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Updated: May 15, 2025
We see the tradesmen of England, as they grow wealthy, coming every day to the Herald's Office, to search for the coats-of-arms of their ancestors, in order to paint them upon their coaches, and engrave them upon their plate, embroider them upon their furniture, or carve them upon the pediments of their new houses; and how often do we see them trace the registers of their families up to the prime nobility, or the most ancient gentry of the kingdom!
The height of the Pandrethan temple of the cloistered recesses, porch pediments, and niches of Marttand itself were all just double their respective widths. This agreement in the relative proportions of my restored roof of Marttand with those deduced from other examples, is a presumptive proof of the correctness of my restoration.
This attic is panelled, and on it stand obelisk-bearing pedestals, one above each column, and between them pediments of strapwork.
Dormer windows were cut in this roof, with casings and pediments which the chisel of some great artist had covered with arabesques and dentils; each of the three windows on the main floor were equally beautiful in stone embroidery, which the brick of the walls showed off to great advantage.
It was also proposed that in the pediments there should be placed portrait-busts of men of the house of Medici, one in each over Justice, for example, the portrait of his Excellency, that being his particular virtue, over Compassion that of the Magnificent Giuliano, over Valour Signor Giovanni, over Nobility the elder Lorenzo, over Wisdom the elder Cosimo or Clement VII, and over Liberality Pope Leo.
Even the exterior of the temples glowed with the richest harmony of colours, and was decorated with the purest gold; an atmosphere peculiarly favourable both to the display and the preservation of art, permitted to external pediments and friezes all the minuteness of ornament all the brilliancy of colours; such as in the interior of Italian churches may yet be seen vitiated, in the last, by a gaudy and barbarous taste.
In this latter, also, some of the pediments are complete, others broken, illustrating another whim of the early American builders. Here the cornice is also Ionic with jig-sawed modillions, and the ensemble is generally more pleasing. In proportion and precision of workmanship this woodwork is hardly excelled in Philadelphia.
The fine humanity of it was everywhere present, and mingled not only with such grand and heroic lines as those of the sloping pediments and long-drawn entablatures of the Parthenon and Theseion, bending them into curves so subtilely modulated that our coarse perceptions did not perceive the variations from the dead straight lines till the careful admeasurements of Penrose and Cockerel and their confrères of France assured us of the fact, not only did it make these enormous harp-strings vibrate with deep human soul-music, but there is not an abstract line in moulding, column, or vase, belonging to old Greece or the islands of the Aegean or Ionia or the colonies of Italy, which does not have the same intensity of meaning, the same statuesque Life of thought.
Even the temples themselves, with their porches and pediments, remind one more of Greece than of India; and it is difficult to believe that a style of architecture which differs so much from all Indian examples, and which has so much in common with those of Greece, could have been indebted to chance alone for this striking resemblance.
Until lately these AEginetan figures were our only important group of late archaic Greek sculptures; and, though that is no longer the case, they still retain, and will always retain, an especial interest and significance. They once filled the pediments of a Doric temple of Aphaia, of which considerable remains are still standing.
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