Andrea Palladio · The First Book
Chapter XII. Of the five orders made use of by the antients
THE Tuscan, Dorick, Ionick, Corinthian, and Composite, are the five orders made use of by the antients, These ought to be so disposed in a building, that the most solid may be placed undermost, as being the most proper to sustain the weight, and to give the whole edifice a more firm foundation: Therefore the Dorick must always be placed under the Ionick; the Ionick under the Corinthian; and the Corinthian under the Composite.
The Tuscan being 2 plain rude order, is therefore very seldom used above ground, except in villas, where one order only is employ’d. In very large buildings, as amphitheatres, and such like, where many orders are required, this, instead of the Dorick, may be placed under the Ionick.
B if you are desirous to leave out any of these orders, as, for instance, to place the Corinthian immediately over the Dorick, you may, provided you always observe to place the most strong and solid undermost, for the reasons above-mention’d.
The measures and proportions of each of these orders I shall separately set down; not so much according to Vitruvius, as the observations I have made on several antient edifices. But I shall first mention such particulars as relate to all of them in general.
Public-domain text (London, published by Isaac Ware, 1738). Read from the Internet Archive’s scan (gri_33125011569684) of the copy in the Getty Research Institute, by way of Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked public domain. That scan’s text layer had lost the ends of the lines on every left-hand page, so the pages were read again from the scan’s images, the two readings compared word by word, and the text cleaned: the long s (ſ) is printed s and the ct and st ligatures as plain letters, words broken at the ends of lines are joined, and running heads, page numbers, signatures and catchwords are removed. Ware’s spelling, capitals and punctuation are otherwise kept (shew, publick, antient, compleat). Chapter titles and words the OCR misread were corrected against the page images. Some misreadings will remain, most of them in the italic prefaces and the Latin of Book III. Ware’s dedication, the list of subscribers, his table of terms, the errata and the bookseller’s advertisement are not reproduced. Nor are the 212 engraved plates, their inscriptions, or the keys to the letters on them that Ware prints in the text: where Palladio writes “as in the design” the figure is in the printed book.