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In their original Greek version, Doric columns stood directly on the flat pavement (the stylobate) of a temple without a base. With a height only four to eight times their diameter, the columns were the most squat of all the classical orders; their vertical shafts were fluted with 20 parallel concave grooves, each rising to a sharp edge called an arris.
A caryatid (/ ˌ k ɛər i ˈ æ t ɪ d, ˌ k ær-/ KAIR-ee-AT-id, KARR-; [1] Ancient Greek: Καρυᾶτις, romanized: Karuâtis; pl. Καρυάτιδες, Karuátides) [2] is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.
The shaft is wider at the bottom than at the top, because its entasis, beginning a third of the way up, imperceptibly makes the column slightly more slender at the top, although some Doric columns, especially early Greek ones, are visibly "flared", with straight profiles that narrow going up the shaft. The capital rests on the shaft.
The columns of an early Doric temple such as the Temple of Apollo at Syracuse, Sicily, may have a height to base diameter ratio of only 4:1 and a column height to entablature ratio of 2:1, with relatively crude details. A column height to diameter of 6:1 became more usual, while the column height to entablature ratio at the Parthenon is about 3:1.
The classic solution chosen by Greek architects is the formula "frontal columns : side columns = n : (2n+1)", which can also be used for the number of intercolumniations. As a result, numerous temples of the Classical period in Greece ( c. 500 to 336) had 6 × 13 columns or 5 × 11 intercolumniations.
The Ionic column is always more slender than the Doric; therefore, it always has a base: [5] Ionic columns are eight and nine column-diameters tall, and even more in the Antebellum colonnades of late American Greek Revival plantation houses. [citation needed] Ionic columns are most often fluted. After a little early experimentation, the number ...
The oldest known example of a Corinthian column is in the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae in Arcadia, c. 450–420 BC. It is not part of the order of the temple itself, which has a Doric colonnade surrounding the temple and an Ionic order within the cella enclosure. A single Corinthian column stands free, centered within the cella.
In 423, Simeon Stylites the Elder took up his abode on the top of a pillar. Critics have recalled a passage in Lucian (De Syria Dea, chapters 28 and 29) which speaks of a high column at Hierapolis Bambyce to the top of which a man ascended twice a year and spent a week in converse with the gods, but according to Herbert Thurston, an English priest of the Roman Catholic Church, scholars think ...