Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/13

 DIANA'S TEMPLE AT EPHESUS. " London has long possessed the finest collection of both the lai-ger and smaller works of art from Greece and Asia Minor, but Lord Elgin could not carry off Homer' s sun, rocks, and seas. ^' — Baedeker's "Greece." Introduction. It i.s impossible to understand any architecture from books alone, and this may be even especially true of the great works of Greek art, for they are not so much seen immediately as through a veil of traditional explanations, commentaries, and theories which are probably in great part a formal grammar applied long after the time when the architecture flourished as a living language. The British Museum, which is the richest collection of representative fragments of great classical buildings in the world, "furnishes us with an invaluable means for looking directly at, and measuring the very stones wrought by Greek artists. In it are stored large and significant fragments of the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, the Propylaea, the Temple of Nik6 Apteros, and of that which once stood by the Ilissus — all in Athens ; of the great Temple of Diana at Ephesus, and of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the two most famous build- ings of Asia Minor ; also of the Temples of Bassae and Priene, and of several important tombs, from the prehistoric work of Mycenae to the late Nereid monument brought from Xanthus. Of these, the Temple of Diana and the Mausoleum can only be properly studied in the Museum, which contains practically all the wrought stones of them which have ever been discovered. I propose first to examine the Temple of Diana. The several phases of architecture are usually classified as Antique and Classical, or Mediseval and Gothic. We are apt A