The Ever-Present Origin - Michael Goodnight - Editor

was especially influential on Greek architecture. It is phallic in nature andsurvives in the column architecture in Greece, as in the Parthenon. Spaceis visible here simply as diastyle or the intercolumnar space, whosestructure is determined by the vertical posts and the horizontal lintels andcorresponds to Euclidean cubic space.The second structural element in von Kaschnitz-Weinberg’s view is theuterine character of Grotto architecture that entered the Mediterraneanarea from the Orient (mainly from Iran) and survives in Roman domearchitecture, as in the Pantheon or the Baths. Here space is merely avault, a Grotto-space corresponding to the powerful cosmologicalconception of the Oriental matriarchal religions for, which the world itselfis nothing but a vast cavern. It is of interest that Plato, in his famousallegory, was the first to describe man in the process of leaving the cave.We are then perhaps justified in speaking of the "space" of antiquity asundifferentiated space, as a simple inherence within the security of thematernal womb;. expressing an absence of any confrontation with actual,exterior space. The predominance of the two constitutive polar elements,the paternal phallic column and the maternal uterine cave — the forces towhich unperspectival man was subject — reflects his inextricablerelationship to his parental world and, consequently, his completedependence on it which excluded any awareness of an ego in our modernsense. He remains sheltered and enclosed in the world of the "we" whereouter objective space is still non-existent.The two polar elements which made up the spaceless foundation of theancient world were first united and creatively amalgamated in Christianecclesiastical architecture. (The symbolic content of these elements doesnot, as we will see later emphasize the sexual, but rather the psychicaland mythical aspects.) Their amalgamation subsequently gives rise to theSon of Man; the duality of the column and tower, the vault and dome ofChristian church architecture made feasible for the first time the trinityrepresented by the son-as-man, the man who will create his own space.Understood in this light, it is not surprising that around the time of Christthe world of late antiquity shows distinct signs of incipient change. Theboldness and incisive nature of this change is evident when we examinethe Renaissance era that begins around 1250 A.D. and incorporatesstylistic elements that first appear around the time of Christ. We refer, ofcourse, to the first intimations of a perspectival conception of space foundin the murals of Pompeii. Besides their first suggestions of landscapepainting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be knownas the "still life," i.e., the objectification of nature already expressed in theRoman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoralscenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil's Ecloges. It was principally byincorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing theirimplications that the Renaissance was able to create the threedimensionalperspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectivalculture.11