Temple of Artemis Magnesia

The temple of Artemis at Magnesia on the Maeander (Western Turkey) is a milestone of Hellenistic architecture. Its architect, Hermogenes of Priene, was famously praised as an innovator already in Antiquity. While we know a good deal about the temple’s architecture, its accentuation with colour remains unknown. A collaborative research project in the Antikensammlung Berlin has now investigated three large marble fragments of the temple’s exterior façade for the remains of colour coatings. Using multiple methods of microscopic and physico-chemical analysis, it was possible, for the first time, to provide an insight into the temple’s exterior colour accentuations. It seems that the façade featured a colour scheme, in which white and yellow-brown hues played a key role, the latter probably for the painterly imitation of freshly cast or gilded bronze applications. Painted shading and colour highlights, applied with a careful consideration for spatial context and light conditions, completed the design. This is the first such evidence on a monumental temple façade. Remarkably, the applied design departs from the traditional colour triad of white, blue and red that was applied on many previous and contemporary temple facades throughout the Classical World. It imitates, however, a tradition of metal decoration that was a hallmark of sacred architecture.

The marble temples of the Greco-Roman world were accentuated with colour. While this is a well-known fact since the 19th century, our knowledge of the technical and artistic variety of architectural surface coating remains limited, especially when it comes to monumental marble façades. Often, erosion and weathering left no trace of former colouring. Therefore, freshly excavated architectural members or those that were placed in museums directly after excavation and not drastically cleaned offer the best chance to gain new information on the colouring of monumental marble facades. This was the premise for a collaborative one-year pilot-project that was carried out in 2015 and 2016 at the Antikensammlung Berlin with funding of the “Berliner Antike Kolleg” and the “Einstein Foundation Berlin”. The project’s goal was to investigate the potential of Berlin’s unique collection of ancient architectural marbles for future research on polychromy. To this end, the surfaces of three architectural members in white marble were examined in an in-depth surface analysis. This contribution presents the synthesized results of our project and briefly discusses them within the wider context of ancient architectural polychromy.

The three architectural pieces come from the exterior façade of the temple of Artemis Leukophryene at Magnesia on the Maeander (Western Turkey). It was built during the first decades of the 2nd century B.C. and designed by the Ionian architect Hermogenes, as we learn from the Roman architect-theorist Vitruvius, who also praised the temple’s innovative design (De Architectura, 3.2.6; 3.3.8–9). Based on the temple’s subsistental remains, scholars have pointed out that indeed Hermogenes broke new ground with this building, in particular with his masterful exploitation of an entire repertoire of spatial and visual effects. The results of our project give us, for the first time, a glimpse into the role of colour in the temple’s intricate design concept. This is even more remarkable when considering that the seminal publication of 1904 concluded that the remains of the temple preserved no evidence of colour.

Based on both microscopic examination and scientific methods of elemental analysis, we were able to identify traces of colour coatings on all of the three marble fragments. A variety of pigment mixtures can be suggested (e.g., for analysis to detect binders was not carried out). The data, even if selective, suggests that the temple’s exterior colour scheme favored white surfaces and, on architectural ornaments, various yellow-brown hues. Both the colouring and the painting technique suggest that they were meant to imitate freshly cast or gilded bronze. As it seems, the artists painted the temple using the full palette of painterly colour rendering such as naturalism, shading, and highlighting. Contour and shadow lines were set with respect to show sides and light impact. This intricate surface rendering may well have been part of the façade’s original design intent.

The provenance of the Berlin fragments leads us back to Prussian archaeology of the late 19th century. Between March 1891 and July 1893, the German archaeologist and architect Carl Humann directed the archaeological excavations at the site of Magnesia on behalf of the German Reichsmuseen zu Berlin, together with the philologist and archaeologist Otto Kern and the architect Rudolf Heyne (fig. 1). At the end of the expedition, about 200 architectural pieces of the Magnesian temple of Artemis were transported to Berlin, where they were integrated into the Antikensammlung. Two thirds of this material belonged to the pronaos; the rest, about 60 pieces, were largely unstratified and represent architectural members from all parts of the temple.

Also among the pieces brought to Berlin were three fragments in white marble, which appear to be part of the façade or its adjacent decoration. Two of them show surface remains of colour and ornament; one fragment preserves small traces only. These three fragments formed the core of our pilot study.