steps curve slightly.

Some Greek temples are in fact massive, but for the Greeks religion and art were centered on man. The people who used the temples were in some ways the focal point, not the afterlife, or strange and exotic deities. Because of this the temples were supposed to be more in proportion to the people who used them.

The Romans copied many stylistic elements from Greek temples. There was, however, a major difference. Greek temples were built freestanding and without regard for the other buildings around them. Roman temples, on the other hand, were built in conjunction with large municipal building projects and their final design took this into account.

Even centuries after temples were built from stone, they were still strongly influenced by their wooden predecessors. Characteristics that the original temples had, for structural reasons were copied in the stone forms. For instance, the round columns imitated tree trunks, and the square triglyphs above the columns were meant to look like horizontal beams sticking out of the face of the building.

Ionic and Corinthian architecture was marked by taller, slenderer columns. Even the Doric temples, still built on the Greek mainland were less squat that their predecessors. The Greeks felt that this gave the buildings a lighter and more delicate feel.

The cella was the room that housed the statue of the patron deity. It was a place reserved almost exclusively to the priests. Many temples did have an antechamber to the cella where people could leave votive offerings.

The formula used to determine the relative length and width of most temples was front columns: side columns = n:n2+1. This meant that the temple would be roughly twice as long as it was wide. The Greeks used mathematical equations as the basis for many of the proportions of their buildings, feeling that this added to their beauty.