For example, the ancient Greek builders had secured the marble blocks together with iron clamps fitted in carefully carved grooves. They then poured molten lead over the joints to cushion them from seismic shocks and protect the clamps from corrosion. But when a Greek architect, Nikolas Balanos, launched an enthusiastic campaign of restorations in , he installed crude iron clamps, indiscriminately fastening one block to another and neglecting to add the lead coating. Rain soon began to play havoc with the new clamps, swelling the iron and cracking the marble.
Less than a century later, it wasclear that parts of the Parthenon were in imminent danger of collapse. In a set of vivid drawings, he depicted how the ancient builders extracted some , tons of marble from a quarry 11 miles northeast of central Athens, roughly shaped the blocks, then transported them on wagons and finally hauled them up the steep slopes of the Acropolis.
To speed up the job, engineers built a flute-carving machine. The device, however, is not precise enough for the final detailing, which must be done by hand.
This smoothing of the flutes calls for an expert eye and a sensitive touch. To get the elliptical profile of the flute just right, a mason looks at the shadow cast inside the groove, thenchips and rubs the stone until the outline of the shadow is a perfectly even and regular curve. The ancients spent a lot of time on another finishing touch.
With hundreds of thousands of chisel blows, they executed this pattern in precisely ordered rows covering the base, floors, columns and most other surfaces. The dates come from the inscribed financial accounts. One key factor may have been naval technology. Since the Athenians were the greatest naval power in the Aegean, they likely had unrivaled mastery of ropes, pulleys and wooden cranes. Such equipment would have facilitated the hauling and lifting of the marble blocks.
Another, counterintuitive possibility is that ancient hand tools were superior to their modern counterparts. After analyzing marks left on the marble surfaces, Korres is convinced that centuries of metallurgical experimentation enabled the ancient Athenians to create chisels and axes that were sharper and more durable than those available today.
The idea is not unprecedented. Modern metallurgists have only recently figuredout the secrets of the traditional samurai sword, which Japanese swordsmiths endowed with unrivaled sharpness and strength by regulating the amount of carbon in the steel and the temperature during forging and cooling.
Moreover, the restoration team has confronted problems that their ancient Greek counterparts could never have contemplated. During the Great Turkish War in the late 17th century—when the Ottoman Empire was battling several European countries—Greece was an occupied nation. The Turks turned the Parthenon into an ammunition dump. More than blocks from those walls—eroded over time—now lay strewn around the Acropolis. For five years, beginning in , Cathy Paraschi, a Greek-American architect on the restoration project, struggled to fit the pieces together, hunting for clues such as the shape and depth of the cuttings in the blocks that once held the ancient clamps.
Eventually, she abandoned her computer database, which proved inadequate for capturing the full complexity of the puzzle. Other days I felt like jumping off the Acropolis. Looming over each restoration challenge is the delicate question of how far to go. There have been some bravura feats of engineering. One talent was the cost to build one trireme, the most advanced warship of the era. Kagan, The Peloponnesian War, According to Kagan, Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war had triremes in service, while the annual gross income of the city of Athens at the time of Perikles was talents, with another in reserve at its treasury.
This ratio governed the vertical and horizontal proportions of the temple as well as many other relationships of the building like the spacing between the columns and their height. The cella was unusually large to accommodate the oversized statue of Athena, confining the front and back porch to a much smaller than usual size. A line of six Doric columns supported the front and back porch, while a colonnade of 23 smaller Doric columns surrounded the statue in a two-storied arrangement.
The placement of columns behind the statue was an unusual development since in previous Doric temples they only appeared on the flanks, but the greater width and length of the Parthenon allowed for a dramatic backdrop of double decked columns instead of a wall. The introduction of elements of the Ionic order in a predominately Doric temple was more dramatic in the development of a continuous freeze on the exterior wall of the cella.
While the integration of Doric and Ionic elements on the same temple was not a new development in Greek architecture, it was rare, and bestowed on the Parthenon a delicate balance between austere and delicate visual characteristics.
All temples in Greece were designed to be seen only from the outside. The viewers never entered a temple and could only glimpse the interior statues through the open doors.
Here is a plan of the temple:. It was built to replace two earlier temples of Athena on the Acropolis. One of these, of which almost no trace remains today, stood south of the Parthenon between the Parthenon and the Erechtheum. The other, which was still being built at the time of the Persian sack in , was on the same spot as the Parthenon.
We know the names of the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates and also of the sculptor Pheidias who made the massive chryselephantine cult statue of the goddess. The three main types of columns used in Greek temples and other public buildings are Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The truest and most basic difference among the orders has to do with proportions Doric columns, for example, being thicker and shorter, Ionic columns taller and slimmer.
As a shortcut, the orders may be distinguished most easily by their capitals the tops of the columns. As you can see from the following examples, the Doric capital has the simplest design; the Ionic has the curlicues called volutes, and the Corinthian has the acanthus leaves:.
Doric is not only a type of column, but an "order"; this means that temples of the Doric order not only have this type of column, but also have a certain structure at the upper levels. The different types of orders column plus entablature are illustrated by these diagrams, from Perseus: Doric order , and Ionic order. The Doric order is characterized by the series of triglyphs and metopes on the entablature.
Each metope was occupied by a panel of relief sculpture. The Parthenon combines elements of the Doric and Ionic orders. Basically a Doric peripteral temple, it features a continuous sculpted frieze borrowed from the Ionic order, as well as four Ionic columns supporting the roof of the opisthodomos.
The metopes of the Parthenon all represented various instances of the struggle between the forces of order and justice, on the one hand, and criminal chaos on the other.
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