Style and Epoch

the life of the Romans. Such columns were retained only in temple schemes, and then only on the front facade, while the entire temple organism was modified according to the conception that had been reworked by the Etruscans (the pseudoperipteral temple); the remaining three walls of the temple were thus in most instances simply articulated by pilasters or columns partly sunk into the surface of the wall. Such a method might be found in a few Hellenic monuments, of course, but only in an embryonic state. Only with the Romans did this motif achieve a new and far-reaching power. It attained unusual variety and expressiveness in the wall-surface treatment applied to theaters, amphitheaters, and especially triumphal arches.

At the same time, the fact that the columns in the triumphal arch, engaged to the wall surface and seeking to break loose from its hold, produce an uneasy sense of dramatic impact is already indicative of impulses that are wholly alien to the Hellenic spirit and that attain full expression only at the end of the sixteenth century in the Baroque style. This sensation becomes even more expressive when the column, by virtue of its centrifugal pull away from the wall surface, destroys the hitherto smooth, mirrorlike surface of the entablature, projecting its entire vertical profile and breaking it beyond both the line of the cornice and the tall pedestal below the column, as may be seen in a majority of triumphal arches. All this already clearly manifests a new sense of composition, one that is strained, dynamic, and no longer mitigated by the common lines of the entablature and sloping Greek pediment. At the same time, the column is deprived of its constructive function, without which the Greek order is inconceivable. At best, it fulfills a subsidiary role here, resting against the wall and, with it, supporting the overhead load (Basilica Maxentius, the trepidarium in the thermae); in the vast majority of instances, it carries absolutely nothing except a simple or projecting entablature above it (triumphal arches). Thus, the complex sensations that we experience in looking at the Arch of Constantine or the Coliseum in Rome or the arch in Ancona are a result of forces artificially induced on their wall surfaces, a strikingly theatrical dramatization, a kind of purely aesthetic game for obscuring or illustrating their constructive essence, but one always sufficiently selfsustaining and independent to prove a worthy object of view. Here for the first time we vividly encounter in a working construction such a sharp differentiation between the body and the attire clothing it—one that sometimes evolved as a result of the purest artistic invention, of the creative play of fantasy. It thus becomes apparent that in Roman architecture the embodiment of aesthetic emotion as such proved as great a goal for the architect as the consideration of any constructive necessity, and that these two aims generally did not coincide, as we saw they did with the Greeks, but rather coexisted alongside and parallel to one another. And though we naturally cannot regard that style which invented a new building material (concrete) and which solved on a grand scale, in a new manner, and with a purely constructive flair the complex problem of roofing spaces with barrel, groin, and domical vaults as an aesthetic style, we nonetheless must recognize the fact that it was precisely Roman architecture that prepared the way for the already purely aesthetic style of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which brought everlasting glory to Renaissance architects.

However, underlying this last word in achievement, proclaimed by the Romans for virtually all the world to hear, was still the same constructive element—the arch and the vault—bequeathed by the Etruscans; and it is here that this element was destined, for the first time, to attain its rightful aesthetic realization.

The use of the arch became commonplace in Roman waterworks. There also oc58