The Authorities Compared

Every classical architect from 1500 to 1900 learned the orders from books, and the books disagree. A Doric column is seven diameters high in Serlio, eight in Vignola and Palladio, eight and a half in Scamozzi. Palladio’s Ionic entablature is a fifth of the column, Vignola’s a quarter. The Corinthian capital is one diameter high in Vitruvius and seven-sixths in Vignola. Choosing an authority was choosing a manner.

Why they disagree

The first reason is Vitruvius himself. His text is short, sometimes corrupt, and its illustrations were lost; he describes only four orders and gives full dimensions for only some of their parts. The second reason is the ruins. Renaissance architects measured the Roman buildings (the Pantheon, the Theatre of Marcellus, the Colosseum, the temples of the Forum) and found that no two used the same proportions for the same order. An author had to decide whether to follow the text, a favourite building, an average of many buildings, or his own eye.

Serlio tried to reconcile Vitruvius with the ruins and produced a simple series of whole numbers. Vignola, who measured more carefully, chose the examples he thought most beautiful and then regularised them into a system that could be memorised. Palladio drew on his own buildings and on the antiquities he had surveyed in Rome. Scamozzi wanted a perfectly graded hierarchy. Each reflects a different idea of what a rule is for.

Perrault’s doubt

In 1683 Claude Perrault, who had translated Vitruvius into French for Louis XIV, drew a startling conclusion from all this disagreement. If the admired buildings of antiquity all use different proportions and are all beautiful, then the exact proportions cannot be the cause of their beauty. Some kinds of beauty are positive (the richness of materials, the grandeur of size, the precision of workmanship, symmetry) and please everyone. Others are arbitrary: they please us because we are used to them and because authorities have praised them. The fine proportions of the orders belong to the second kind.

℟Positive and arbitrary beauty

Distinguish positive beauty, which pleases everyone for evident reasons (fine materials, size, precise workmanship, symmetry), from arbitrary beauty, which pleases through custom, including the exact proportions of the orders.

Perrault then did something very modern: he took the average of the ancient examples and proposed a new, simplified set of orders whose column heights rise in equal steps of two small modules. His academy colleagues were scandalised; François Blondel, director of the Royal Academy of Architecture, defended the natural basis of proportion, and the “quarrel of the ancients and moderns” ran on for decades. The question Perrault raised is still alive: are the rules of architecture discovered or invented?

Using the comparisons

The Orders laboratory (see Orders in the header) lets you build any order after any of these authorities, switch between them, and compare them in a table. Two things become clear quickly. First, the differences are real but modest: a trained eye can tell a Palladian from a Vignolan Corinthian, but both are unmistakably Corinthian. Second, the relations are remarkably stable: every author makes the orders grow more slender from Tuscan to Corinthian, makes the entablature a fifth to a quarter of the column, and diminishes the shaft by about a sixth. The rules are a family, not a single law.

℟Divide, do not multiply

Find every member of an order by dividing the given height into equal parts with the compasses, and those parts again, so that no arithmetic is needed.

height → 5 parts: 1 entablature + 4 column (without pedestal)