The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (20 page)

Vitruvius specified in mathematical detail the ornaments and the proportions of all parts of each of these three original orders. These specifications went beyond the gross dimensions, beyond the relation of width to length, to a minute prescription for the placing of columns and their fluting, and other subtleties. All the architectural members above the capital had to be inclined toward the front by a twelfth part of their own height, for otherwise they would not seem perpendicular. The column could not be uniform in thickness from top to bottom, “on account of the different heights to which the eye has to climb. For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures, and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented to the beholder.” Vitruvius’s calculations showed how to make precisely the right bulge for “an agreeable and appropriate effect.”

Whatever Vitruvius may have been in his own time—military engineer, man of letters, practitioner and teacher of a new liberal art of architecture—for later centuries he became the legislator of the arts. He defined, declared, and decreed
the
orders of architecture. With a legislator’s overconfidence he claimed that he had “disclosed all the principles [
rationes
] of the art [
disciplinae
].” He proved effective in ways he might have predicted. While he guided, he also narrowed the imagination of architects for generations. The creators who might have been inspired by the classical Greek experience he imprisoned into archetypes. But he actually succeeded in his quixotic purpose of quantifying an art into a science. And he did make it teachable.

Vitruvius’s eyes were fixed so obsessively on the surviving beauties of the past that he did not notice the revolutionary architectural achievements of his own time. He stood at the threshold of one of the great innovative ages of Western architecture, but all he professed to see was decadence. His book reeks with condescension toward “the new taste that has caused bad judges of poor art to prevail over true artistic excellence.” He refers to concrete only as a material useful for making polished floors. And he gives no hint that this new kind of “artificial stone” ingeniously combined with ancient brick by the unexcelled skills of Roman engineering would create grand new forms. But this humble fluid concrete was already beginning to raise grandiose space-encompassing buildings without precedent and would liberate architects from Vitruvius’s orders.

The power of his sacred text for architects was not fully realized until a thousand years had passed. His alone among ancient architectural treatises has survived. Fifty-five manuscripts have appeared, the oldest written in the ninth century at Jarrow in Northumberland, copied from others brought there from Italy in the seventh century. Still, his influence on building during the Middle Ages was meager. Like other seminal books, Vitruvius’s leaped the centuries. Then the great Renaissance architects, beginning with Alberti (1404–1472), who wrote his own ten books “On Building,” (
De Re Aedificatoria
), faithfully patterned their treatises on his. Bramante, Ghiberti, Michelangelo, Vignola, and Palladio all acknowledged Vitruvius as their master in the art and made his ten books their gospel.

In the very act of codifying the “liberal” profession of architect, Vitruvius stultified the architect’s work. His orders became the order of architecture, propriety became the standard of beauty, and the great Greek creations cast a long dark shadow.

Vitruvius’s lifetime, between the death of Julius Caesar (44
B.C.
) and the death of Augustus (
A.D
. 14), embraced some of the most productive decades in the long history of architecture. In Rome during that Augustan Age more than 125 important buildings were constructed or restored. While Vitruvius
pleaded for beauty, decorum, and authority (
auctoritas
) in the works of his time, he wrote little about their brilliant Roman embodiments. A whole new cycle of creation was in progress with new materials and new forms, far outside the classic Greek canons. But the great Roman mentor of architects was not a friend of Roman architecture. How were the Romans liberated from ancient canons to make their own?

“T
HE
ancient Romans,” Voltaire complained, “built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, the amphitheatre, for wild beasts to fight in.” In this “enlightened” verdict on Roman architecture critics and historians have joined for the last thousand years. Vision of the ancient Roman creations had long been clouded by Vitruvius’s idealizing of ancient Greece. The arts of Rome, like Roman civilization as a whole, have had a bad press. The title of Edward Gibbon’s classic
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
has dominated literary imagination. Awed by the grand spectacle of so great a civilization disintegrating, we have thought too little about its rise and the creations that made it great. Western pundits have applauded Rome’s decline. “I know not why any one but a school-boy,” Dr. Johnson decreed, “should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind.” “The barbarians who broke up the Roman empire,” Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed, “did not arrive a day too soon.” Still, Roman creations are among the most remarkable works of mankind. And their architecture remains their most original and most enduring contribution to the arts of the West.

It is not so surprising that architects schooled in Vitruvius and the beauties of classic Greece have been slow to recognize the greatness of Roman architecture. For the beauties of classic Greece were revealed in the elegance of polished marble and survive with a charming patina. But the decisive new Roman material was concrete, which in modern times has borne the stigma of the commonplace. Concrete is the everyday substance of our sidewalks, driveways, and roads, of dams, bridges, and office buildings. How could it have been the raw material of a revolution in architecture and the shaper of new beauties?

The accidents of geology provided the Romans with a new basis for their concrete and their architecture. Mud, adobe, and mortar had of course been used for millennia. But the Romans added a new mineral to their concrete, pozzolana (Latin
pulvis puteolanus
). This volcanic earth they first found in thick strata at Pozzuoli (Latin
Puteoli
), a seaport near Naples, not far from Lake Avernus, the legendary mouth of hell. The discovery that pozzolana-enriched concrete would harden in contact with water had been made when the people in Pozzuoli mixed this local volcanic sand with lime for buildings on the water’s edge. Pozzolana was imported to Rome for bridges, wharves, and jetties until the same volcanic sand was found in large quantities in the nearby Alban Hills. By Augustus’ time pozzolana was used in all concrete for buildings. “This substance,” Vitruvius explained, “when mixed with lime and rubble, not only lends strength to buildings of other kinds, but even when piers of it are constructed in the sea, they set hard under water.” Concrete made of pozzolana resisted fire as well as water, and would preserve Roman monuments through centuries.

We have been misled, too, by the legendary boast of Augustus (63
B.C.
–
A.D
. 14) that he “found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” In fact the Romans found architecture a realm of marble, and would remake it in concrete. But in the time of Augustus, marble, used in Roman buildings mainly in slabs for facing or in decorative fragments for mosaics or pavements, was a material more cosmetic than structural. Like stucco, it covered a solid core of brick and concrete, which made their grand and distinctive buildings possible.

Builders were so convinced of the unique qualities of their crucial new element, pozzolana, that, in the heyday of their high imperial age, they routinely incorporated it in the concrete for buildings, great or small. Bricks, one of the most ancient and familiar building materials, when added in the concrete gave character, novelty, and grandeur to their works. Walls of brick required less labor than stonework of the same quality, and could be made of local clay where there was no stone. Bricks, besides being wonderfully durable, protected against heat and weather. More than three thousand years before Augustus, the city of the biblical Abraham, Ur of the Chaldees, had been built of sun-dried brick and kiln-dried brick. The Tower of Babel was probably built of brick, as was Nebuchadnezzar’s city of Babylon. In the great age of Roman architecture, bricks embedded in concrete helped hold together grand new shapes.

Roman bricks themselves record a saga of foresight and organization. Sun-dried bricks, Vitruvius explained, should be made only in spring or autumn and, to allow full and uniform drying, should be made at least two years in advance. The best bricks, like those at Utica, had been left to dry for five years. Under the Empire, when bricks were visible on the outside
of buildings they were no longer the structural material. They were only a protective skin covering a structure of concrete. Roman bricks were made in several shapes and sizes. Often the bricks were cut into triangles which had their hypotenuse laid out and their apex inserted in a core of concrete. The commonest, which were about one and a half inches thick and two feet square, we would call large tiles, for they were thinner than our common bricks.

As the decades passed, bricks became smaller and took new shapes, while the thickness of the mortar and its strength increased. During the first three centuries of the Empire, a proportion of the bricks in each brickyard were stamped as they were made, and so became historical documents, witnesses to the Roman sense of order and of history. Stamped bricks commonly carried the name of the owner of the estate where they were made, the name of the brickmaster, and sometimes too the names of consuls in office. In familiar Latin abbreviations they carried a message like this: “Brick from the estates of His Excellency, C. Fulvis Plautianus, Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Consul for the second time, from the Terentian Brickyard, made by L. Aelius Phidelis.” In their time these stamps probably were meant to serve for inventory or for taxation, but now they help us date Roman monuments and trace the development of their architecture. Brickmaking was eminently respectable, for senators not usually allowed to be in trade could be in the brickmaking business which was classed as a kind of agriculture.

The dated bricks help us follow the Roman revolution in architecture, which Gibbon himself overlooked. Concrete, the drab and humble raw material of the Roman revolution, seems to have been beneath the dignity of his rotund eloquence. Nor does he celebrate the soaring, enveloping new shapes. Of course Vitruvius, though an opinionated conservative, dared not omit from his architects’ guide a full discussion of the materials (including brick and concrete) in common use.

The shapes developed by the Romans—arches, vaults, and domes—have become so familiar and so essential to our architecture that we find it hard to believe they ever had to be created. The earlier architecture of the ancient West had been an architecture of mass. Dominated by posts, roofs, and walls, it displayed columns and architraves. Then the architect’s problem was to arrange masonry or bricks to support a platform or a roof. There were variations only in the size, weight, and shape of the masses, the materials of the walls, the number and disposition of the columns. The great works of Greek temple architecture, as we have seen, were made to be viewed from the outside, not to be experienced from within. The inner chamber, the cella, was reserved for the priest alone. The Greek buildings were “trabeated” (from Latin
trabs
, beam). Such structures were dominated
by the vertical and the horizontal, by right angles and rectangles that confined the architectural imagination.

Even the few apparent ancient exceptions, like the pyramids, were masses for external viewing. In one of the grand revisions of the creative imagination, the Romans would change all this. They built an architecture of interiors, of vast enclosed spaces. And this was a new kind of space—within arches, vaults, and domes, in omnipresent dominating curves, where walls became ceilings, and ceilings reached up to the heavens. The artificial world, the world of interiors that architects would make for man, was transformed into a new curvesomeness. The classic Greeks had gathered out in the open air. Roman architecture brought people indoors to share their public and exchange their private concerns. Their spectacular new domed and vaulted shapes would dignify and glorify religious faiths, political hopes, and lawmaking efforts across the West—from Hagia Sophia to St. Mark’s in Venice, St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Paul’s in London, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and in American state capitals.

This grand Roman innovation in architecture would be accomplished in two centuries as the essential ingredient, concrete, was perfected gradually by trial and error. Vitruvius tried to explain the chemistry, but the improvements were not based on chemical theory. The remarkable qualities of perfected concrete in the Age of Hadrian, the Age of the Pantheon, would be attained by further trial and error in improving the proportions of lime and pozzolana and other ingredients in the mortar.

The techniques of laying concrete were also improved. In the beginning, each horizontal course was allowed to dry before the successor was applied. The result was an unsightly horizontal line of cleavage between layers. Then an improved slower-drying mixture allowed the successive layers to fuse into a single mass, and before the death of Hadrian in
A.D
. 137 pozzolana-enriched concrete had become a monumental building material in its own right.

The Roman Empire had brought cities into being and created a far-flung urban culture with common needs. And the new architectural creations arose from the needs of these Roman cities. While the glory of classic Greek architecture was in its temples to gods and civic deities, the grandeur of Roman architecture began in the public baths. How and why Romans acquired their mania for public baths remains a mystery. But its signs were everywhere.