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"In the harmonious proportions of this stately edifice," he said, "the peerless genius of the architect Ictinus, who designed the structure, is revealed, and in the delicate finish of the smallest details of the sculptured work, the wonderful skill of the artists who carried out the master's design is shown.
Ictinus might have drawn the plans for the Parthenon, but without Pericles the noble building would have remained forever the stuff which dreams are made of. And they do say that without Aspasia Pericles would have been a mere dreamer of dreams, and Walter Savage Landor overheard enough of their conversation to prove it.
In our fitful fever of honest intention and wrong judgement, high endeavour and point-blank commercialism, Greek art, the art of Pheidias and Ictinus, is still the wise mother to whom we must return.
Afterwards Silenus published a book on the proportions of Doric structures; Theodorus, on the Doric temple of Juno which is in Samos; Chersiphron and Metagenes, on the Ionic temple at Ephesus which is Diana's; Pytheos, on the Ionic fane of Minerva which is at Priene; Ictinus and Carpion, on the Doric temple of Minerva which is on the acropolis of Athens; Theodorus the Phocian, on the Round Building which is at Delphi; Philo, on the proportions of temples, and on the naval arsenal which was at the port of Peiraeus; Hermogenes, on the Ionic temple of Diana which is at Magnesia, a pseudodipteral, and on that of Father Bacchus at Teos, a monopteral; Arcesius, on the Corinthian proportions, and on the Ionic temple of Aesculapius at Tralles, which it is said that he built with his own hands; on the Mausoleum, Satyrus and Pytheos who were favoured with the greatest and highest good fortune.
The overseer and manager of the whole was Phidias, although there were other excellent architects and workmen, such as Callicrates and Ictinus, who built the Parthenon on the site of the old Hecatompedon, which had been destroyed by the Persians, and Coroebus, who began to build the Temple of Initiation at Eleusis, but who only lived to see the columns erected and the architraves placed upon them.
In one of them, for instance, Ictinus confides to the reporter that he was born in the shadow of the Parthenon. This mixing up of one's peculiarities, habits, and nationality with those of the illustrious individual whose name he bears, is capable of being given many laughable twists and has been taken advantage of in many amusing skits.
On the day of our visit, its pillars of pale bluish-gray limestone rose against a wintry sky, its guardian oaks were leafless, and the wind whistled over its heaps of ruin; yet its symmetry was like that of a perfect statue, wherein you do not notice the absence of color, and I felt that no sky and no season could make it more beautiful. For its builder was Ictinus, who created the Parthenon.
It was, however, inevitable that the fine simplicity of Periclean art should vanish with its ideals, and one finds a certain compensation in the extension of the range and outlook of architecture, which we owe to the Hellenistic architects of the fourth and succeeding centuries B. C. So far as perfection of form was concerned, it was impossible to carry the art beyond the stage to which Ictinus and Callicrates had brought it; but there still remained something, and something very important, to be done.
On the highest part of the platform of the Acropolis, not more than 300 feet from the entrance-buildings just described, stood and yet stands, though shattered and mutilated, The Parthenon, justly celebrated throughout the world, erected of white Pentelican marble, under the direction of Callicrates, Ictinus and Carpion and adorned with the finest sculptures from the hand of Phidias.
At Miletus, the temple of Apollo, also Ionic in its proportions, was the undertaking of the same Paeonius and of the Ephesian Daphnis. At Eleusis, the cella of Ceres and Proserpine, of vast size, was completed to the roof by Ictinus in the Doric style, but without exterior columns and with plenty of room for the customary sacrifices.
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