What the common summaries get wrong about the orders

Short accounts of the orders tend to repeat the same handful of statements. Some are simply wrong; more often they take one writer’s rule, or one period’s practice, and present it as the rule of all. Each is set out below with what the sources say.

“The Doric is 1 : 8, the Ionic 1 : 9, the Corinthian 1 : 10”

These are Vignola’s figures (16, 18 and 20 modules of half a diameter), and Palladio’s for the Doric and Ionic. They are not Vitruvius’s, who gives the Doric 7 diameters, the Ionic 9 and, by implication, the Corinthian 9⅔ (IV.1.1, IV.1.8). Serlio makes the three 7, 8 and 9, Palladio’s Corinthian is 9½, and Scamozzi’s Doric 8½ and his Ionic 8¾. The Parthenon’s Doric columns are about 5½ diameters. The ratios are a family that rises from stout to slender, not a single canon; the guide to column heights by author, listed below, sets them side by side.

The same applies to the entablature. A quarter of the column is Vignola’s rule for all five orders, but Palladio gives the Ionic, Corinthian and Composite a fifth.

“Vitruvius described the five orders”

Vitruvius describes the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, and separately the Tuscan as the Etruscan way of building a temple. He mentions capitals of other forms set on the same columns, and says that they do not amount to another order (IV.1.12). The canon of five, ranked as a series, is Serlio’s, published in 1537.

Confusing the Tuscan and the Doric

At a distance an unfluted Roman Doric column and a Tuscan column look much alike, and their capitals are both half a diameter high and divided into three. The test is the entablature. The Doric frieze always has triglyphs and metopes, with guttae below and usually mutules above; the Tuscan frieze is plain. The capitals differ in detail too, the Doric having annulets under the echinus. A column without a base is not Tuscan, since Vitruvius gives the Tuscan a base half a diameter high (IV.7.3); it is more likely to be Greek Doric. Some Roman buildings sit between the two: the lowest storey of the Colosseum is called Tuscan by some writers and Doric by others.

“A fluted column is Doric”

Flutes are found on all the orders except the Tuscan. What differs is their number and edge: the Doric has twenty shallow flutes meeting in sharp arrises, the Ionic, Corinthian and Composite twenty-four deeper ones separated by flat fillets. Roman and Renaissance Doric columns are often left unfluted, while Greek Ionic columns are almost always fluted. Fluting is older than the Doric: the rock-cut tombs at Beni Hasan in Egypt have faceted and fluted shafts, sometimes called “proto-Doric”, long before any Greek temple was built in stone.

“The Doric column has a base”

The Greek Doric has none. Its shaft rises directly from the stylobate, as at the Parthenon and at Paestum, and Vitruvius gives no base in his chapter on Doric temples (IV.3). The base came with Roman practice, and Roman Doric columns are found both with and without one. The Renaissance writers normally supplied one, most often the Attic base, which is why the Doric of most later buildings stands on two tori and a scotia.

“The Romans invented the Composite by mixing the Ionic and Corinthian”

Half of this is right. Capitals combining the Corinthian bell of acanthus with large Ionic volutes were made in Rome from about the time Vitruvius wrote, and the Arch of Titus (after AD 81) is the first great surviving example. But the Romans did not treat it as a separate order with its own proportions; Vitruvius’s comment on mixed capitals is that they do not make a new order (IV.1.12). The name and the status are Renaissance. Alberti called it the Italic order; Serlio made it the fifth and most slender of his series, at 10 diameters; Vignola gave it the same height as his Corinthian; Scamozzi called it the Roman order and placed it below the Corinthian, at 9¾. The order is also more than a capital: Vignola gives it its own entablature, with two fasciae and block modillions.

“The Parthenon is built on the golden section”

No Greek text says so, and Vitruvius never mentions the ratio. The claim is usually made by drawing a rectangle over a photograph of the front and choosing which points to measure to: the top of the pediment or the cornice, the top step or the stylobate. Measured dimensions point to a different ratio. The Parthenon’s stylobate is 30.88 by 69.50 metres, 4 : 9 (2.25, where the golden section is 1.618), and the lower diameter of its columns is to their axial spacing in nearly the same ratio. Even that is a modern observation from measurement, not a documented rule of its architects.

The pattern behind the mistakes

Most of these errors come from treating the orders as a single fixed system, laid down once and followed ever since. The sources describe something looser: a set of related practices that changed from Greek to Roman to Renaissance building, recorded by writers who disagreed with one another and knew it. When a summary states a rule, it is worth asking whose rule it is and which buildings follow it.