Greek sacred architecture
Greek sacred architecture is the design of temples, altars and sanctuaries in ancient Greece. It is as much about landscape as about buildings. In an influential study first published in 1962, the architectural historian Vincent Scully argued that a Greek sanctuary cannot be understood without the land around it.[1]
Not a shelter for worshippers
Scully contrasts the Greek temple with the Roman Pantheon, a "dome of heaven", and with the medieval cathedral, imagined as a heavenly city. Those buildings were made to hold people. The Greek temple was not. It housed the image of the god, and the building itself was an image of the god's qualities set in the landscape. Some critics have called Greek temples "non-architectural" because they have so little interior space.[1]
This matters for how worship worked. Because the temple was a house for the god rather than a hall for a congregation, communal ritual, including sacrifice at the altar, took place outdoors in the sanctuary. The temple and the altar together, with the landscape, made up the sacred place.
Landscape and the god
Scully's central claim is that every Greek sanctuary praised a particular god in a particular place. The place was holy before any temple was built, because it was felt to embody the god as a natural force. So the formal elements of a sanctuary were the sacred landscape itself and the buildings set within it. This is why, in his view, Apollo at Delos is not quite the same as Apollo at Delphi, and Hera at Paestum differs from Hera at Olympia.[1]
Earlier scholars had already noticed recurring features of holy places, such as mountains, caves and springs (Lehmann-Hartleben, 1931), and Paula Philippson (1939) read Greek landscapes as aspects of the earth goddess. Scully went further, arguing that temples were deliberately placed to enhance, develop, complement or even contradict the meaning of the land.[1]
Was there a plan?
Scholars have disagreed about whether early sanctuaries were planned. Von Gerkan saw sanctuaries before the fifth century BCE as unplanned. Doxiadis proposed a system based on views from the gateway (propylon) across a 180-degree arc. Scully accepts some of Doxiadis's idea but notes that his sightlines are sometimes blocked. For Scully the real point is that the layout was meant to look unplanned, leading the eye out of the sacred precinct (temenos) to the landscape beyond. Answering a critic who said the slope at Delphi "complicated" the plan, Scully replied that the slope "created" it.[1]
He describes the buildings in a sanctuary as like "phrases in a developing language", added over generations, and sums up his approach in the phrase "the form is the meaning". He ends with the Homeric hymn to Earth, "mother of all": the holiness of the earth came first and the temples came late.[1]
Two sanctuaries in their landscapes
Scully's reading is clearest at two great sites. At Delphi, Apollo's temple is set below the Phaedriades cliffs in earthquake country, and the Sacred Way reveals and hides it on the way up.[2] At Eleusis, Demeter's "space-positive" Telesterion enclosed a standing crowd at the end of a day-long procession from Athens.[3] See Sacred landscape of Delphi and Eleusis and the Sacred Way.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Scully, Vincent (2013). "Landscape and Sanctuary". The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (Revised ed.). Trinity University Press. ISBN 9781595341778.
- ↑ Scully, Vincent. "Apollo". The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture. Yale University Press. Delphi passage.
- ↑ Scully, Vincent. "Demeter". The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture. Yale University Press. Eleusis passage.