IRONING OUT THE DIFFERENCES

 I was intrigued by a post on LinkedIn where Mark Somerfield credited the diagonal version of Ionic to Scamozzi. I hadn’t heard this attribution before, but I knew Scamozzi as a pupil of Palladio who completed some of his projects and wrote a book, as so many of the architects of that era did.

It struck me that this version of Ionic could be derived by reverse engineering the Composite Order. If you take a Corinthian capital and swap out the volutes with more substantial scrolls based on the Ionic order, you arrive at Composite. In the process you will have adapted the scrolls from two sets of parallel pairs to four diagonal corners.

 

Take the Acanthus leaves away again, and you get Scamozzi’s Ionic.  So we have the “flat/parallel” and the “diagonal corners” These are the two types that currently feature in my modular classical columns system for Revit.  But in this latest bout of research I also came across an intermediate version that may well predate the flat/parallel solution.  That will be an interesting one to tackle at some point in the future.

During my research I came across two interesting articles by Calder Loth, retired historian of classical architecture. Turns out that the diagonal Ionic goes back to the classical era although it was rare compared to the flat/parallel version.

https://www.classicist.org/articles/classical-comments-the-composite-order-an-overview/

https://www.classicist.org/articles/classical-comments-the-scamozzi-ionic-capital/

 

Loth credits Scamozzi as the popularizer of this version. Inigo Jones had a copy of his book and used it on the Banqueting House in Whitehall which stands opposite Soane’s Board of Trade (later remodeled by Barry and current home of the cabinet office)

 

Looking back at my own photos of the Banqueting House, I noticed that Jones used the Scamozzi Ionic on the lower range of windows and Composite capitals on the upper row.  There’s always something new to discover when you take a closer look at buildings in the classical style.  

 Fascinating