The Composite Order

The Composite is the youngest of the orders and the only one that is purely Roman. It takes the lower part of the Corinthian capital (the bell with its two rows of acanthus) and replaces the stalks and small helices with the large volutes of the Ionic, turned diagonally so that one faces each corner. Between them, round the top of the bell, runs an Ionic echinus carved with egg-and-dart. The result is heavier and more assertive than the Corinthian, and the richest of all.

An order without a text

Vitruvius knew nothing of the Composite; it seems to have appeared in the Augustan age just after he wrote, and its first great surviving example is the Arch of Titus in Rome (after AD 81). Because it had no ancient authority, Renaissance writers had to decide what to do with it. Alberti called it the Italic order. Serlio placed it fifth and highest in his series, the most slender at ten diameters; Vignola made it equal in height to the Corinthian; Scamozzi, who called it the Roman order, placed it below the Corinthian, arguing that its heavier capital demanded a stouter column.

The triumphal order

The Composite was above all the order of the triumphal arch, the Roman monument to victory: the Arch of Titus, the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Constantine all use it. Its association with triumph made it the natural order for the topmost storey of a façade and for monuments of state and power. In the Colosseum’s scheme of superimposed orders, and in Renaissance treatises that followed it, the Composite (or a Corinthian pilaster) crowns the building.

Its entablature is proportioned like the Corinthian, though Vignola gives it simpler, block-like modillions (mutules) and two fasciae in the architrave rather than three. In practice many buildings mix Composite capitals with a Corinthian entablature, and the line between the two richest orders is not always sharp.