Greek Art and Architecture - history.

« powerful independent city-states.

From 334 to 323 BC, Alexander the Great extended his father's empire into Asia Minor (now Turkey), Syria, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan, and as far as India. D The Hellenistic Period (323-31 BC) Although Alexander the Great extended Greek civilization far beyond the Greek mainland and the boundaries of the Aegean Sea, his empire did not survive his death in 323.After Alexander died, his generals and successors divided the empire into a number of kingdoms: Ptolemy I and his descendents ruled Egypt, Seleucus I established adynasty in Asia, and Antigonus I ruled in Macedonia.

Philetaeros carved the small but wealthy kingdom of Pergamum out of northwestern Asia Minor in the 3rd century BC. These were called Hellenistic (“Greek-like”) kingdoms, because the ruling classes spoke Greek and the official culture was Greek.

The term Hellenistic is derived from the Greek word Hellen meaning “Greek.” In mainland Greece, federations of city-states, such as the Achaean League, increasingly dominated politics, but in the 2nd century BC Rome began to exert its influence.

In 146 BC Rome defeated the Achaean League, destroyed the important Greek city of Corinth, and established itself as the dominant power in Greece.

Athens and other Greek cities intermittently resisted the Romans at first, but to no avail.

One by one, Rome also defeated the Hellenistic kingdoms.

The Hellenistic period ended in 31 BC, when Rome defeated Egypt, the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms, in the Battle of Actium. III ARCHITECTURE Greek architecture begins with the simple houses of the Dark Age and culminates in the monumental temples of the Classical period and the elaborately planned cities andsanctuaries of the Hellenistic period.

As in any time or place, the raw materials available and the technologies developed to utilize them largely determined the nature of thearchitecture.

The principal materials of Greek architecture were wood, used for supports and roof beams; unbaked brick, used for walls, especially of private houses;limestone and marble, used for columns, walls, and upper portions of temples and other public buildings; terracotta (baked clay), used for roof tiles and architectural ornaments; and metals, especially bronze, used for some decorative details.

Greek architects of the Archaic and Classical periods used these materials to develop a limitedrange of building types, each of which served a fixed purpose—religious, civic, domestic, funerary, or recreational. The principal forms of religious architecture were open-air altars, temples, and treasuries.

The altar, the earliest religious structure, always served as the focus of prayer andsacrifices.

The temple, which developed in the 8th century BC, housed the statue of a god or goddess to whom the sanctuary was dedicated.

The treasury, a small temple- like building, held offerings to gods and goddesses made by city-states and their citizens at sanctuaries such as Olympia and Delphi.

Other important public structures werenot religious in function.

They included the council house, where a governing council met; the law court; the fountain-house, a building where women filled their vases withwater from a community fountain; and the stoa, a roofed colonnade or portico, open on one side and often with rooms set along the rear wall.

These structures typically lined the principal public gathering place of the city, the agora, an open assembly area or marketplace Private houses took many forms.

Most early dwellings had just one room, in the shape of a rectangle, an oval, or a rectangle with a curved back wall (an apse).

Few Greekhouses were ever impressive from the outside, because their walls were of relatively flimsy mud-brick or small stones.

But when houses expanded into multiple rooms, theinteriors could be airy and pleasant, as they were generally organized around a small courtyard.

In the Hellenistic period kings and queens had grandiose palaces built atplaces such as Vergina in Macedonia and Alexandria in Egypt. The principal forms of funerary architecture were circular earthen mounds covering built tombs, rectangular earthen mounds with masonry facades, and mausoleums (largeindependent tombs typical of the Late Classical and Hellenistic periods). Entertainment and recreational activities took place in the open-air theater; the roofed concert hall; the gymnasium, an open field surrounded by rows of columns, where youths met for exercise and intellectual discussion; the wrestling ground; the stadium; and baths.

These various building types emerged at different times, but onceestablished, remained fundamental.

Like Greek art, Greek architecture consists of essential building types that were enriched and refined over time but rarely abandoned orreplaced. A The Temple The most characteristic Greek building is the colonnaded stone temple, built to house a cult statue of a god or goddess, that is, a statue to whom people prayed and dedicated gifts.

Developed in the Archaic and Classical periods, the typical temple had a rectangular inner structure known as a cella , which was normally divided by two interior rows of columns.

The cult statue usually stood at the rear of this room.

Most temples faced east, and visitors entered on that side through a colonnaded front porch.The side walls of the cella extended forward onto the porch and two columns stood either between the projecting walls ( in antis ) or in front of them ( prostyle ).

A back porch gave symmetry to the whole, but was usually cut off from the interior of the cella by a solid wall.

Completely surrounding this inner core was a continuous line of columnscalled a peristyle .

The best surviving examples of Greek temples are the Temple of Hephaistos (5th century BC) overlooking the Athenian agora and temples in southern Italy and Sicily from the 6th and 5th centuries. The origin of the peripteral temple (that is, one surrounded by columns on all sides) is still open to debate.

In the Dark Age there was no obvious distinction between ahouse and a temple.

In fact, the dwelling of a community's leader or king probably also served as the focus of religious activity, with sacred objects and the statue of adivinity stored within it.

One Dark Age building deserves special mention as a possible predecessor to later temple designs: a 10th-century structure at Lefkandi on theisland of Euboea.

Archaeological remains show that it was about 45 m (148 ft) long and 10 m (33 ft) wide, with walls made of mud brick set on a base of small stones, anda thatched roof.

Its most remarkable feature was an exterior colonnade of wooden posts, which seems to predict the peripteral temples of later eras.

But this building wasnot a temple, and it could not have influenced later architects.

It was built over the graves of a hero, his wife, and his horses, and was apparently intentionally destroyedsoon after its construction.

The Lefkandi hero-shrine is the first monumental structure in the history of Greek architecture, and testifies to the surprising capabilities of DarkAge builders. The earliest Greek temples looked like large one-room houses.

Clay models and remains from a number of 8th-century BC sites indicate that most were rectangular or horseshoe-shaped, with wooden posts or pillars set in a porch at the front ends of the cella walls.

But the Temple of Hera (8th century BC) on the island of Sámos was different.

It was barnlike, long and narrow, with a single row of columns running down the middle of the cella.

Sometime after its initial construction (possibly still duringthe 8th century BC), a continuous colonnade was added around the cella, making this the earliest truly peripteral temple in Greece.

Hereafter, the exterior colonnade became the principal distinguishing feature of most Greek temples. The first monumental temples of stone were built in the 7th century BC, possibly in emulation of the massive buildings in Egypt that the Greeks would have seen or heard about.

Also because of Egyptian influence, the Greeks began to carve monumental stone statues at this time.

Another factor leading to greater use of stone may have beenthe invention of heavy terracotta roof tiles, which needed more support than wood and mud brick could offer.

The Temple of Poseidon at Isthmia (early 7th century BC) had a tile roof and was one of the first temples to use cut stone for its walls (its columns were still of wood). B Architectural Orders By the end of the 7th century BC, two major architectural styles, or orders, emerged that dominated Greek architecture for centuries: Doric and Ionic.

The Doric order developed on the Greek mainland and in southern Italy and Sicily, while the Ionic order developed a little later than the Doric order, in Ionia and on some of the Greek. »