How tall is each order? The column heights by author

The height of a column is given as a number of lower diameters, base and capital included. Most short accounts give one figure for each order, usually Vignola’s, but the principal writers do not agree, and the Greek buildings agree with none of them. The tables below give the figures used for this book’s models, which are rounded from the treatises.

Every writer makes the column more slender from the Tuscan to the Corinthian, but the steps differ. The Doric runs from 7 diameters (Vitruvius, Serlio) to 8½ (Scamozzi); the Ionic from 8 (Serlio) to 9 (Vitruvius, Vignola, Palladio); the Corinthian from 9 (Serlio) to 10 (Vignola, Scamozzi). The Composite is the tallest order in Serlio and Palladio, equal to the Corinthian in Vignola, and a quarter of a diameter shorter than the Corinthian in Scamozzi. Vitruvius’s Corinthian, 9⅔ D, is derived: he says it is the Ionic with a taller capital, one diameter high in place of a third (IV.1.1), so it gains two thirds of a diameter.

The entablature

The second number to know is the height of the entablature (architrave, frieze and cornice) as a fraction of the column. Here the writers divide into two camps: those who keep one fraction for all the orders, and those who make the entablature relatively lighter as the orders grow richer.

Vignola keeps a quarter throughout, which is what makes his rule so easy to remember. Palladio gives a quarter to the Tuscan and Doric and a fifth to the three richer orders, and Serlio does much the same. Scamozzi stays between the two, at a little over a fifth. The Parthenon’s entablature is about a third of its column, heavier than anything the Renaissance proposed.

Why the authors differ

The first reason is that Vitruvius himself gives more than one figure. He says that the first Doric columns were six diameters high and the first Ionic eight, and that later builders, liking more slender proportions, made them seven and nine (IV.1.6–8). In his chapter on spacing he then ties the height of a column to the space between columns, so that the same temple front may have columns of anything from 8 to 10 diameters (III.3.10). He describes four orders, not five, and his drawings were lost before the Renaissance.

The second reason is the ruins. The architects of the sixteenth century measured the Roman buildings and found that no two used the same proportions for the same order. Each writer had to decide whether to follow the text, a favourite building, an average of several, or his own judgement. Serlio wanted a simple series of whole numbers, one diameter apart. Vignola chose the examples he thought finest and made them regular. Palladio drew on his own buildings and on the antiquities he had surveyed. Scamozzi wanted a graded hierarchy and placed the Composite, his “Roman” order, below the Corinthian.

The third reason is what is being measured. A figure may or may not include the base (Vitruvius’s Doric figure counts the capital but has no base to count), and some writers allow a choice, as Palladio does for his Doric, which may be 7½ or 8 diameters. The Greek figures are surveyors’ measurements of one building each, and the Greek Doric itself grew more slender over two centuries, from the squat columns of the early temples to the Parthenon.

In 1683 Claude Perrault drew the conclusion that the exact proportions of the orders please by custom rather than by nature, and proposed his own set, rising in equal steps of two small modules, the small module being a third of the diameter. His set is not among this book’s models.

℟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.

The practical lesson is to name the author with the number. “A Doric column of eight diameters” is correct for Vignola and Palladio, too slender for Vitruvius and Serlio, and too stout for Scamozzi.