Recently, my AP Art History class covered basic Roman architecture. We talked the many of the well known examples, like temples, domes, the Colosseum but one thing stuck out to my class: arches, and more specifically, groin arches (high schoolers are always very intrigued by funny names).
Now, what are groin vaults (and why do they sound so funny?)? Arches were technically not created by the Romans (but instead seen as earliest in Mesopotamia architecture) but widely used within the Rome time period. The Romans created multiple types of arches and built up "vaults," all in an effort to create large buildings, enough sustain the large empire and the growing population of people who needed to be entertained. Oftentimes, there'd be very limited space but thanks to these arches, they'd be able to open up buildings with a more efficient use of materials. These new inventions included basic arches, barrel vaults, and groin vaults.
These structures are all alike in their "keystone," a stone with without it, the whole entire arch would fall apart (shout out to my AP environmental science class with the idea of "keystone species"!). But to be more specific, let's first talk about barrel vaults. barrel vaults have haunches (middle part of an arch), making them curved and 3D: essentially, just arches but with haunches. Groin vaults are two barrel vaults intersected within one another diagonally.
The Romans also exploited it and stretched it out to create domes. These handy dandy arches are extremely efficient in how they store weight: the weight of the entire vault pushes to the sides and comes down to the "groin" (or the edge between the intersecting vaults, seen in the picture with the arrows representing the weight of the stones; thanks Mr. Leventhal!) and therefore, only need to be buttressed at those specific points. This enabled the Romans to have more architectural advancement as not as much stone needed to be utilized to build massive structures.
The funny name is why I'm so intrigued: it doesn't help that my art history class talked about this a lot too. Most likely named after our understanding that it looks like a groin, nonetheless, I feel like this exemplifies the idea that Greeks and the Romans saw the divine and beauty of the human body and its proportions and translated this into different pieces of art. Likewise, at the end of the day, it really seems that we are all just arches, buttressed by muscle, skin, bone.
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