Ictinus

Ictinus designed the Parthenon, and almost nothing else about him is known. He worked in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BC, and Plutarch names him with Callicrates as the architect of the temple built on the Acropolis between 447 and 432 BC under Pericles' building programme, with Phidias as overall supervisor and sculptor. The Parthenon is the reason his name survives. It is a Doric temple of unusual proportions — eight columns across the front rather than the usual six — built entirely of Pentelic marble, and it contains almost no straight lines. The stylobate curves upward in the middle by about eleven centimetres over its length; the columns lean slightly inward and swell in the middle; the corner columns are thicker and set closer to their neighbours; and the entablature tilts. Every one of these refinements required individually cut blocks and complicates the construction enormously. The usual explanation is optical: that the corrections counteract the visual distortions by which long horizontals appear to sag and columns against a bright sky appear thinner. Whether that was the intention or whether the effect was aesthetic rather than corrective is argued. Vitruvius credits him with a written treatise on the building, now lost. He is also credited with the Telesterion at Eleusis, a vast columned hall for the mysteries, and with the temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia, which contains the earliest known Corinthian capital. The Parthenon took nine years. The building he designed has been a temple, a church, a mosque and a powder magazine, and was largely destroyed when the powder was hit by a Venetian shell in 1687.

• Lived: 490 BCE – 420 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: intellectual