The Parthenon. Oxford Bibliographies. Reed College. The Parthenon: Religion, Art and Politics. The State University of New York. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Acropolis of Athens is one of the most famous ancient archaeological sites in the world. Located on a limestone hill high above Athens, Greece, the Acropolis has been inhabited since prehistoric times.
Over the centuries, the Acropolis was many things: a home to kings, a Few monuments in the world are more recognizable than the Parthenon. Sitting atop a limestone hill rising some feet above the Ilissos Valley in Athens, this soaring marble temple built in tribute to the goddess Athena brings the glory of ancient Greece into the modern world.
The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the years B. Archaic Greece saw advances in art, poetry and technology, but is known as the age in which the polis, or city-state, was Ancient Greek ruins that survive today are among the most iconic landmarks in the world. Grand structures like the Acropolis in Athens are a testament to a culture defined by advancement and innovation, especially in art and architecture.
In the middle of 5th Mycenae is an ancient city located on a small hill between two larger hills on the fertile Argolid Plain in Peloponnese, Greece. The Bronze-age acropolis, or citadel built on a hill, is one of the great cities of the Mycenaean civilization that played a vital role in classical The Hagia Sophia is an enormous architectural marvel in Istanbul, Turkey, that was originally built as a Christian basilica nearly 1, years ago.
Delphi was an ancient religious sanctuary dedicated to the Greek god Apollo. Developed in the 8th century B. The Pantheon is one of the best-preserved monuments of ancient Rome. The structure, completed around A. The Pantheon is situated on Ephesus was an ancient port city whose well-preserved ruins are in modern-day Turkey. The city was once considered the most important Greek city and the most important trading center in the Mediterranean region.
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All of these mythological battles represent the struggle between the forces of justice and injustice, of civilization against barbarity, of order versus chaos. These three battles as well as episodes from the Trojan War were also represented on the outside of the Parthenon, on the metopes of the building.
So there is a thematic unity from the exterior to the interior of the Parthenon. This theme of victory, of order over chaos, would have been drilled into any visitor to the Parthenon. These mythological battles between gods and giants, Greeks and centaurs, Greeks and Amazons were regarded as mythical allusions to historical victory, the recent victory of the Athenians over the Persians.
The Athenians' lofty conception of themselves is manifest in the idealized horsemen and other figures of the Panathenaic frieze. Battle Collection of Plaster Casts. One interesting thing about the Athena Parthenos, however, is that this glorious expression of Athens' patron goddess stood on a base decorated with a representation of the birth of Pandora.
Pandora is best known through Hesiod, the epic poet, as responsible for letting loose evils from her famous box. It's curious that Pandora, whom Hesiod calls a beautiful evil, should adorn the base of a statue that otherwise expresses Athenian might, wealth, and power.
I think an intellectual member of Athenian society might have wondered whether Pheidias wasn't attempting to perhaps slightly undercut the glorification of Athens, that this great statue hinted that Athens might have to deal with circumstances not of its own choosing. Since the early 19th century scholars have studied and measured the Parthenon and demonstrated that the so-called optical refinements of the Parthenon, the deviations from the perfectly horizontal or the perfectly vertical, deviations from the straight and perpendicular, were in fact intentional.
They are not the result of the settling of the building over time. There is a slight beveling or a slight angle in the blocks that was intended to create, for example, the curvature of the steps. There has been considerable debate. Vitruvius, who was an architect of the Roman period, believed that refinements like the upward curvature of the steps were made to compensate for optical illusion. Vitruvius believed that a perfectly straight line carried over a long distance would appear to sag, and he suggested the upward curvature of the long steps of the Parthenon would counteract that optical illusion, making the line look straight.
Vitruvius would seem to be assuming that the architects of the Parthenon wanted the Parthenon to look perfectly straight, wanted its lines to look perfectly horizontal and perfectly vertical.
I think there are good grounds to question that. I believe that the refinements were made to give the Parthenon an impression of being a living mass that responded to its own weight. For example, each column has a slight swelling at its center called entasis—it's a bulge of only a couple of centimeters, but it's measurable and it's visible. The slight swelling makes the columns seem to be tense; they seem to swell up to respond to the weight that they carry. In fact, entasis is the Greek word for tension or swelling.
Unlike straight cylinders, the Parthenon's columns swell slightly at the center, like an arm tensing under the weight of a heavy load. The kinds of optical refinements that we detect in the architecture of the Parthenon were far older than the fifth century. In the sixth century, in what we call the Archaic period, entasis can be far more exaggerated than it is on the Parthenon. But the Parthenon brings all these various refinements together in a particularly harmonious and integrated way.
The steps curve upward, the columns tilt inward, the metopes tilt outward, the columns swell, the corner columns of the building are slightly thicker than the other columns of the building. All of these refinements are combined masterfully. The Parthenon is a sculptor's building in many ways. We are told that Pheidias was the general overseer of the Periclean building program—that a sculptor was actually the overseer of an architectural project.
We think that the Parthenon's extraordinary width was to accommodate the placement of the huge statue of Athena Parthenos within it. But it's also a sculptor's temple in another way: These deviations from the straight, from the perpendicular, from the perfectly vertical, from the perfectly horizontal are analogous to the curvatures and the swellings and the irregularities of the human body. And in that sense, the Parthenon strikes me as being a sculptural as well as an architectural achievement.
There is no question that the Greeks conceived of their architecture in anthropomorphic terms. The most obvious expression of this is found on the Acropolis itself, where in the south porch of the Erechtheum, columns take the form of six maidens, or caryatids. Vitruvius, the Roman architect, talks about how the Doric order is masculine and the more elaborate, thinner Ionic order is feminine. There is no question that in the Greek mind, there was an analogy between the architectural form and the human form.
The ancient Greeks saw an analogy between architecture and the human form, as evident in the six caryatids, sculpted female figures, which serve as columns of the Erechtheum's south porch. Yes, and to the Athenians in particular. I think this is best expressed in the frieze that decorated the top of the cella walls, where there is a long procession of idealized youths and idealized maidens and idealized elders and idealized horsemen who parade down the walls, heading toward the east side.
The Parthenon procession is generally considered a representation of the Panathenaic procession that was held every year, in mid-summer, to celebrate the birthday of the goddess Athena.
What the Athenians do in the Panathenaic frieze is represent themselves in a lofty, exalted, idealized way, claiming a status that brings them almost to the level of the gods, who themselves sit on the east frieze. And while the Athenians are represented as nearly divine, the gods on the east frieze are represented as nearly human—they sit, they recline, they kibitz with one another, they lean on each other's laps, awaiting quite informally the culmination of this procession.
So the difference between gods and mortals, between Athenians and Olympians, is not one so much of kind as of degree.
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