Architecture and decoration of the Parthenon.

Authors Avatar

Architecture and decoration of the Parthenon

The Parthenon is a Doric order temple with a rectangular floor plan with a series of low steps on every side, and a colonnade (8 x 17) of Doric columns around the outside of the entire structure. Although the temple is predominantly Doric there are some aspects of and ionic temple incorporated into it. There is an inner section of the Parthenon were Doric columns give way to ionic. Another example of this is the frieze; it uses ionic components that were borrowed from the ionic design. The frieze itself is a very important aspect of the temple it surrounds the temple, it’s relatively small size (3 feet 5inces tall) made it fairly hard to see from the ground, unlike the metopes the frieze has a single subject on all four sides it depicts a procession of horsemen, musicians, sacrificial animals and other figures with various religious functions. On the east side there is a child handing a folded cloth to an older man, on one side of them the gods are present and seated, on the other side two girls are holding something. Most scholars believe that it represents the Panathenaic procession however some think that it shows the procession which took place at the same period as the temple was built and that it shows the over confident Athenians who dared to put themselves where ordinarily only the gods and heroes might be found.

Join now!

The metopes of the Parthenon all represented various instances of struggle between the forces or order and justice on one hand and criminal chaos on the other. On the west side the mythical battle against the amazons and on the south the battle between the Lapiths and centaurs, on the east the battle between the gods and the giants and on the north the Greeks verses the Trojans.

The interior has three chambers. The pronaos leads to the cellar, and that leads to the opisthodomas. Originally the rear chamber was called the Parthenon, (chamber of the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay