Editing Corinthian order (section)

===Renaissance Corinthian order===
[[File:Scamozzi portrait by Veronese.jpg|thumb|[[Vincenzo Scamozzi]] offers his version of the Corinthian capital, in a portrait by [[Paolo Cagliari|Veronese]] ([[Denver Art Museum]])]]
During the first flush of the [[Italian Renaissance]], the Florentine architectural theorist [[Francesco di Giorgio]] expressed the human analogies that writers who followed Vitruvius often associated with the human form, in squared drawings he made of the Corinthian capital overlaid with human heads, to show the proportions common to both.<ref>Francesco di Giorgio's sheet with the drawings, from the Turin codex Saluzziano of his ''Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare'', c. 1480–1500, is illustrated by [[Rudolf Wittkower]], ''Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism'' (1962) 1965, pl. ic</ref>

The Corinthian [[architrave]] is divided in two or three sections, which may be equal, or may bear interesting proportional relationships, to one with another. Above the plain, unadorned architrave lies the [[frieze]], which may be richly carved with a continuous design or left plain, as at the U.S. Capitol extension. At the Capitol the proportions of architrave to frieze are exactly 1:1. Above that, the profiles of the [[cornice (architecture)|cornice]] mouldings are like those of the Ionic order. If the cornice is very deep, it may be supported by brackets or modillions, which are ornamental brackets used in a series under a cornice.

The Corinthian column is almost always fluted, and the flutes of a Corinthian column may be enriched. They may be filleted, with rods nestled within the hollow flutes, or stop-fluted, with the rods rising a third of the way, to where the [[entasis]] begins. In French, these are called ''chandelles'' and sometimes terminate in carved wisps of flame, or with bellflowers. Alternatively, beading or chains of husks may take the place of the fillets in the fluting, Corinthian being the most flexible of the orders, with more opportunities for variation.

Elaborating upon an offhand remark when Vitruvius accounted for the origin of its acanthus capital, it became a commonplace to identify the Corinthian column with the slender figure of a young girl; in this mode the classifying French painter [[Nicolas Poussin]] wrote to his friend [[Paul Fréart de Chantelou|Fréart de Chantelou]] in 1642:

<blockquote>The beautiful girls whom you will have seen in [[Nîmes]] will not, I am sure, have delighted your spirit any less than the beautiful columns of Maison Carrée for the one is no more than an old copy of the other.<ref>Quoted by [[Kenneth Clark|Sir Kenneth Clark]], ''The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form'', 1956, p. 45.</ref></blockquote>

[[Sir William Chambers]] expressed the conventional comparison with the Doric order:

<blockquote>The proportions of the orders were by the ancients formed on those of the human body, and consequently, it could not be their intention to make a Corinthian column, which, as Vitruvius observes, is to represent the delicacy of a young girl, as thick and much taller than a Doric one, which is designed to represent the bulk and vigour<!--vigour in original--> of a muscular full grown man.<ref>Chambers, ''A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture'' (Joseph Gwilt ed, 1825:pp 159–61).</ref></blockquote>

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