pupil, Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.), took geographers and engineers along on his military campaigns and sent back plant and animal specimens from wherever he traveled. (Legend has it that the great empire-builder was an amateur naturalist and had a special glass vessel built to facilitate his underwater observations.)
Alexander’s collection—in which every creature was believed to have a function in the Great Design—prompted Aristotle to compile an encyclopedia that was to contain all knowledge. Thereby he stimulated the switch from speculative to empirical thinking. In addition, he provided a framework for the discussion of philosophy and disciplines such as logic and physics. One of his many noteworthy achievements was to prove formally that the earth is round.
Some early thinkers even precisely calculated the earth’s circumference (just 15 percent greater than the actual measurement), and others went so far as to oppose Aristotle’s geocentric view by asserting that the sun is the center of what we now know as the solar system. Unfortunately this theory was quickly forgotten.
The Platonic Bodies
A theory of solids was based on aesthetic considerations. Philosophers enamored with the concept of symmetry supported the argument that there had to be a continent on the other side of the earth to maintain its equilibrium. Almost 2,000 years later, James Cook, while searching for it, found Australia!
Greek scientists created and followed trends, just as artists do today. Some believed that the four elements (earth, water, fire, air), thought to constitute the universe, could be altered by forces such as love or strife. The elements, themselves a subdivision of the general cosmogony, were viewed as the constituents of the human body.
Natural philosophers made analogies to transformative processes in crafts, such as pottery and metallurgy, to explain the functioning of the body and the formation of the earth. The fundamentals of Western alchemy were established by these observations.
A vast amount of information was generated, and learning eventually entailed organized study in schools. New architectural concepts emerged: stoas, buildings with colonnades where students could talk and walk, lycea and academies. The Museum of Alexandria was a teaching center that attracted scholars of all types, and employed about a hundred state-paid professors.
Empirical methods in science found echoes in art’s new freedom and naturalism. Realistic sculptures decorated multi-story buildings. At the same time, pragmatic inventors, forerunners of today’s engineers, Archimedes of Sicily (c. 287–212 B.C.), Philon of Byzantium (c. third century B.C.) and Heron of Alexandria (first century A.D.), invented mechanical devices used for stage scenery as well as for military purposes. Improved weapons with high-velocity projectiles also influenced architectural design.
Meanwhile, in Rome, networks of paved roads were being built. Across the expanding empire a large-scale uniform construction program was carried out—as Rome had a monopoly over natural materials such as marble and travertine.
The Romans exploited mines in England, imported silk and spices from the East and cereals from Russia. In the south of France, mills produced enough flour to meet the year-round needs of almost 100,000 people; most of it was exported to feed the troops.
The Romans, whose strengths were essentially administrative and organizational, made two major contributions to architecture: they developed the potential of concrete—a light-weight, fire-resistant material composed of rubble, water and mud, produced on building sites; and they extended the use of the arch which enabled them to create the biggest interior spaces made until that time.
The Ancient Greeks used arches on a small scale and found them unappealing. Under the Romans, arches became ubiquitous, used in new classes of buildings and in improved versions of traditional ones. Basilicas for gatherings, hospitals for soldiers, amphitheaters and hippodromes, and public baths decorated like contemporary art galleries, sprang up. Mega-projects such as dams, aqueducts, canals and tunnels, some of which are still in use, were built throughout the empire.
In Rome, the Colosseum (c. first century A.D.) accommodating more than 50,000 people, remained the world’s largest amphitheater until 1914 (the year of the construction of the Yale Bowl). Similarly, the capital’s crowning monument, the Pantheon (c. 30–126 A.D.) remained the largest dome for centuries. Nine-tenths of it was built of concrete, a material that had been upgraded and refined over a period of two hundred years. Over its cement core, the Pantheon (the symbolic home of all the gods, as its name indicates) was faced with luxurious materials. Egyptian porphyry, granite and the finest Greek marble covered the massive building.
Porch of the Maidens, Erechtheum, the Acropolis, 421–405 B.C.
Sculpture was an integral part of this structure, which reflected human proportions. Tinted wax was used to color the hair, lips and costumes of the figures.
Digital reconstruction of the Pharos of Alexandria
Constructed in the third century B.C., this lighthouse was one of the tallest structures in the ancient world. After being damaged in several earthquakes, it was finally reduced to a ruin in the fourteenth century. In 1994, marine archaeologists discovered several stone blocks from the lighthouse in the harbor of Alexandria.
Vitruvius (first century A.D.), a Roman engineer who admired the Ancient Greeks but failed to appreciate the building talents of his peers, is the author of a text that was to become the construction bible of the Renaissance. He gave the first account of architectural acoustics and explained that sound is caused by the vibration of air. Vitruvius, who also theorized on astronomy and waterwheels, wrote: The architect “must be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have knowledge of medicine, know the opinion of the jurist, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.” A tall order!
Roman scientists also took their cues from the Greeks. The astronomer Ptolemy (second century A.D.) drew maps of various countries presented in his Geographica and charted over 1,000 stars in his Almagest (Al Majisti as the Arabs respectfully named it). Their given positions would go unquestioned until late in the Renaissance.
Naval Games, Serge Strosberg, 1998
The Romans built an aqueduct to supply a large artificial lake for mock naval battles. They flooded amphitheaters such as the Colosseum. Its circular, richly decorated structure—each story designed according to one of the Greek orders—admitted and disgorged audiences through miles of interior stairways leading to seats around the arena.
Galen (second century A.D.), a famous Greek physician, was particularly interested in art and made reference to the canon of human proportions developed by the sculptor Polykleitos: “Beauty arises not in the commensurability of the elements, but in that of the parts, such as the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and the wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact from everything to everything else.”
From his dissections of monkeys and pigs, Galen extrapolated information on human anatomy that remained unchallenged until findings based on the dissection of human corpses were published over 1,000 years later. The Romans did a fine job of disseminating knowledge passed down from the Ancient Greeks, but they adopted their content without
