The Corinthian Order

The Corinthian is the only order with a story of its invention, and Vitruvius tells it beautifully. A young girl of Corinth died just as she was about to be married. Her nurse gathered the little cups and toys she had loved into a basket, set it on her grave, and put a roof tile on top to protect them. The basket happened to stand on the root of an acanthus plant. In spring the leaves grew up round it, and where they met the corners of the tile they were forced to curl outward into small spirals. The sculptor Callimachus, passing by, was charmed by the sight and made from it a new kind of capital.

The legend gives the anatomy exactly. The capital is a bell (the basket) wrapped in two tiers of acanthus leaves. From between the upper leaves rise stalks (caulicoli), each ending in a pair of small spirals: the larger ones, the helices, reach out under the corners of the abacus, which is the tile; the smaller ones curl toward the centre of each face, beneath a flower (the fleuron). The abacus itself has concave sides and clipped corners, as though the tile had been bent by the leaves beneath it.

℟The Corinthian capital

The Corinthian capital is as high as the column is thick; its abacus is one seventh of that height, and the rest is divided in three: the lower leaves, the upper leaves, and the stalks from which the volutes spring.

capital = 1 D; abacus = ⅐; leaves : leaves : volutes = 1 : 1 : 1; abacus diagonal = 2 D

Proportions

For Vitruvius, the Corinthian differs from the Ionic only in its capital: the shaft, base and entablature are the same, but the capital is as tall as the column is thick, where the Ionic capital is only a third. That makes the whole column taller and more slender, “an imitation of the slenderness of a maiden”. Later authors enlarged the capital further: Vignola makes it 2⅓ modules (7⁄6 D) and the column ten diameters, the most slender of his orders.

The capital’s geometry follows from the abacus. Vitruvius makes its diagonal twice the lower diameter of the column. The height below the abacus is divided into three equal parts: the lower leaves take the first, the upper leaves reach the second, and the stalks and volutes fill the third. Eight leaves in each row alternate so that the upper leaves stand over the gaps of the lower, and the helices spring from behind the upper row at the corners.

The entablature

The Corinthian entablature is the richest of all. Its architrave has three fasciae separated by small beads; its frieze is plain or carved with scrolls of foliage; its cornice combines dentils with modillions, ornamental scrolled brackets that seem to hold up the corona. In Vignola’s Corinthian the cornice alone is a full diameter deep.

From Greek novelty to imperial order

The Greeks used the Corinthian sparingly, at first only inside buildings: the earliest known capital stood alone in the interior of the temple of Apollo at Bassae (c. 420 BC). The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens (334 BC) is the first building to use it outside, and the colossal Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, completed under Hadrian, gave it grandeur. It was Rome that made the Corinthian its own. Its richness suited imperial display, and it became the standard order of Roman temples, from the Maison Carrée at Nîmes to the portico of the Pantheon.

In the Renaissance the Corinthian was the order of churches, especially those dedicated to the Virgin, and of the grandest interiors. Michelangelo used a giant Corinthian order, rising through two storeys, on the exterior of St Peter’s; Bernini and the Baroque made it the order of splendour. Its capital is the hardest of all to carve well, and a well-carved Corinthian capital has always been one of the signs of a serious building.