Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/202

 ORDER, in classic architecture the term employed (Lat. genus, Ital. ordine, Sp. order, Ger. Ordnung) to distinguish the varieties of column and entablature which were employed by the Greeks and Romans in their temples and public buildings. The first attempt to classify the architectural orders was made by Vitruvius, who, to those found in Greek buildings, viz. the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, added a fourth, the Tuscan. On the revival of classic art in Italy, the revivalists translated Vitruvius’s work De Architectura, and added a fifth example, the Composite, so that nominally there are five orders. The Tuscan, however, is only an undeveloped and crude modification of the Doric order, and the Composite is the same as the Corinthian with the exception of the capital, in which the volutes of the Ionic order were placed above the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian.

An order in architecture consists of several parts, constructive in their origin, but, as employed afterwards, partly constructive and partly decorative; its principal features are the column, consisting of base (except in the Greek Doric order), shaft and capital, and the entablature, subdivided into the architrave (the supporting member), the frieze (the decorative member) and the cornice (the crowning and protecting member). Two only of the orders were independently evolved, viz. the Doric in Greece and Magna Grecia, and the Ionic in Ionia. For the Corinthian order, the Greeks borrowed with slight variations the entablature for their Ionic order, and the Romans employed this modified entablature for their Composite order. Owing to a certain resemblance in form, it was at one time thought that the Greeks owed the origin of the Doric order to Egypt, but the Egyptian column has no echinus under its abacus, which in the earliest Doric examples is an extremely important element in its design, owing to its great size and projection; moreover, the Doric column ceased to be employed in Egypt after the XIXth Dynasty, some seven or eight centuries before the first Greek colony was established there. Dr Arthur Evans’s discoveries in the palace of Cnossus in Crete have shown that the earliest type of the Doric column (c. 1500 ) is that painted in a fresco which represents the façades of three temples or shrines, the truth of this representation being borne out by actual remains in the palace; the columns were in timber, tapered from the top downwards, and were crowned by a projecting abacus supported by a large torus moulding, probably moulded in stucco. The next examples of the order are those in stone, which flank the entrance doorway of the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae (c. 1200 ), the greater portions of which are now set up in the British Museum; and here both capital and shaft are richly decorated with the chevron pattern, probably derived from the metal plates which in Homeric times sheathed the wood columns. The columns of the Mycenae tombs are semi-detached only, and of very slender proportions, averaging 10 to 11 diameters in height; as isolated columns, therefore, they would have been incapable of carrying any weight, so that in the next examples known, those of the temple at Corinth, where the columns had to carry an entablature in stone supporting a stone ceiling over the peristyle, the relation of diameter to height is nearly one to four, so diffident were the Greek architects as to the bearing power of the stone. In the temple of Apollo at Syracuse, also a very archaic example, the projection of the capital was so great that the abaci nearly touched one another, and the columns are less than one diameter apart. The subsequent development which took place was in the lightening of the column and the introduction of many refinements, so that in the most perfected example known, the Parthenon, the columns are 1 diameters apart and nearly 5 diameters high. In a somewhat later example, the temple of the Nemaean Zeus (Argos) the columns are 6 diameters high. A similar lightening of the structure took place in the entablature, which in the earliest temple in Sicily is about half the height of the columns, in the Parthenon less than a third, and in the Temple of the Nemaean Zeus a little over a fourth.

The origin of the Ionic order is not so clear, and it cannot be traced beyond the remains of the archaic temple of Diana at Ephesus (c. 560 ), now in the British Museum, in which the capitals and the lower drum of the shaft enriched with sculpture in their design and execution suggest many centuries of development. Here again attempts have been made to trace the source to Egypt, but the volute capital of the archaic temple of Diana at Ephesus and the decorative lotus bud of Egypt are entirely different in their form and object. The latter is purely decorative and vertical in its tendency, the former is a feature intended to carry a superincumbent weight, and is extended horizontally so as to perform the function of a bracket-capital, viz. to lessen the bearing of the architrave or beam which it carries. A similar constructive expedient is found in Persian work at Persepolis, which, however, dates about forty years later than the Ephesian work. The volutes of the capitals of the Lycian tombs are none of them older than the 4th century, being copies of Greek stone examples. As with the Doric order, the columns became more slender than at first, those of the archaic temple being probably between 6 and 7 diameters high, of the temple on the Ilissus (c. 450 ) 8, and of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene (c. 345 ) over 10 diameters high.

The employment of the two orders in Athens simultaneously, and sometimes in the same building, led to a reciprocal influence one on the other; in the Doric order to an increased refinement in the contour of its mouldings, in the Ionic order to greater severity in treatment, more particularly in the bedmould, the members of which were reduced in number and simplified, the dentil course (which in Ionia was a very important feature) being dispensed with in the temple on the Ilissus and in that of Nike Apteros, and employed only in the caryatide portico of the Erechtheum. The capital of the Corinthian order, its only original feature, may have been derived from the Egyptian bell-capital, which was constantly employed there, even in Roman times; its decoration was, however, purely Greek, and would seem to have been based on the application to the bell of foliage and ornament derived from metallic forms. The inventor of the capital is said to have been Callimachus of Corinth, who was a craftsman in metal and designed the bronze lamp and its cover for the Erechtheum in Corinthian bronze, which may account for the origin and title of the capital. The earliest example of the Corinthian capital is that found at Bassae by Cockerell, dating from about 430, and the more perfected type is that of the Tholos of Epidaurus (400 ).

Whilst the entablatures of the Doric and Ionic orders suggest their origin from timber construction, that of the Corinthian was simply borrowed from the Ionic order, and its subsequent development by the Romans affords the only instance of their improvement of a Greek order (so far as the independent treatment of it was concerned) by the further enrichment of the bedmould of the cornice, where the introduction of the modillion gave an increased support to the corona and was a finer crowning feature.

The Greek Doric order was not understood by the Romans, and was, with one or two exceptions, utilized by them only as a decorative feature in their theatres and amphitheatres, where in the form of semi-detached columns they formed divisions between the arches; the same course was taken with the Ionic order, which, however, would seem to have been employed largely in porticoes. On the other hand, the Corinthian order, in consequence of its rich decoration, appealed more to the Roman taste; moreover, all its faces were the same, and it could be employed in rectangular or in circular buildings without any difficulty. The earliest examples are found in the temple of Castor and Pollux at Cora, near Rome, which is Greek in the style of its carving, and in the portico of the Pantheon at Rome erected by Agrippa (27 ), where the Roman order is fully developed. The next developments of the orders are those which followed the revival of classic architecture in the 16th century, and these were largely influenced by the discovery in 1456 of the manuscript of Vitruvius, an architect who flourished in the latter half of the 1st century In his work De Architectura he refers constantly to drawings which he had prepared to illustrate his descriptions; these, however, have never been found, so that the translators of his work put their own interpretation on his text and published woodcuts representing