Classical orders.

Classical orders:A classical order is one of the ancient styles of classical architecture, each distinguished by its proportions and characteristic profiles and details, and most readily recognizable by the type of column employed. From the sixteenth century onwards, architectural theorists recognized five orders. Each style has its proper entablature, consisting of architrave, frieze and cornice.
Ranged in the engraving (illustration, right), from the stockiest and most primitive to the richest and most slender, they are: Tuscan (Roman) and Doric (Greek and Roman, illustrated here in its Roman version); Ionic (Greek version) and Ionic (Roman version); Corinthian (Greek and Roman) and composite (Roman). There are just three ancient and original orders of architecture, the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, which were invented by the Greeks. To these the Romans added the Tuscan, which they made simpler than the Doric, and the Composite, which was more ornamental than the Corinthian.
The order of a classical building is like the mode or key of classical music, or the grammar and rhetoric of a written composition. It is established by certain modules like the intervals of music, and it raises certain expectations in an audience attuned to its language.


Composite order:The composite order is a mixed order, combining the volutes of the Ionic order capital with the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian order. The composite order volutes are larger, however, and the composite order also has echinus molding with egg-and-dart ornamentation between the volutes. The column of the composite order is ten diameters high.
Until the Renaissance, the composite was not ranked as a separate order. Instead it was considered as a late Roman form of the Corinthian order. The Arch of Titus, in the forum in Rome, built in 82 AD, is considered the first example of a Composite order.
The Composite order, due to its delicate appearance, was deemed by the Renaissance to be suitable for the building of churches dedicated to The Virgin Mary or other female saints.


Corinthian order:The Corinthian order is one of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The other two are the Doric and Ionic. When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order. The Corinthian, with its offshoot the Composite, is the most ornate of the orders, characterized by slender fluted columns and an elaborate capitals decorated with acanthus leaves and scrolls.
The name "Corinthian" is derived from the Greek city of Corinth, although the order first appeared used externally at Athens. Although of Greek origin, the Corinthian order was actually seldom used in Greek architecture. It came into its own in Roman practice, following precedents set by the Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus (ca. 2 AD).


Doric order:The Doric order (or in Greek Δωρικός ρυθμός) was one of the three orders or organizational systems of Ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.
In their original Greek version, Doric columns stood directly on the flat pavement (the stylobate) of a temple without a base; their vertical shafts were fluted with 20 parallel concave grooves; and they were topped by a smooth capital that flared from the column to meet a square abacus at the intersection with the horizontal beam (entablature) that they carried.
Temple of the Delians, Delos; 19th century pen-and-wash restoration.
Pronounced features of both Greek and Roman versions of the Doric order are the alternating triglyphs and metopes. The triglyphs are decoratively grooved with three vertical grooves (tri-glyph) and represent the original wooden end-beams, which rest on the plain architrave that occupies the lower half of the entablature. Under each triglyph are peglike stagons or guttae (literally: drops) that appear as if they were hammered in from below to stabilize the post-and-beam (trabeated) construction. They also served to "organize" rainwater runoff from above. A triglyph is centered above every column, with another (or sometimes two) between columns, though the Greeks felt that the corner triglyph should form the corner of the entablature, creating an inharmonious mismatch with the supporting column. The spaces between the triglyphs are the metopes. They may be left plain, or they may be carved in low relief.
The architecture followed rules of harmony. Since the original design came from wooden temples and the triglyphs were real heads of wooden beams, every column had to bear a beam which lay in the middle of the column. Triglyphs were arranged regularly; the last triglyph met the mid of the last column (illustration, right: I.). This was regarded as the ideal solution which had to be reached.


Ionic order:The Ionic order ( Greek ιωνικός ρυθμός ) forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian. (There are two lesser orders, the stocky Tuscan order and the rich variant of Corinthian, the Composite order, added by 16th century Italian architectural theory and practice.)
The Ionic order originated in the mid-6th century BC in Ionia, the southwestern coastland and islands of Asia Minor settled by Ionian Greeks, where an Ionian dialect was spoken. The Ionic order column was being practiced in mainland Greece in the 5th century BC. The first of the great Ionic temples was the Temple of Hera on Samos, built about 570 BC–560 BC by the architect Rhoikos. It stood for only a decade before it was leveled by an earthquake. It was in the great sanctuary of the goddess: it could scarcely have been in a more prominent location for its brief lifetime. A longer-lasting 6th century Ionic temple was the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The Ionic columns normally stand on a base which separates the shaft of the column from the stylobate or platform; The cap is usually enriched with egg-and-dart. Originally the volutes lay in a single plane (illustration at right); then it was seen that they could be angled out on the corners. This feature of the Ionic order made it more pliant and satisfactory than the Doric to critical eyes in the 4th century BC: angling the volutes on the corner columns, ensured that they "read" equally when seen from either front or side facade. The 16th-century Renaissance architect and theorist Vincenzo Scamozzi designed a version of such a perfectly four-sided Ionic capital; Scamozzi's version became so much the standard, that when a Greek Ionic order was eventually reintroduced, in the later 18th century Greek Revival, it conveyed an air of archaic freshness and primitive, perhaps even republican, vitality


Tuscan order: the Tuscan order's place is due to the influence of the Italian Sebastiano Serlio, who meticulously described the five orders including a "Tuscan order", "the solidest and least ornate", in his fourth book of Regole generalii di Architettura... sopra le cinque maniere degli edifici... (1537). Though Fra Giocondo had attempted a first illustration of a Tuscan capital in his printed edition of Vitruvius (1511), he showed the capital with an egg and dart enrichment that belonged to the Roman Doric order. The "most rustic" Tuscan order of Serlio was later carefully delineated by Andrea Palladio. From the perspective of these writers, the Tuscan order was an older primitive Italic architectural form, predating the Greek Doric and Ionic,[citation needed] associated by Serlio with the practice of rustication and the architectural practice of Tuscany. Giorgio Vasari made a valid argument for this claim by reference to il Cronaca's graduated rustication on the facade of Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Like all architectural theory of the Renaissance, precedents for a Tuscan order were sought for in Vitruvius, who does not include it among the three canonic orders, but peripherally, in his discussion of the Etruscan temple (book iv, 7.2-3). Later Roman practice ignored the Tuscan order,and so did Leon Battista Alberti in De re aedificatoria (shortly before 1452).