The last great Italian Renaissance treatise, by Palladio’s pupil and rival. Scamozzi ranked the orders in a strict hierarchy of slenderness and gave the Composite, which he called the Roman order, a place below the Corinthian.
Scamozzi completed several of Palladio’s buildings, including the Teatro Olimpico and the Rotonda, and built the Procuratie Nuove in Venice. His vast treatise (planned in ten books, of which six were published) is encyclopaedic and philosophical, but its plates of the orders were widely copied, notably in northern Europe.
His Ionic capital with volutes turned out on all four corners (the “Scamozzi capital”) solved the problem of the corner column in an Ionic colonnade and became the standard in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The book, part by part
I Book VI: The orders
The five orders in a graded series, with the Composite (Roman) placed below the Corinthian; the four-faced Ionic capital.
Rules: Scamozzi’s hierarchy