Classical Greek buildings and Golden Daffodils

What a great end to the Grand Tour. Lots of memories tumbled through my brain as I watched Kevin on his last adventure of his grand tour. I have this terrible habit of finding a song in everything. In the middle of a TV show or a conversation a song will pop into my head. For example when someone says time to go home I start to sing the theme song from Andy Pandy the old TV show ‘Time to go home time to go home Andy is waving goodbye…’ Then the song will get stuck in my head and I can’t help but sing it.

Golden Daffodils
When Kevin mentioned William Wordsworth I could not get his poem ‘I wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ out of my head. The only problem was I could not remember all the words. So I then had to go and find the words. It can be so easy to get wonderfully distracted.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (first verse only)

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

William Wordsworth

Classical Greek Buildings
Straight lines dominate the post and lintel constructed Greek buildings. The entablature contains the cornice, frieze and architrave. Columns are made up of the capital, the shaft and the base. The Greeks followed strict mathematical rules. All the measurements used by the architects such as the height of a column were expressed in multiples of the diameter at the base of the shaft.

Each order had rules concerning the size of the component parts. The Doric column is between four and six times the diameter of its base. The height of the Ionic column is nine times the diameter of its base. The Corinthian column is ten times the diameter of its base.

I was amazed years ago to discover Greek buildings had originally been brightly coloured.

I wonder how all the copies of the Classical Greek style of buildings around the world would have been interpreted if the colours used for the original buildings had been known. What do you think?

Will finish the discussion on Kevin’s Grand Tour in the next blog