Live Stones The Doric Temple. By Elisabeth Ayrtbn and Serge
Moulinier. (Thames and Hudson, 70s.) run moment we arrive in their presence, the Doric temples of Greece break through our Preconceptions about them. Nobody, after clambering up those sunlit hills of stone and thorn, will arrive at the top with memories of the framed photographs in school corridors or the dates mugged up in Bury's history. You have 10 start all over again. History comes back on the Way down, when you start fidgeting with the Pages of the Blue Guide. But at first Greece is all in the present: colour, light, texture.
The Picture album is perhaps the best way to
recapture these sensations afterwards. Thames and Hudson's Greece in Colour was one of the best of them. The present volume, The Doric ,T`MPle, is at once more and less informative. Ii is the collaboration of a photographer, Serge Moulinier, and a writer, 'Elisabeth Ayrton. In- cluded also are lengthy quotations from the diaries of C. R. Cockerel!, who travelled in Greece around 1800 and excavated at /Egina. liass and the Acropolis. Cockerell was chiefly interested in sculpture, salvaging, like Elgin, as much as possible under great difficulties and by bribery. He must have felt that nothing could be done to save the temples themselves from the depredations of the Turks. (And the Greeks. According to Mrs. Ayrton, the Temple of Aohrodite on /Egina was destroyed by Capodis- tria soon after the Liberation.)
M. Moulinier's photographs are of the temples
toemselves, and the majority are of Pcestum, krlgento and Segesta. Surely this is rather like si!ndYing baroque art from South America? The ,,arthenon is well represented, but there is only a piece of cleverness to indicate the Propylwa. W,:neh Mrs. Ayrton deals with at length. Nothing Oi: Su n ju m.M. Moulinier was obviously going h Own Way and enjoying himself. Though his )otographs evoke the feeling of stone and Itilarble, they do nothing to suggest their relation °I the surrounding landscape. There are no P "Vaphs of the temples as a whole in their though there is a two-page spread of ortl.e prickly vegetation in Sicily. 'Informative' ",nd 'topographical' would be dirty words to M. \nloulinier. Today it is the photographer and the ,),1.erior decorator who show temperament and '.'sonality. The writer and artist just get on "nh their work. Mrs that Ayrton does this very well. She discusses idst at is known o'f the architects; she gives the ot)°,rY of the temples; she deals with the great Which is that almost nothing in Greek i„t`eunidtecture or sculpture is what the creators Its to see, Hers is by far the more sub- makir. contribution to this piece of book-
FRANK TUOHY
Previous page
