The Elements Of The Canonic Classical Doric (Left) And Ionic {Right) Orders Of Architecture.
Egypt also taught the Greeks about the use of stone for columns and architectural ornaments. Until the later seventh century
the Greeks built in brick, wood, and mainly undressed stone. Only in the seventh century had fired clay tiles begun to
replace thatch or mud for roofs, and the only major buildings were temples, oikoi (houses) for the god's image. The need to
create an image for a god had slight effect on the early development of sculpture, but the requirements of his house dictated
the development of architecture, and only in the sixth century did other public buildings begin to attract the architectural
elaboration otherwise reserved for temples. The Greek response to the use of dressed and carved stone was, predictably, the
establishment of new conventions. In plan this meant the regularizing of the earlier, basic type of deep hall and porch,
which had already in places been provided with encircling colonnades.
In elevation it meant the creation of decorative schemes for these colonnades and the upper-works of the buildings. By the
end of the seventh century the Doric order emerged in mainland Greece, its intricate but austere patterns based on the
timbering of earlier structures. Soon afterwards the east-Greek world contributed the Ionic order, based on orientalizing
patterns of flower and scroll. As in sculpture, the colossal was not shunned, and some of the largest temples of the Greek
world, double-colonnaded, were planned in the sixth century by Ionian tyrants, in Samos, Ephesus, Miletus, Didyma. In
both orders development was slow, and it is in some respects easier to judge the date of a building by the proportions of its
overall plan and elevation, of its columns and friezes, than from the detail of its mouldings and capitals. For decoration the
temples were provided with sculpture: akroteria for their roofs; relief or figures in the round for the low Doric gables - a
dire challenge to the artist's skills in space-filling; reliefs in the Doric metope panels, or on Ionic friezes. These proved
important fields for the display of religious and state propaganda, as had the very differently disposed, wall covering reliefs
and paintings of Near Eastern palaces and temples.
The intractable character of black-figure for vase-painting was resolved in about 530 by the invention in Athens of a new
technique, red-figure. The drawing was now done in outline, the background blacked in and the figures reserved in the clay
ground -with detail painted on where before it had been incised. Replacing the graver with the brush gave the artist a subtler
line and a new range of linear expression. There was soon to be less colour, and the old sex differentiation of white =
woman, black = man was lost, but by the end of the century the Pioneer Group of painters was experimenting with a
rendering of anatomy which the sculptor was only later to emulate in three dimensions. The style was certainly closer to
that of painting on wall or panel, but this seems not to become a major art form until the fifth century.