The Tuscan Order

The Tuscan is the order stripped to essentials. Its shaft is unfluted, its base a single torus on a square plinth, its capital three plain members (necking, echinus and abacus), and its entablature has no ornament at all. It is the most robust of the orders, seven diameters high in the classic formulation, and the one closest to the timber buildings from which all the orders may have descended.

The Etruscan temple

Vitruvius does not call the Tuscan an order. He describes it as the manner in which the Etruscans, the people of central Italy before Rome, built their temples: almost square in plan, with a deep porch of widely spaced columns in front of three cellas side by side, and a heavy timber roof whose eaves projected far beyond the columns. His column is seven diameters high, its top reduced by a quarter, with base and capital each half a diameter.

℟The Tuscan column

Make the Tuscan column seven diameters high, diminish it by a quarter at the top, and give its base and capital each half a diameter.

column = 7 D; upper Ø = ¾ D; base = capital = ½ D

Because the spacing of Etruscan columns was too wide for stone, the architrave was made of timber, which is why Vitruvius’s Tuscan has no stone entablature to speak of, and why the order is associated with the widest intercolumniation, the araeostyle.

Becoming an order

It was Sebastiano Serlio, in 1537, who promoted the Tuscan to the first place in a series of five orders. He made it six diameters high (even stubbier than Vitruvius) and gave it the character of rustic strength, fit for city gates, fortresses, arsenals and prisons, often combined with rough-hewn rusticated stonework. Vignola lengthened it to seven diameters (fourteen modules) and gave it a proper entablature a quarter of the column’s height, with a plain architrave, a plain frieze, and a simple cornice of ovolo, corona and cavetto.

Palladio followed Vitruvius more closely, diminishing the shaft by a full quarter and giving the order a low plinth rather than a pedestal. He used it in the farm buildings of his villas, the long arcaded wings (barchesse) of the Villa Emo and the Villa Barbaro, where its plainness suited working architecture.

The Tuscan capital

Vignola divides the capital, half a diameter high, into three equal parts. The lowest is the necking, a plain continuation of the shaft above its astragal; the middle is the echinus, a quarter-round with a small fillet below it; the top is the square abacus. The whole is simpler than the Doric, which adds annulets to the echinus and a small moulding to the abacus.

The Tuscan in use

Because it is cheap to make and needs no carver, the Tuscan is the order of utilitarian and vernacular classicism. Inigo Jones used it at St Paul’s, Covent Garden (1631), calling it, according to a later anecdote, “the handsomest barn in England”; the building proved that the order could be noble in its plainness. Bernini ringed the piazza of St Peter’s in Rome with a colonnade four columns deep of a Tuscan so enlarged that its effect is overwhelming. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the order appeared on markets, stables, farmhouses and countless American porches.

℟Column heights in modules

Make the Tuscan column 14 modules high, the Doric 16, the Ionic 18, and the Corinthian and Composite 20, the module being half the lower diameter.

Tuscan 7 D · Doric 8 D · Ionic 9 D · Corinthian 10 D · Composite 10 D