Interest in
Hermogenes of Priene (late 3rd - early 2nd century BCE), the Hellenistic architect of a temple of
Artemis LeukophryeneArtemis was one of the most widely venerated of the Ancient Greek deities. In the classical period of Greek mythology, Artemis was often described as the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and the twin sister of Apollo...
(
Artemision) at
MagnesiaMagnesia on the Maeander is an ancient Greek city in Anatolia, located on the Maeander river upstream from Ephesus, its site near the modern town of Germencik, Turkey...
in
LydiaLydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern Turkish provinces of Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian....
, an
IoniaIonia is an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir, which was historically Smyrna. It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements...
n colony on the banks of the Maeander river in
AnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Iranian plateau to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west...
, has been sparked by references to his esthetic made by the first century Roman architect
VitruviusMarcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer , active in the 1st century BC. By his own description Vitruvius served as a Ballista , the third class of arms in the military offices...
(
De Architectura, books iii, 2 and 6).
Hermogenes' rules on symmetry and proportion define what Vitruvius calls
"eustyle" (
eu stylos "right column"), an architectural ideal that prescribed a series of proportional relationships for temples that was all derived from the diameter of the column, as a
moduleA module is a term that was in use among Roman architects, corresponding to the semidiameter of the column at its base. The term was first set forth by Vitruvius , and was employed by architects in the Italian Renaissance to determine the relative proportions of the various parts of the Classical...
or unit of measure.
Interest in
Hermogenes of Priene (late 3rd - early 2nd century BCE), the Hellenistic architect of a temple of
Artemis LeukophryeneArtemis was one of the most widely venerated of the Ancient Greek deities. In the classical period of Greek mythology, Artemis was often described as the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and the twin sister of Apollo...
(
Artemision) at
MagnesiaMagnesia on the Maeander is an ancient Greek city in Anatolia, located on the Maeander river upstream from Ephesus, its site near the modern town of Germencik, Turkey...
in
LydiaLydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern Turkish provinces of Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian....
, an
IoniaIonia is an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir, which was historically Smyrna. It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements...
n colony on the banks of the Maeander river in
AnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Iranian plateau to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west...
, has been sparked by references to his esthetic made by the first century Roman architect
VitruviusMarcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer , active in the 1st century BC. By his own description Vitruvius served as a Ballista , the third class of arms in the military offices...
(
De Architectura, books iii, 2 and 6).
Hermogenes' rules on symmetry and proportion define what Vitruvius calls
"eustyle" (
eu stylos "right column"), an architectural ideal that prescribed a series of proportional relationships for temples that was all derived from the diameter of the column, as a
moduleA module is a term that was in use among Roman architects, corresponding to the semidiameter of the column at its base. The term was first set forth by Vitruvius , and was employed by architects in the Italian Renaissance to determine the relative proportions of the various parts of the Classical...
or unit of measure. Ideal "eustyle" intercolumniation (the space between the columns) should be two-and-a-quarter column-thicknesses, and the height of the Ionic column nine-and-a-half times its diameter. If the intercolumniation was to be tighter, columns should be taller in their proportions, and thicker if they were farther spaced. It is this sense of rational relations that Vitruvius is expressing when he writes "in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole." One element in a classical system cannot be changed without changing the other proportions too.
The geographer
StraboStrabo was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born in a wealthy family from Amaseia in Pontus , which had recently become part of the Roman Empire.. He studied under various geographers and philosophers; first in Nysa, later in Rome...
mentions this temple, the third greatest temple after those in Didyma and Ephesus, but considered finest of all for its proportions.
Consequently, archaeologists have been curious to rediscover the site of Hermogenes' temple, traces of which are not apparent. Even the site of the
colonyColonies in antiquity were city-states founded from a mother-city, not from a territory-at-large. Bonds between a colony and its metropolis remained close, and took specific forms...
of the mother-city of
MagnesiaMagnesia , deriving from the tribe name Magnetes, is the name of the southeastern area of Thessaly in central Greece. The modern prefecture was created in 1947 out of the Larissa prefecture. About 70% of the population live in the Greater Volos area which is the second-largest city in Thessaly...
in Thessaly was not established until W. M. Leake got the site correctly identified in 1824 (
Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor pp 242ff). In the winter of 1842-3, a French team struggled with swampy ground and a high water table at the heavily sedimented site, and succeeded in removing 40 meters of the temple's frieze, comprising 41 blocks, and some other architectural elements. These were taken to the Louvre Museum, but the excavations were never published. In 1887 Osman Hamdi Bey, director of the Archaeological Museums of Constantinople, carried off to Constantinople a further 20 meters of frieze blocks from the Artemision. More rigorous excavations at Magnesia were undertaken by the German Institute at Constantinople in the 1890s and by German and Turkish scholars since 1984. The result is that sculptural elements of Hermogenes' Artemision are scattered among the Pergamum Museum, Berlin, the Louvre Museum, Paris and Istanbul.
Since the 1980s, enough remnants of the U-shaped raised colonnaded altar that faced the temple have been recovered to permit modern reconstructions of its original appearance, for the first time since Antiquity.
Hermogenes was the architect of the hexastyle peripteral Temple of
DionysusIn classical mythology, Dionysus or Dionysos is the god of wine, the inspirer of ritual madness and ecstasy, and a major figure of Greek mythology, and one of the twelve Olympians, amongst whom Greek mythology treated him as a late arrival...
in
TeosTeos or Teo was a maritime city of Ionia, on a peninsula between Chytrium and Myonnesus, colonized by Orchomenian Minyans, Ionians, and Boeotians...
, also mentioned by Vitruvius. It was the largest temple to Dionysus in the ancient world; only the platform (
stylobate) remains, measuring 18.5 by 35 meters (61 by 115 feet). It is in the western part of the lower city, against the walls. It was constructed early in the 2nd century BCE and later reconsecrated to the cult of Tiberius and partly rebuilt during
HadrianPublius Aelius Hadrianus was emperor of Rome from AD 117 to 138, as well as a Stoic and Epicurean philosopher...
’s reign. The temple has been excavated by a team of the University of Ankara.
Hermogenes also appears to have written a text, no longer extant, on his symmetrical principles. (
De Architecturaright|thumbnail|A 1521 [[Italian language]] edition of De architectura, translated and illustrated by [[Cesare Cesariano]].' is a treatise on architecture written by the Roman architect Vitruvius and dedicated to his patron, the emperor Caesar Augustus as a guide for building projects...
3.3.9)
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