Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/37

Rh The study of the motive of architectural investment is essential to the Archaeologist for the due comprehension of the whole style of the Architecture; but the tracing out the financial sources of that investment is rather the business of the Historian. Therefore, I will but remind you here how the centralising power of despotism reared with the slave labour of captive nations, and the produce of the most fertile of soils, the Votive and Commemorative architecture of Egypt,—how the victories of Marathon and Salamis gained for Athens those island and Asiatic dependencies, whose tribute built the Parthenon,—how Rome gave back to a conquered world part of their plundered wealth in the aqueducts, bridges, harbours, and fortifications, which the Empire constructed for the provinces,—and how, lastly, in most parts of Medieval Christendom, as there were but three great Landowners, so there were but three great Architects,—the Sovereign, the Churchman, and the Noble.

The third aspect in which the Archaeologist must regard Architecture, is in its relation to Painting and Sculpture. Every one who is the least conversant with the history of Art knows that Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture, as they are naturally connected, so have in all times been more or less associated, and that the divorce by which, in modern times, they have been parted, is as exceptional as it is to be deplored. In a great age of art, the structure modifies and is in turn modified by the painting and sculpture with which it is decorated, and it is out of the antagonism of the decorative and the structural that a harmonious whole is produced. The great compositions of Phidias in the pediments of the Parthenon were regulated by the triangular space they had to fill, the proportions of the whole building itself were again adjusted to the scale of the chryselephantine statue of Pallas Athene which it contained; for in the Greek, and the ancient idolatries generally, the temple of a god was considered his dwelling-place, his statue in the interior, the symbol—and more than the symbol—of his bodily presence.

Therefore, if the Mythography was colossal, so was the Architecture; if the genius of the religion invested the god with a form and character not so much exceeding the familiar proportions of humanity, the architecture was adjusted to the same standard. This, doubtless, was one