From the ground up: step, shaft, flutes
Read a Doric column from the bottom. It stands directly on the top step of the temple platform, the stylobate, with no base in between; this is the first and quickest way to tell it from the three orders‘ other two. The shaft is fluted, cut into vertical channels, and Vitruvius, the Roman architect of the first century BCE, gives it twenty of them.
Is the shaft straight? Not quite. Vitruvius describes a slight swelling in the middle of columns, which the Greeks called entasis (from enteino, to stretch), and explains it as a correction: seen from below, the upper part of a column looks thinner than it is, so the builder adds what the eye takes away. The Parthenon has this swelling, together with other curves and swellings whose exact purpose is still debated.
The capital: a sea urchin and a board
The Doric capital has two parts. Below is the echinus, a cushion-like slab that swells out from the top of the shaft; the name is the Greek word for sea urchin, after its rounded shape. Above it lies the abacus (from the Greek abax, board), a flat square slab. That is all: no spirals, no leaves, no carving. The capital’s job is to pass the weight of the beam above onto the round column below, and the Doric version does it with two plain shapes, a disc and a square, like a cushion with a tray on top.
The entablature: architrave, frieze, cornice
On the capitals rests the entablature, made of three bands. The lowest, the architrave, is a plain beam, decorated only by a narrow strip under which hang little pegs, the guttae (Latin for drops). Above it runs the frieze, with the signature of the order: triglyphs, blocks with three vertical bars, alternating with metopes, square slabs often carved in relief. At the top projects the cornice.
Why triglyphs? Vitruvius has an explanation. Early temples were built of wood, and the ends of the beams sat above the columns; builders cut them flush and covered them with grooved boards, and when temples were rebuilt in stone the carvers kept the pattern. In his words, the arrangement of beams gave rise to the invention of triglyphs. It fits what we know: the earliest temples did use wooden columns, and the Temple of Hera at Olympia had its wooden columns replaced with stone over time.
A man’s proportions
How tall should a Doric column be? Vitruvius again tells a story. The first builders measured a man, found that his foot was one sixth of his height, and made the column, capital included, six times as tall as its lower diameter. Later architects stretched it to seven diameters, against eight and a half for the slimmer Ionic.
Where the Doric is best
The Doric order belonged to mainland Greece and to the colonies of southern Italy and Sicily. Among the best-preserved Archaic examples are the Temple of Apollo at Corinth, built in the second quarter of the sixth century BCE with columns carved from single blocks more than 7 metres high, and the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina (about 500-480 BCE), whose pediments preserve several groups of sculpture. At Paestum, south of Naples, the Temple of Neptune (about 460 BCE) still has its full ring of 6 by 14 columns.
In Athens the order reaches its most refined form. The Parthenon (447-438 BCE), a Doric temple of 8 by 17 columns in Pentelic marble, adds to the basic scheme curves, swellings and even an Ionic frieze; the Temple of Hephaistos (460-420 BCE) stands on the hill above the Agora. Seen together, they show that the Greek temple could keep the same simple parts for two centuries and still keep improving them.
Where to see it
In Greece: the Temple of Apollo in Ancient Corinth, the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, Olympia, and in Athens the Parthenon and the Temple of Hephaistos in the Ancient Agora. In Italy, the three temples of Paestum. Check opening times on the official sites before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
- Vitruvius, On Architecture 3.3.13, 4.1.6-8, 4.2.2-3 and 4.3.9, trans. M. H. Morgan (LacusCurtius, University of Chicago).
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Temple of Apollo at Corinth; Temple of Aphaia; Heraion of Olympia; Temple of Hephaistos.
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Parthenon”.
- Parchi Archeologici di Paestum e Velia, “Archaeological area of Paestum”.
