Greek Sanctuaries and Temple Architecture by Mary Emerson

Author:Mary Emerson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Decoration

It seems that no sculpture was planned for the Propylaia. Metope carvings would have to have been put in place at an early stage of building, so their absence is clearly intentional. If acroteria were planned they do not seem to have ever been put in place. The Propylaia was left deliberately plain in order to offset the abundance of sculpture on the three main Acropolis temples and to differentiate its function.

Despite the general restraint of the design, there are some innovative decorative details. One trendsetting idea is the use of dark limestone strips to contrast with the creamy Pentelic marble. Dark limestone is used for the bottom step of the four wing steps, and also for the top step of the five on the east end of the passage. Linking these dark accents, the corridors have fine large orthostate slabs of the same dark stone forming a long dado (emphasising the directionality of the passage). Thus, the theme of colour contrast is carried right through the building (Fig. 57).

This use of dark stone must be innovative because the whole Propylaia design is innovative and challenging. The stone is used to define the unusual spaces, to emphasise their connections and to underline where the building ends. Firstly, on each side wing, the dark bottom step of the four steps visually reduces the number to the conventional three steps; it also draws a line under the little Doric stoas as a whole and rounds off the design, separating it from the substructure.

The same horizontal accent carries all through the side passages in the form of the dark orthostates, till it touches the top step of the five final steps. That dark top step, level with the top of the orthostate panels, puts a frame under the view of the sanctuary that now begins to greet the approaching visitor. Of course, it also links each side of the passage, so that there is a ‘box’ of dark stone, used in different ways, all around the complex interior. In the long white passageway, the dark dado may have made a welcome change, and would have been a good background for anything placed in front of it, such as free-standing sculpture (just visible on right of Fig. 57).

We have seen this dark stone used before. It cl ad the Altar of the Chians at Delphi, and later it was used decoratively in the Tholos at Marmaria, Delphi. It was a fine-grained dark marble from a quarry near Eleusis, in Attica, and was greatly exploited in the Eleusis sanctuary, before emerging to be used sparingly but strikingly in some very specialised buildings (Shoe 1949). On the Periclean Acropolis, we shall see it again on the Erechtheion and the Athene Nike temple, and it also already formed the base of Pheidias’s bronze Athene Promachos statue (456 BC), giving visual weight to balance the great size of the sculpture.

The Doric columns are matched in style to those of the Parthenon itself. The Ionic columns, higher and slimmer than the Doric, have plain bases with a double torus linked by a scotia.

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