It is the most admired of the Greek temples and the largest in the entire Hellenic world. It was built on the Acropolis of Athens to replace what had been destroyed in the Persian plunder between 447 and 438 BC, by Ictino and Callicrates . Apart from the sculpture, executed by Phidias and his disciples, it took more than seven years to complete. The temple is made of Pentelic marble , except for the pillars, and was made in Doric style (although the interior frieze and a few other small details are Ionic ). The peristyle has 17columns on each side and 8 at the ends (two more than was customary at that time). In the eyebrow was the famous statue of Athena Parthenos , of Phidias. The 92 metopes of the outer frieze represent the Centaurs' struggle with the Lapitas , the Gigantomachy, the Amazonomachia, and other battles; the request of the rising side, the birth of Athena, and that of the west side, the struggle between the goddess and Poseidon for the pose of the city; the outer frieze, the procession of the Panathenaic , with the gods to observe. The building, in which all the refinements of the entasis were applied , remained almost intact until 1687, the date on which an explosion of gunpowder stored in it, during the war between Turks and Venetians , destroyed the cover. The order and the metopes were appropriated by Lord Elgin and sold to the British Museum , in 1816 ; others went to the Louvre Museum , some preserved in situ .
The building was built on the initiative of Pericles , an Athenian political leader of the 5th century BC, and its construction was supervised by Phidias , who also commissioned the decorative sculptures . The architects of the Parthenon were Ictinos and Calícrates . Its construction began in the year 447 BC being completed in 438 BC , yet the decoration work did not finish until the year 433 BC Some data on construction costs have survived to this day, these showed that the largest construction expenditure occurred in transport of the stone from Mount Pentélico, about 16 km near Athens . The budget for the work, about 2,000 talents , a colossal figure for the time, came from the League of Delos, whose treasures had been transferred from the Sanctuary of Delos to the Acropolis in 454 BC. Although the Temple of Hephaestus is considered the most complete survivor of the Doric order , the Parthenon is the most refined. According to JJ Norwich:
The Parthenon enjoyed the reputation of being the most perfect Doric temple ever built. Even in antiquity, its architectural refinement was legendary, especially the subtle relationship between the curvature of the stylobate, the narrowing of the nave and the notches of the columns.
The Parthenon has retained its religious character over time as a Byzantine church, Latin church, and Muslim mosque . However, in 1687, the Turks used the building as a powder magazine during the siege by the Venetian Republic of Athens dependent on the Ottoman Empire. Venetian troops were under the command of Admiral Francesco Morosini . One of the Venetian cannonades fell on the Parthenon and caused a huge explosion that destroyed much of the building, preserved in good condition until then. There are legends that suggest that Morosini had information that the Parthenon had become a powder keg .
The subsequent process of deterioration and erosion continued and the damage continued in the early 19th century , when the British ambassador to Constantinople , Thomas Bruce Elgin , decided to remove most of the sculptural decoration left on the monument ( friezes , metopes , pediments) and move it. to England to sell to the British Museum , where it is still on display, being one of the museum's most significant collections. The western façade of the Parthenon is preserved relatively intact.
The design of the Parthenon was initially conditioned by the project to house the gold and ivory image of Athena Parthenos, sculpted by Phidias. The colossal twelve-meter-high statue required an immense eyebrow more than 18 meters long, divided into three naves by a double colonnade formed by two superimposed Doric-style orders. The central nave was ten meters long. Within the eyebrow on the east side, the colonnade was arranged in a "U" shape and consisted of nine columns with a sandwich between each, on the longer sides of the "U" and three columns with two sandwiches on the shorter side.
In the western part, at the bottom of the interior of the four-columned colonnade, was the base of the statue for the cult of Athena Parthenos with a large, shallow pond, which produced a glow effect by the water in front of the statue. Both eyebrows were closed by bronze doors .
The east eyebrow was dedicated to Athena Polias, protector of the city, and the west eyebrow was dedicated to Athena Párthenos, "the virgin", so the whole building ended up being known as the Parthenon.
This construction is one of the clearest examples of knowledge in geometry by Greek mathematicians and architects. It is octastyle and peripteral, that is to say, it has columns in all their perimeter, eight in the two shorter facades and seventeen in the lateral ones. It consists of a double eyebrow with pronaos and opistódomo , but a prosthetic facade of six columns.
The architects managed to ensure that the visual effect shown by the Parthenon did not allow us to appreciate the unsightly deformation that is perceived when it is located in the vicinity of other large monuments. They managed to obtain a more aesthetic visual effect with some alterations in their construction: columns with entasis , slightly curved towards the center, not equidistant and somewhat thicker in the corners; the pediment slightly arched and the stylobate slightly convex.
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