Three orders, one system
An order is more than a style of column. It is a set of rules for the whole front of a building: the column (base, shaft and capital, the crowning block at the top) and the entablature, the horizontal band of stone the columns carry. It works like three typefaces for the same alphabet: the letters are the same, but every detail, from the foot to the serif, follows one style.
The Doric and the Ionic grew up side by side and were both established by the early sixth century BCE. The Doric belonged to mainland Greece and the western colonies in Italy and Sicily, the Ionic to the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the Ionian islands. The Corinthian came much later: it first appeared in the late Classical period and became common only under the Hellenistic kings and the Romans.
Doric: no base, plain capital
The Doric column stands straight on the top step of the temple platform, the stylobate, with no base. Its shaft is fluted, cut into vertical channels, and Vitruvius, the Roman architect and writer of the first century BCE, gives it twenty flutes. At the top sits a plain capital without carved ornament.
The giveaway is above the columns. In a Doric frieze, blocks grooved with vertical channels, the triglyphs (from the Greek tri, three, and glyphe, carving), alternate with square panels, the metopes, which could be left plain or carved in relief, as on the metopes of the Parthenon.
Where do the proportions come from? Vitruvius tells a story. The first builders of a Doric temple, he says, wanted a column strong enough to carry weight and handsome to look at, so they measured a man, found that his foot was one sixth of his height, and made the column six times as tall as its lower diameter, capital included. Later architects stretched it to seven diameters. Nobody can check the tale, but the rule of thumb is easy to remember.
Ionic: a base and two volutes
Ionic columns stand on a moulded base, rise more slenderly and end in a capital with two spirals, the volutes (from the Latin voluta, rolled). The entablature often carries a continuous frieze, one long band that can hold a sculpted procession without interruption.
Vitruvius gives the Ionic a female model. When the Ionians built a temple to Artemis, he says, they took the slenderness of a woman as their standard: the base was like a shoe on the foot, the volutes like curls of hair hanging on each side, the flutes like the folds of a long dress. He sets its height at eight and a half diameters, against seven for the later Doric. On the Acropolis of Athens you can see the order at small scale in the Temple of Athena Nike, with four single-block columns at each end, and in the porches of the Erechtheion. At large scale, the Metropolitan Museum has a column from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis, in today’s Turkey: the reassembled section is 3.61 metres high, and the whole column once rose about 17 metres, the height of a six-storey building.
Corinthian: a basket and some leaves
The Corinthian keeps the base and the slender shaft of the Ionic and changes the capital, which is wrapped in acanthus leaves, with small volutes curling out at the corners. Vitruvius has a story for this one too. A girl of Corinth, old enough to marry, fell ill and died; her nurse put her belongings in a basket, set it on the tomb and covered it with a tile. The basket happened to stand on the root of an acanthus, which sent up its leaves around it and curled them under the corners of the tile. The sculptor Callimachus passed by, liked what he saw and made columns on that model near Corinth.
Is it true? It is a legend, written down by a Roman some four centuries later, and it can’t be checked. What the buildings show is this: the earliest Corinthian capital known stood inside the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, in the Peloponnese, at the end of the fifth century BCE. One of the earliest buildings in Greece to use the order on its outside is the Choragic Monument of Lysikrates in Athens, put up in 335/334 BCE to celebrate a victory in a music and drama contest. From then on the leafy capital spread, and the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, finished under Hadrian, shows it at full size.
Three checks to tell them apart
Faced with any column, ancient or modern, three questions settle it:
- Is there a base? No base means Doric. A base means Ionic or Corinthian.
- What is on the capital? A plain cushion is Doric, two spirals are Ionic, leaves are Corinthian.
- What runs above? Triglyphs and metopes are Doric; a continuous band points to Ionic or Corinthian.
The second check alone solves most cases, and you can do it from a bus window.
Buildings that mix the orders
The rules were never a cage. The Parthenon is a Doric temple, with 8 columns on the ends and 17 on the sides, yet it has an Ionic frieze running round the outside of its inner building, something unique for a Doric temple, and four Ionic columns held up the ceiling of its west room. At Bassae, the Temple of Apollo combines all three orders in one building, with that early Corinthian capital inside. So when you look at a Greek temple, the orders tell you which tradition its builders followed, and the exceptions show where they chose to break the rule.
Where to see them
Athens has all three within walking distance: the Doric Parthenon and the Ionic Erechtheion and Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis, the Corinthian Monument of Lysikrates below it, and the Corinthian columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus nearby. The Temple of Apollo at Bassae is in the mountains of the western Peloponnese, and the Sardis column stands in the Greek and Roman galleries of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Vitruvius, On Architecture 4.1.3-10 and 4.3.9, trans. M. H. Morgan (LacusCurtius, University of Chicago).
- C. Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA): Parthenon; Erechtheion.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Temple of Athena Nike; Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae; Olympieion.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 26.59.1, “Marble column from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis”.
- Museum of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge, “Choregic monument of Lysikrates”.
