Glossary · T
Triglyph
Also called triglyphs
A vertical block in a Doric frieze carved with two full vertical grooves and two half-grooves at its edges; one stands over every column and over the middle of every intercolumniation. Thought to recall the ends of timber beams.
Rules that use the word
The Doric corner conflict. A Doric frieze cannot obey all three of its rules at a corner: triglyphs over the column axes, a triglyph turning the corner, and metopes as broad as they are high. One of them must give way.
Contract the corner bays. To end the frieze with a triglyph at the corner and keep every metope square, move the corner column inward: make the last intercolumniation narrower than the others by the amount the corner triglyph is displaced.
Vitruvius’s half-metope. Keep every triglyph centred over a column and every intercolumniation equal, and finish the frieze at the corner with a half-metope half a module wide.
The Doric module. Divide the front of a Doric temple into modules; the column’s thickness is two modules, its height with the capital fourteen, the capital one, the architrave one, and the triglyphs one and a half high and one wide.
Triglyphs over every column, and square metopes. Set a triglyph over the axis of every column and over the middle of every intercolumniation (or two, in a wider bay); make the metopes between them as wide as they are high.
Where it appears in the book
In the chapters Post and Lintel, The Anatomy of an Order, The Doric Order, Columns in Company, The Classical World, Renaissance and Baroque.
A feature of Mannerism architecture.
Nearby in the glossary
Transverse arch · Treillage · Triclinium · Triforium · Trilithon · Triumphal arch · Trompe-l’oeil · Truss