The Acropolis Essay Example for Free

The Acropolis Essay The Acropolis is the main part of the city of Athens located in 150m above sea level. Since ancient times, art flourished in his part of the city. Temple building had both a symbolic and economic objective. It glorified the gods and the city, which thereby succeeded in overawing the proprietary aristocratic cults that existed in the earlier foundations. In economic terms temple construction meant returning to circulation the money that otherwise would have accumulated in the coffers of the divinities concerned. Acropolis represents a flat-topped rock settled since Neolithic era (6 millennium BC). Further, Mycenaean population settled in this region. In two centuries, Acropolis was occupied by Kylon. For tribes henceforward all looked alike to Athens, set on that plains broad level between the mountains and the sea (Coulton 34). The splendid rock, the famous acropolis, afforded them a strong, capacious citadel; and under the rocks north slope sprang up the nucleus of what later was to be incomparably the largest of Greek towns. Political power was vested in the hands of a landowning aristocracy, the High-born or Eupatrids. From their ranks were yearly chosen the three Archons or executive officials, for civil administration, for religion, and for war. Plutarch, in his life of Pericles wrote of the great Classical buildings on the Acropolis that â€Å"they arose no less towering in their grandeur than inimitable in their grace of form, for the workmen eagerly strove to surpass one another in the beauty of their craftsmanship . . .† (Berve 56). This description shows that Acropolis had a great meaning and significance for Greece.   Acropolis art included literature and sculpture, buildings and painting. The most famous architectural constructions, temples, were located in Acropolis’ slopes. The most important temples were the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, and the Temple of Athena Nike. Temple sacred to Athena Polias’ was built around 6th century BC. There were two temples of Athene, an old and a new. Athenas new temple on the acropolis, and the great Portico which was raised at the entrance to the hill; out of it, too, came the gold and ivory statue of the goddess which stood within the shrine. Such a use of the allies money may seem inexcusable to us; but the ethics of imperialism are never very easy to define. Pericles believed that Athens had a mission to spread artistic culture by such means, and for this reason empire builders too have believed in their own mission and not always in a mission upon so lofty a plane (Berve 67). The temple of Athene had important meaning for Greeks because the climax of the Festival was a procession of ascent to the temple of Athena on the citadel. This temple dated from times long before the tyrant Gelon, there is excellent evidence that he embellished it, adding perhaps the pillars which ran round the shrines exterior, and the sculptured groups of marble figures which adorned its gable-ends. Nor were these the only monuments of his architectural passion (Coulton 76). Peisistratus and his sons rebuilt the Ancient Temple of Athena, with a peristyle of stone. Most unusual is the difference of material in the marble raking cornice, with its hawksbeak bed moulding and a crowning moulding which, though an ovolo, is also painted with a Doric leaf. The sima is likewise of marble, and on the pediments has the ovolo imitated from Corinthian terracotta simas, but on the flanks it retains the old Ionic vertical face with pipe-like spouts at intervals, while the water-spouts carved on the four angle acroterion bases were lion heads at one end, ram heads at the other (Berve 9). For the first time great pedimental groups were carved in marble, and consequently in the round rather than relief, for the technical reason that it was cheaper to construct the tympanium background separately in local limestone; the subjects were, at the east the battle of the gods and giants, and at the rear a combat of animals. The Erechtheum (421-407 BC) was constructed, near the north edge of the Acropolis, in the troubled period after Pericles death when the Peloponnesian War was going badly for Athens and funds were limited. Despite these handicaps, and the extraordinarily difficult architectural problems involved by the necessity of incorporating earlier shrines into the structure, the Erechtheum ranks as the finest of all Greek temples in the Ionic style. It later suffered badly from fires, from adaptation into a Church and then into a Turkish mansion, and from the carrying off of much of its materials for use in medieval and later buildings. This temple had â€Å"porch of maidens† consisted of six female figures as columns (Plommer 34). The greatest temple, the Parthenon (5th century BC) and popular monument, the Propylaea, were in the Dorian style, though they were in many respects different from the Dorian works elsewhere. Leader among the architects was Ictinus, the designer of the Parthenon, Ictinus was assisted in his work on the Parthenon by Callicrates, of whom less is known; and the name of Mnesicles has come down to us as that of the creator of the Propylaea, the Parthenon embrace both Doric and Ionic principles, as well as their distinctive features.   This temple was built on the place of the old temple of Athena. A huge platform of solid limestone masonry 252 feet long and 103 feet wide, attaining at one corner a height of 35 feet above bed rock, â€Å"formed the substructure of the temple; along the south flank it was intended to form a podium rising 7 ½ feet above the graded earth† (Berve 34). Leaving a portion of the platform to form a terrace on all four sides, the three-stepped temple was begun with stylobate dimensions of 77 feet 2 ½ inches by 219 feet 7 ½ inches; the lowest step was of pink Kara limestone, the middle step and stylobate of Pentelic marble. The temple was hexastyle, with sixteen columns on the flanks, all uniformly 6 feet 3 inches in lower diameter except those at the corners, which in accordance with a new system of emphasis were thickened by one-fortieth of the diameter. On the other hand, the archaic practice of reducing the flank spacing was retained. The inner building was tetrastyle prostyle (rather than in-antis) at both ends, the antae being of Ionic form lacking offsets but with base mouldings which were continued along the cella walls (Berve 56). The pronaos gave access to a long cella divided by two rows of interior columns, while through the opisthodomus could be entered what was probably a single large room, the prototype of the west chamber of the Periclean temple (Dinsmoor 48). The chief interest of this temple is that it initiated marble construction in Attica on a large scale, introduced the use of Ionic elements (Ionic frieze which runs around the walls) and the application of delicate refinements in upward curvature and column inclinations, and even contributed much of the material and many of the dimensions for the present Parthenon. When the Persians returned in 480 B.C. they completely destroyed it, the unfinished columns at this time having attained a height of only two to four drums above the stylobate. Also, â€Å"in high relief 92 metopes were carved† (Dinsmoor 48). East and west impediments depict scenes from Greek mythology. â€Å"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† (The Parthenon, n.d.).   Pheidias was the maker of the celebrated gold and ivory Athena Parthenos that stood in the Parthenon. There are literary descriptions of this lost statue which inspire us with the belief that the great image was truly free in the Greek sense. There are also, unfortunately, copies of Roman date which can only mislead. When he made the Athena Parthenos in Athens, and later the seated Zeus at Olympia, both of gold and ivory and on the giant scale, he was fulfilling the highest ambition of Greek art which had begun, more than a thousand years before, to make works of ivory and gold (Coulton 74). Under the south-east side of the Acropolis he further planned the building of a magnificent temple to Olympian Zeus. This scheme he never lived to see completed; and before the roof was added, the Athenian people had regained their liberty. The gaunt columns of the arrested work were left simply as they stooda memorial, as it were, of the tyrants frustrated pride and a warning to others who in future days might be tempted to follow in his footsteps (Coulton 73). Similar plans were employed for the earlier temple of   Ã¢â‚¬Å"A† on the Athenian Acropolis. More elaborate was temple A on the Acropolis, with a tetrastyle in-antis faà §ade (Plommer 78-80). In these temples may be seen the characteristic Greek practice of using a different type of anta capital (with the Doric) from that of the column In the entablatures, while the mainland tendency was to leave the metopes uncarved, they were frequently accented by the use of thin slabs of white marble, contrasting with the dark blue or black of the triglyphs and the blues and reds of the taenia below and cornice above. The Hydra gable (belonging to an unknown building on the Acropolis) illustrates the growing Athenian tendency to use sculptured pediments, though here the amount of relief is only 1 inch (Plommer 78-80). Other Athenian temples of this period were the miniature temple E on the Acropolis, unknown as to location (possibly one of three treasuries, including temples B and C, west of the Hecatompedon) though its details obviously imitate those of the Peisistratid temple of Athena, and also its direct antithesis, the huge but frustrated beginning of the great Olympieum by the sons of Peisistratus, abandoned when Hippias was driven into exile in 510 B.C. (Plommer 78-80).. The two lower steps were actually built, as well as the foundations of the second or inner rows of columns, as well as the arrangement of the columns, the outer rows having eight on the fronts and twenty-one on the flanks, with a diameter of 7 feet 11 1/4 inches (Dinsmoor 48). The Acropolis and its temples embodied the best architectural constructions of Ancient Greece. The Acropolis temples represent a architectural importance because of the meticulously detailed representation of a building and unique combination of styles. Works Cited Berve H., Gruben G., Hirmer M. Greek Temples, Theatres and Shrines. Greenwood Press, 1963. Coulton J.J. Greek Architects at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Dinsmoor W.B. The Architecture of Ancient Greece. London: Croom Helm, 1975. The Parthenon n.d. 09 Ma7 2007. http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/110Tech/Parthenon.html Plommer W.H. Ancient and Classical Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.