The Troy of Edward Carrère

Edward Carrère’s task to create a believable Troy for the screen was not an easy one. Although containing clues as to the Bronze Age city’s appearance the archaeological site (as it was known in the early 1950s) was not of epic proportions. The real Troy had been a wonder of its age in the Mediterranean for its layout and elegance of its stone work but scholars had long questioned the small size of the site. Could this place of cut stone and mudbrick really have been the great city of Homer’s poems? It is now known that the area previously considered to be the city was just the acropolis of the town. Probably it was here that the houses of the Royal family were as well as the most sacred buildings. Below this on the plain there once stretched out a great lower city.

Carrère therefore created a fantasy city for the screen like all before and after him have done. He gleaned clues as to the appearance of a Minoan styled city from the very few books that were then available on the period. That his fantasy Troy is so beautiful and so believable is a tribute to his skill and artistry. It follows the spirit of Homer’s Troy if not its exact detail. Troy appears in the Iliad and Odyssey as a great, wealthy and widespread city guarded by mighty walls and towers. It has wide streets, lofty gates and an open square set before a splendid palace. Its buildings are well built and made of dressed stone. All these things Carrerè depicted. Homer’s city wall had angles in it and the archaeological fortification had offsets. These features again appear in the movie city. The real Troy had walls and towers with a pronounced batter to their lower courses which were surmounted by a vertical wall and again this feature may be seen in the film. Carrère’s bastions owe much to those on the Aurelian wall in Rome, particularly one near to the Porta Appia. Only the one by the Scaean gate was actually built but those that appear in the matte shots of the outside of Troy are good copies of the Aurelian towers but without their upper storeys. (Picture on Sets Page).

It is obvious from the early sketches Carrère made of the exterior of the city that he was at first not entirely at ease with his “Minoan” Troy. It is interesting to compare this image (seen here below) with that of the city taken from the same angle as it appears in the stirring scene of the first Greek attack on the city walls (picture on Sets Page). Details are different, but the general stepped arrangement of the walls can be traced. One great problem was that the Troy of legend and archaeology surmounted a hill. The back lot at Cinecitta was quite flat and so the buildings clustering up the hill could only be supplied by Louis Lichtenfield’s beautiful matte paintings. The palace and square in the film (which should have topped the hill) had to be built on flat ground and so was constructed within sight of the Scaean Gate, but all of the panoramic views of the city show a metropolis built on rising ground. The city as seen in the landscape from outside is roughly the same shape as the archaeological Troy as it was then known but hugely enlarged.

Three of the city’s gates are seen in the film. These are the Scaean Gate, which is nearest the palace, the North Gate and one other which is presumably the

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Dardanian Gate of the Iliad. All are virtually identical in design although the Scaean, as the most important, has a slightly more elaborate superstructure. Carrère seems to have based these magnificent gates on the tripartite Minoan and Mycenaean religious structures that one sees in the art of the era, with a tall central block flanked by lower wings. These, as will be seen below, were also his ultimate inspiration for the palace itself. For the gates he retained the single columns of the side wings and used them as a flanking device for the taller central section. The gates look quite believable as Minoan designed structures, really because of this tripartite design, even if they are actually beyond the skills of Bronze Age builders.

The inspiration for much of the decoration of both the structure and the gates themselves must have come from the engravings found in Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez’s volumes "Art in Primitive Greece" London, 1894. There the two engravings reconstructing both the palace façade and that of the tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, contain most of the decorative elements that Carrère was to include in his finished designs for the gates.

In order to accommodate the wooden horse Carrère was forced to make the gate higher and wider than would have been likely or probable in the Bronze Age. It is also questionable whether the Trojan gates would have been structurally sound with their vast stone lintels and heavy over-portal frames. The great door opening at the Treasury of Atreus which is about the largest doorway we have evidence for in the Aegean was almost 18 feet in height by 9 feet in width. In his original drawing of the exterior of the city the gates appear less dominant and mere openings within the body of the wall, and it is only later that they dominate it. They also sport relieving triangles over the portals in the drawing. Carrère’s sketch of the exterior of the Scaean gate reproduced here shows it flanked not only by columns but also by sloping walls which are surely a legacy of the side walls in Chipiez’s restoration of the Treasury of Atreus.

The Scaean Gate is heavily supported by solid rectangular wings of masonry. From the top of these rise two tall rectangular pier buttresses that clasp the sides of the great door frame and rise above it. They are crowned on their internal and external faces by two pairs of colossal horns of consecration. Smaller curved buttresses support these piers. Above the portal a great fresco is painted, of all the gates, this most resembles a sacred shrine in silhouette. Internally the right hand pier through which the windlass chain for the gates is threaded is supported by an additional buttress.

The double gates themselves are portrayed as being solid bronze, but in reality such Bronze Age barriers are more likely to have been of wood covered in sheets of embossed metal as on a door carved on the Sanctuary Rhyton from the palace of Zakro on Crete. At Troy the outside faces of the doors are covered with five pairs of triglyphs separated by strips of scrollwork above a pair of framed panels each bearing a central lion’s head. Below this may be found a zig-zag decoration . Rosettes surround the whole design. Internally the gates are covered by two huge triglyphs vertically arranged above a band of zig-zag and again surrounded by rosettes. All of this decoration and the painted architectural blockwork of the inner portal is suggested by the Chipiez palace reconstruction (plate XI).

The other city gates are basically similar to the Scaean but lack the number of supporting side buttresses. One, that appears in a pre-war arms training shot and again in a funeral pyre scene has a strange double entranced opening in the external face of the fortification wall to its right. The same feature may be seen in the distance on some of the studio shots taken on the ramparts where this gate is also featured.

To the left of the internal face of the gatehouse there is a high podium upon which is a pedestal bearing a great bronze bull’s head, yet another reference to the Aegean world. This appears in the designer’s early drawings. Above this and on a level with the rampart is a small building with a colonnade. The gatehouse and windlass are to the right of the gate and consists of a solid block of masonry approached by a wide staircase illuminated by a brazier. The windlass is placed on a higher platform and also served by the staircase which turns to the left on its way to the rampart.. The outside of the gatehouse platform is ornamented with a wide painted band of red ochre below a band of roundels. It is topped by five sacred horns. T he most memorable feature of the structure is without doubt the most anachronistic, and yet so visually exciting that one can forgive the designer for his liberty with history. This is the pair of great bronze wolf heads with rings through their mouths that sprout from two faces of the

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platform. They are in fact colossal copies of one of a series of carnivores that were found in the remains of the Emperor Caligula’s pleasure barge at the bottom of Lake Nemi. On the barge they served as mooring rings. What function they were supposed to serve at Troy is debatable but they looked magnificent and were in Carrère’s

drawings from an early stage. Adjoining the gatehouse platform is the most enigmatic of the buildings on the set. It is a small structure with a front colonnade of seven Minoan columns and is heavily crowned with an entablature of roundels and sacred horns. Drawings show that it was originally intended to be twice the size that was actually constructed. It is very likely that it was based on the iconic columned fragment of the North Entrance at Knossos. It is difficult to interpret its function on the set but, notwithstanding its size, it is likely to be the "Trojan temple" that the film’s publicity mentions the construction of. Its position would attach it to the rear of the great columned palace building seen in exterior glass shots and mentioned below. Certainly it has become well known through its inclusion over the years in children’s illustrated books where the illustrator has drawn on Carrère’s sets.

This building is probably Carrère’s most successful design for the film, although early drawings show that he had problems in achieving it. Archaeologically the palace is thought to have crowned the Trojan acropolis and Carrère had originally intended this for the film as well. The drawings show a multi-columned façade with vast areas of steps and a small tetrastyle temple off to the right. The two structures were to have been linked by an open Minoan colonnade. The flatness of the Cinecitta backlot ruled this out and so he repositioned the palace to the right of the Scaean gatehouse. The early external view of the city shows a great columned building poking up above the walls to the left of the gate, and Carrère retained this and obviously intended it to represent a wing of the palace. It shows most clearly in the shots of the fight between Hector and Achilles. Although existing only as a matte painting the side wall was actually built albeit to a lower height, and can be seen crowned with horns in many of the scenes of the film and stills of the sets.

Carrère’s breakthrough with the palace design was his discovery of the famous "Grandstand Fresco" from Knossos with its

central pillar shrine. This was to provide the framework for the final palace. Although symmetry in architecture seems to have been unimportant to the Minoans the triple unit obviously had great religious significance. Thus in the Grandstand Fresco the dominant central double pillared section is flanked by symmetrical single columned wings at a lower level. Using this painted structure as his model Carrère then divided the two central columns by inserting a staircase and then also widened and raised the height of the wings placing central staircases in them from whence the long columns then rose. He then inserted the columned galleries with their wall paintings either side of the stairs. Grand and wide flights of stairs as palace approaches with central columns are a noticeable feature at the Cretan palaces of Phaistos and Knossos. The result of all this was a spectacular and harmonious facade and one that was believably of the era.

That Carrère did use the painted shrine as his model is proved by a later drawing showing an early stage of this final design. At this point he retained not only the central columns springing from their giant horns but also the painted decoration of the wall below. On the drawing this has been split into two by the insertion of the central staircase. This pattern is known as a triglyph and was used to great

effect on the bronze city gates. The chequer work of the cornice and the circular beam ends from the fresco are retained in a slightly altered form on the finished façade as are the square "C" shapes of the side walls of the central section. This drawing also shows single columns standing on the forecourt in front of this entrance topped by strangely shaped pieces of sculpture. These single columns were to develop into the two screen colonnades of four columns topped by horns of consecration that stand on the low sloping walls that frame the first wide stairway from the square. Adjoining these a 7 foot high sloping wall rises from the square and acts as a parapet to the walkways for the side stairs.

Although the central staircase of the Trojan palace with its giant horns of consecration is obviously the most important it is actually half the width of the grand staircases either side. The central stairs lead up to the Throne Room on the first floor and appear to divide at the top of the first flight in front of the statue of a goddess who stands with her arms raised. The way to the Throne Room was to take the left hand stair at the divide.

Notwithstanding that only the lower part of the palace was constructed, this alone rose to over 40 feet in height. Matte paintings provided the upper storey with its central balcony and Throne Room for the long shots and for the view of the square when the horse is left alone after the victory

celebrations. Carrère’s drawing of the palace façade seen from a street opposite shows the central section with an upper storey having sloping sides similar to an Egyptian temple pylon. It has three small windows. The final design featured wings with two triple columned verandahs either side of a central doorway and with two solid blocks of masonry beyond these. That nearest the ramparts bears a little columned kiosk on its upper floor. It is in this area between the city wall and the palace that the houses of Aeneas and Paris seem to be placed in the film

Carrère designed four religious shrines for the city that briefly feature in the film. The most substantial stands opposite the right hand wing of the palace façade. It appears in the scene of the Greeks streaming into Troy past the wooden horse. It

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consists of a square podium approached at the rear by a flight of steps. Two statues of goddesses stand on the platform facing the palace, each fronted by a huge pair of sacred horns. On the steps behind them two statues of gods face in the opposite direction and overlook the street to the rear. On the left hand side of the structure a bronze wolf head fountain spout protrudes from the podium over a shallow rectangular basin. This, like the great wolf heads on the gatehouse, is based on the famous bronze animal heads used as mooring rings on the Emperor Caligula’s pleasure barge found in Lake Nemi. The podium with its wolf head is seen again shortly afterwards in the film but this time stripped of its religious statues and horns, and with a colonnade adjoining it. It becomes the scene of Ulysses’s mocking speech "A magnificent leadership Agamemnon…". Yet again the podium is used earlier in the film as a viewing platform for Trojans as the wooden horse is dragged into Troy, only this time the camera shows its rear steps and the low wall surmounting the back of the structure.

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The three other shrines that Carrère designed are all of the same type. These free standing structures are pillar shrines, consisting of six paired columns standing upon a high base and heavily roofed. That standing in front of the palace, and seen when Priam and Hecuba are waving farewell to Paris, is crowned by multiple pairs of horns of consecration, and it is likely that the others should have been so treated as well. During the sack of the city another appears at the end of a street and is flanked by steps up which Trojans flee. Finally one stands in the middle of the road leading to the North Gate and is the scene of Paris’s death. Although pillar shrines existed in the Minoan world these interesting Trojan structures are Carrère’s own creation.

No traces of Bronze Age mural paintings have been discovered as yet at Troy, but the likelihood is that they once

existed and were swept away in the rebuilding of the site in Greco-Roman times. It is assumed that the main palace buildings occupied the summit of the acropolis and were raised during the building of the Temple of Athena in classical times and what remained was later swept away by Schliemann’s drastic excavation methods. No Minoan or Mycenaean palace in the Aegean was without its wall paintings and murals existed in the Hittite world as well, so it is unlikely that Troy failed to follow the fashion.

Lacking actual Trojan examples to follow, Edward Carrère has naturally decided to decorate his Minoan styled city with murals

based on those of the same era. The inspiration for these are the restored series from the Corridor of the Procession fresco in the Palace of Minos at Knossos and the Procession of Ladies from the Palace of Kadmos at Thebes on mainland Greece. Rather than simply copying existing subjects, however, Carrère has designed his own figures in the spirit of the originals.

The great panels above the lintels of the city gates both internally and externally are decorated with processional scenes. Only the lower parts of the figures were actually painted, the rest being finished off by the matte paintings that supplied the upper storeys to the surrounding buildings. The seaward side of the Scaean Gate has the faded remains of a scheme similar to that seen on one of Carrère’s preliminary sketches. The gate itself is recessed in a great frame decorated on its outer edge by bands of a running scroll based on that found on the legs of the famous Ayia Triada sarcophagus from Crete and the Shield Fresco from Tiryns Palace. The decorative lintel panel above the gates shows the remains of two confronted groups of three figures who walk towards each other holding sacrificial rhytons. The inside of the gate bears a framed procession of six figures moving to the right in the direction of the palace and bearing items of tribute. Like those of the outer panel they wear garments that are inspired by, but not identical, to those of Crete. The inner gate is also framed by a border of scrollwork with an additional vertical strip of a blockwork pattern. Unlike the exterior façade, the placing of the internal buttresses results in the scrollwork being directly juxtaposed to the decorative processional panel.

The palace façade displays the finest examples of wall painting to be seen in the film. The subjects are again figurative and highly Minoan in inspiration. The scheme is processional with figures walking through a lily field against a white background and a wavy ochre band. Figures almost 15 feet in height face the palace square at the back of square niches. The side walls of these niches are covered in painted lilies. Those figures on the left hand side of the palace are of women whilst those on the

right are of men, suggesting that both sexes had their own section of the building. The figures on both sides of the façade face toward the central and main entrance to the building. They are all dressed in Minoan costume. On the left the first woman holds a small flask and flowers whilst her companion plays a lyre. Between these two images, and on the walls flanking the top of the steps to this entrance, two pairs of women are painted on either side with their hands raised in a gesture of adoration. They face toward the doorway which is flanked by panels of painted lilies. On the far right of the façade a man in a Minoan kilt holds a bowl whilst his companion in the other niche bears a short standard of singular design which has no ancient parallel. Although no photographic proof has been found it is to be expected that four male figures in the same adoring posture as the pairs of females on the left hand staircase flanked the right hand one. The decoration of the side walls of the main staircase in the centre of the building is a slight problem.. Photographs of the left hand side show three Minoan style women.

On the right two women in elaborately patterned dresses face a third who approaches from the left through a field of lilies. their arms are raised in the Minoan gesture of conversation. Long stylized locks of hair hang down either side of their bodies. Below their feet the painting is finished by a border of Minoan rosettes. The same arrangement occurred on the opposite wall . On either side of the main entrance stand antithetical male figures with an arm raised in the gesture of worship. It seems likely that the idea for placing this pair was suggested to the designer by the mourning men on either side of the painted doorway in the Tomb of the Augurs in Tarquinia, Italy, although the Trojan figures are pure Minoan in gesture and dress wearing the short belted kilt and cod piece.

Although the murals are remarkably close to the spirit of Minoan and Mycenaean painting the ancient convention of using white for the female flesh was not followed, and the artists simply used a paler shade of brown than employed in the male figures. An interesting touch is the inclusion of the occasional hanging flower garland. This is an Etruscan fashion found in tomb paintings of feasts. As will be seen from the paintings in the Throne Room, Carrère, or the artists employed, merged elements of Etruscan mural paintings into the Trojan murals. Whether this was intentional as a reference to the later history of Aeneas and the Trojan refugees in Italy, or by pure chance, the merger was an extremely successful one.

The series of paintings flanking the throne in this chamber are again mostly Minoan and Mycenaean in inspiration, but with a strong

flavour of the Etruscan. High on each side wall there is a biga or two horse chariot against a pale and plain background. That on the left holds only a driver but the chariot on the right has a passenger as well. They all wear long tunics. These chariot groups are similar to those found at the palace of Tiryns on the Greek mainland, but the long legged horses are pure Etruscan, as are the trees and flower garlands behind them. On the walls behind the throne are two groups of men in Minoan kilts with their hands raised in adoration. Two appear on the left whilst three are painted on the right. The plants growing behind them are again in the Etruscan style.

Two rather inferior colour slides that were given to the author by Carrerè in the 1970s show that more figured paintings were done for sets in the film than were

actually used or shown in the finished production. These include an elaborate study similar in style to the adoring women on the left hand side passage and a procession fresco of youths in Minoan style but wearing costumes that are strongly influenced by Etruscan murals. Another fragment, which may have joined this procession shows a similar youth standing before a female figure who may well represent a goddess. This panel is finished by a strip of scrollwork similar to that found on the city gates.

Bands of plain colour wash may be seen on some buildings in the city, notably the stepped gatehouse platform with the bronze wolf heads next to the main gate. The same technique is used in the Spartan palace, where other paintings are noticeably absent.

The Marble Pavements

Although most of the buildings on the set of Troy consisted of nothing more substantial than a wooden framework coated in wooden panels and plaster, visitors to the site were astonished to find real marble used on some of the floors. It was said that it was far cheaper to use the original materials than imitation, especially where they were exposed to the weather. Most admired were the two decorated opus sectile pavements of the Palace. The Throne Room had a floor with a two colour scheme, showing horses chariots and warriors and taken from painted pottery designs. The glory of the Palace, however was that magnificent exterior pavement that can be seen in the shot where Hector is given the standard of Troy and made head of the fighting force (see Warriors page). This superb pavement consisted of three panels of red, blue, black and white marble edged by a running scroll. The central panel had a circle looped by a flowing garland, whilst the outer panels consisted of two identical designs of intersecting squares. Such pavements owe more to ancient Rome than the Bronze Age, although the running scroll is of the earlier period. Palaces in Crete and on the mainland had decorated and patterned floors but of painted plaster.

The Houses and Streets of Troy

The houses of Troy are loosely based on those to be found on the famous town mosaic from Knossos. This is not an actual mosaic but a collection of small faience inlays that once ornamented a wooden piece of furniture and seems to have depicted an attack upon a city. Carrerè, however, must also have looked at the ground plan of the excavated Troy VI as we find buildings with open fronts holding a pair of columns on his streets like one finds in

houses VI A, B and C. The original structures were freestanding however and not part of a street façade. The upper storeys are surmised but most likely a second storey with windows placed above doors appears in ancient depictions and are noticeable in a relief now in Larnaca Archaeological Museum, Cyprus. The relief found at Hala Sultan Tekké shows a building façade of the period with a large door above which are a pair of shuttered windows. Above these may be seen the remains of a pair of Sacred Horns. Traces of red paint remains on the piece. Other influences in his house designs may have been the reconstructions at Knossos, particularly the Caravanserai and elements of the palace itself. The Minoan mural paintings again will have afforded ideas. Whereas the ancient examples show beams and half timbering the Trojan houses of the film are all ashlar but with some painted decoration. One house at least shows a painted imitation of half timbering at first floor level.

In the exterior scene of the fight between Achilles and Hector one can see what must be an attempt at a reconstruction of an actual Trojan building from Troy VI showing above the battlements. (set page ) This is to be found to the left of the great columned building, which itself is on the site of the Pillar House of the real city. The house in question has a series of square windows on its first floor. Below this the wall slopes out in a batter. This is presumably an attempt to reconstruct house VI M whose sloping lower walls are such a feature of the site today. Its appearance in ancient times must have been very similar to what is portrayed here although possibly with an additional storey.

Many of the buildings on the set were flat movable facades that could be positioned to form new streets, so it is often possible to spot the same buildings in different contexts. The side of the Palace Square to the right of the Palace façade seems to have been more or less permanent part of the set but several of the buildings were also used in shots taken of the city from that building’s balcony. (set page) They also appear in the opening shot of the Palace Square. (set page) By using a matte painting which shows the city spreading up its hill in the scene of Paris’s return to Troy it was possible to add windows and horns of consecration to buildings already seen in another context. Most recognizable is a three storey house with its projecting upper floor supported by two columns. (set page) This appears opposite the Palace in the balcony scenes, but is provided with windows above the columns in the return of Paris scene by the use of the matte painting.

Although not noticeable in the moving film, it is obvious from stills that buildings and streets were altered and widened during filming in order to produce more impressive camera shots. Also different combinations of building fronts were obviously tried to gain the most impressive effect. The Lichtenfield paintings depict several tall campanile like buildings scattered throughout the city. These are no doubt for the benefit of Marlowe’s famous reference to the “topless towers of Ilium”

Although the interior of the buildings are generally blandly austere with ashlar walls (the smooth stone of Homer’s Troy) one interior may be distantly based on a real Trojan house. That is house VI F, with its double row of internal columns. This may have been the inspiration for the main chamber in the house of Paris and Helen in the film.

Carrerè’s Troy therefore is a fantasy city but one that draws on the archaeological record of the period and of the remains at Troy itself. Grander and more impressive than any Bronze Age city ever was, it nevertheless encapsulates the wonderful city of the romance.