Elements
Each style has distinctive capitals and entablatures. The shaft is sometimes articulated with vertical hollow grooves known as fluting. 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.
The capital rests on the shaft. It has a load-bearing function, which concentrates the weight of the entablature on the supportive column, but it primarily serves an aesthetic purpose. The necking is the continuation of the shaft, but is visually separated by one or many grooves. The echinus lies atop the necking. It is a circular block that bulges outwards towards the top to support the abacus, which is a square or shaped block that in turn supports the entablature. The entablature consists of three horizontal layers, all of which are visually separated from each other using moldings or bands. In Roman and post-Renaissance work, the entablature may be carried from column to column in the form of an arch that springs from the column that bears its weight, retaining its divisions and sculptural enrichment, if any.
Read more about this topic: Classical Order
Famous quotes containing the word elements:
“The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.”
—Thomas Campbell (1777–1844)
“It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.”
—Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)