Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/25

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

DIANAS TEMPLE AT EPIIESUS. 13 ful, as I saw the fragment only for two minutes in the Museum cellars. Another fragment is a ram's head, catalogued as be- longing to the New Temple, but of similar work. (Fig. 9.) The bases had various profiles in detail while agreeing in the larger parts. Dr Murray, giving no plinth to the new order, has withheld this feature from the old order too, but Wood found one in place under a base, and the Austrian account gives its depth as 0.322 metre — about a foot. The two stones, side by side, of which it was formed, were joined by dovetailed metal cramps. (Fig. 7.) The most remarkable feature is the gutter front so ingeniously restored by Dr Murray. It is so big as to be a parapet, slightly inclined to the vertical plane, rather than a cymatium,* and the surface is sculptured like a frieze between the lion's-head spouts. There cannot have been another frieze together with such a feature, and the cornice probably approxi- mated to the form of Fig. 10. As men- tioned below, the archaic temple was fully decorated with painting on the architectural members and sculpture. This building is of extraordinary historical interest, as in many particulars it set the type for this fully developed Ionic order — or perhaps it would be better to say Ionian order when speaking of the works found on Asiatic soil. Fig. 10. The New Temple. The weight of Dr Murray's case, summarised above, rests on the assumption that the sculptured drums must have rested on the sculptured pedestals, because on the top of the latter are traces of a circular setting-line suitable in size. When we realise that the ordinary fluted columns are of exactly the same diameter, and have an exactly similar torus moulding at the bottom, and ask why they may not have stood on the sculptured pedestals, we open up an alternative solution which is simpler, and, I think, more likely on its merits, apart from the fact that

  • It probably derives from one of the archaic terra-cotta gutters.