Roman Architecture

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The geographical position of Italy conferred upon her special and obvious advantages for taking up and carrying northward and westward the arts of civilization. A scarcity of good harbors was the only drawback amid the blessings of a glorious climate, fertile soil, varied scenery, and rich material resources. From a remote antiquity Dorian colonists had occupied the southern portion and the island of Sicily, enriching them with splendid monuments of Doric art; and Phœnician commerce had brought thither the products of Oriental art and industry. The founding of Rome (assigned by popular tradition to the date 753 B.C.) established the nucleus about which the sundry populations of Italy were to crystallize into the Roman nation, under the dominating influence of the Latin element. Later on, the absorption of the Etruscans added to this composite people a race of builders and engineers, as yet rude and uncouth in their art, but destined to become a powerful factor in develop-

ing the new architecture that was to spring from the contact of the practical Romans with the noble art of the Greek centres.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

While the Greeks bequeathed to posterity the most perfect models of form in literary and plastic art, it was reserved for the Romans to work out the applications of these to every-day material life. The Romans were above all things a practical people. Their consummate skill as organizers is manifest in the marvellous administrative institutions of their government, under which they united the most distant and diverse nationalities. Seemingly deficient in culture, they were yet able to recast the forms of Greek architecture in new moulds, and to evolve therefrom a mighty architecture displaying their genius in a wonderful variety of combination and in an unfailing sense of the demands of constructive propriety, practical convenience, and artistic effect. Where Egyptian or Greek architecture shows one type of plan, the Roman shows a score.

GREEK INFLUENCE

Previous to the closing years of the Republic the Romans had no art but the Etruscan. The few buildings of importance they possessed were of Etruscan design and workmanship, excepting a small number built by Greek hands. It was not until the Empire that Roman architecture took on a truly national form. True Roman architecture is essentially imperial. The change from the primitive Etruscan style to the splendors of the imperial age was due to the conquest of the Greek states. Not only did the Greek campaigns enrich Rome with an unprecedented wealth of artistic spoils; they also brought into Italy hosts of Greek artists, and filled the minds of the campaigners with the ambition to realize in their own dominions the marble colonnades, the temples, theatres, and propylæa of the Greek cities they had pillaged. The Greek orders were adopted, altered, and applied to arcaded designs as well as to peristyles and other open colonnades. The marriage of the column and arch gave birth to a system of forms as characteristic of Roman architecture as the Doric or Ionic colonnade is of the Greek.

THE ROMAN ORDERS

To meet the demands of Roman taste the Etruscan column was retained with its simple entablature; the Doric and Ionic were adopted in a modified form; the Corinthian was developed into a complete and independent order, and the Composite was added to the list. An approximation to a standard system of proportions for all these five orders was gradually evolved, and the mouldings were profiled with arcs of circles instead of the subtler Greek curves. It must not be supposed, however, that all this was due to arbitrary rules imposed by authority. It was a gradual convergence of practice due to growing experience, and the uniformity was much less than is sometimes imagined. In the building of many-storied structures the orders were superposed, the more slender over the sturdier, in an orderly and graded succession. The immense extent and number of the Roman buildings, the coarse materials often used, the relative scarcity of highly trained artisans, and above all, the necessity of making a given amount of artistic design serve for the largest possible amount of architecture, combined to direct the designing of detail into uniform channels. Thus in time was established a sort of canon of proportions, which was reduced to rules by Vitruvius, and revived in much more detailed and precise form by Vignola in the sixteenth century.

In each of the orders, including the Doric, the column was given a base one half of a diameter in height (the unit of measurement being the diameter of the lower part of the shaft, the crassitudo of Vitruvius). The shaft was made to contract about one-sixth in diameter toward the capital, under which it was terminated by an astragal or collar of small mouldings; at the base it ended in a slight flare and fillet called the cincture. The entablature was in all cases given not far from one quarter the height of the whole column. The Tuscan order was a rudimentary or Etruscan Doric with a column seven diameters high and a simple entablature without triglyphs, mutules, or dentils. But few examples of its use are known. The Doric retained the triglyphs and metopes, the mutules and guttæ of the Greek; but the column was made eight diameters high, the shaft was smooth or had deep flutings separated by narrow fillets, and was usually provided with a simple moulded base on a square plinth. Mutules were used only over the triglyphs, and were even replaced in some cases by dentils; the corona was made lighter than the Greek, and a cymatium replaced the antefixæ on the lateral cornices. The Ionic underwent fewer changes, and these principally in the smaller mouldings and details of the capital. The column was approximately nine diameters high. The Corinthian order, the column of which was given a height of ten diameters, was made into an independent order by the designing of a special base of small tori and scotiœ, and by sumptuously carved modillions or brackets enriching the cornice and supporting the corona above a denticulated bedmould. Though the first designers of the modillion were probably Greeks, it must, nevertheless, be taken as really a Roman device, worthily completing the essentially Roman Corinthian order. The Composite was formed by combining into one capital portions of the Ionic and Corinthian, and giving to it a simplified form of the Corinthian cornice. The Corinthian order remained, however, the favorite order of Roman architecture.

USE OF THE ORDERS

The Romans introduced many innovations in the general use and treatment of the orders. Monolithic shafts were preferred to those built up of superposed drums. The fluting was omitted on these, and when hard and semiprecious stone like porphyry or verd-antique was the material, it was highly polished to bring out its color. These polished monoliths were often of great size, and they were used in almost incredible numbers.

Another radical departure from Greek usage was the mounting of columns on pedestals to secure greater height without increasing the size of the column and its entablature. The Greek anta was developed into the Roman pilaster or flattened wall-column, and every free column, or range of columns perpendicular to the façade, had its corresponding pilaster to support the wall-end of the architrave. But the most radical innovation was the general use of engaged columns as wall-decorations or buttresses. The engaged column projected from the wall by more than half its diameter, and was built up with the wall as a part of its substance. The entablature was in many cases advanced only over the columns, between which it was set back almost to the plane of the wall. This practice is open to the obvious criticism that it makes the column appear superfluous by depriving it of its function of supporting the continuous entablature. The objection has less weight when the projecting entablature over the column serves as a pedestal for a statue or similar object, which restores to the column its function as a support.

ARCADES

The orders, though probably at first used only as free supports in porticoes and colonnades, were early applied as decorations to arcaded structures. This practice became general with the multiplication of many-storied arcades like those of the amphitheatres, the engaged columns being set between the arches as buttresses, supporting entablatures which marked the divisions into stories. This combination has been assailed as a false and illogical device, but the criticism proceeds from a too narrow conception of architectural propriety. It is defensible upon both artistic and logical grounds; for it not only furnishes a most desirable play of light and shade and a pleasing contrast of rectangular and curved lines, but by emphasizing the constructive divisions and elements of the building and the vertical support of the piers, it also contributes to the expressiveness and vigor of the design.