Beautiful bodies are vessels for beautiful minds and are where strong moral compasses dwell. So believed the ancient greeks, as a corollary good minds only live in good bodies, hence a lot of effort was made to maintain strong, healthy and beautiful bodies chiselled to perfection. If a person was beautiful externally, with ripped abdomen or shapely curves, it was believed that they had a beautiful mind too, and also a very sound morality. Therefore a lot of work was done to keep the physical body highly attractive, today we see a huge number of statues peppered across the Peloponnese and Greece in general in nude, even Leonidas the Spartan has his statue all equipped with his arrow, shield and helmet, in utter nude. Clothed statues with the ripple of cloth were introduced by the Romans and are the proponents of the Greco-Roman period in art and architecture when Greece and Roman influences overlapped. The body in nude was to display its beauty. Sanctuaries or places of healing were important centres that people would travel to to heal their bodies and perhaps minds, keeping themselves healthy and in turn beautiful.
The centres of healing that are very impressive in their remains today are those at Delphi and Epidauraus. In Delphi, the stunning sloping landscape embraces in its midst the temple of Apollo, where the famous Oracle would dish out her prophecies, the theatre and a stadium. in Epidaurus, also a major centre of healing the theatre’s stunning acoustic properties are still keenly felt and enjoyed. The ancient Greek theater was a sacred space that allowed audiences to overlook the city, countryside, and ocean, and encapsulate the sky. The sky was the most prominent feature in the visual field of the spectator, and the Greek terms for sky were interchangeable with the word for heaven. Though the stage buildings do not remain, considering they were built in the 5th century, it is a marvel that the theater with its stepped seating still stands today. In Delphi, an Agora sets the tone to journey up to the hill top where the stadium sits, while in Epidaurus, the lay of the land is more flattened and all the parts of the sanctuary are laid out with some buildings still a lot more intact. These sanctuaries are the most beautiful remains of the ancient Greek architecture.
While Roman architecture follows rules stringently, we see such spectacular and proportionate architecture all over Rome and Italy, they also came in much after the Greeks in the timeline of history, they have the rulebook fine-tuned and applied. But in Greece where it all began, the golden ratio, the optical illusions in building design, they embraced nature and the tenet that the site is everything and the architect seeks answers from the site in its landscape, using nature for inference and inspiration. Nature and site are two things that the Greeks widely embraced. For if the site is sloping, the Greek buildings are built embracing the lay of the land as we find in Delphi or even in Oia, while in the buildings of Rome, the human spirit and enterprise were valued as prime and sites were even razed to make way for enormous spirited architecture. But in Greece the building always married the site, in tandem, flowing with it effortlessly. The beauty of nature is never surpassed in these beautiful buildings, that sometimes frame, sometimes encapsulate, sometimes perch onto the site, like we see in the temple of Apollo, or the monasteries of Varlum and Holy Trinity among the others, but for the most part, in Greek architecture, nature is the wind beneath the wings of architecture, nature is the sanctuary, and then beauty is the consequence.
Vedasri Siddamsetty 