The Ionic was not much more to the taste of the Romans than the Doric, for, with the exception of the examples in tall buildings, where the orders were piled up one over the other, the Temple of Fortuna Virilis is the only good example, although there is a very debased one at the Temple of Concord. The columns of the Temple of Fortuna Virilis somewhat resemble the Greco-Roman ones of the Temple of Bacchus at Teos; they have similar paltry capitals, and an Attic base, but their truly Roman entablature is very notably worse than that at Teos, in fact, it might be used as an example of what to avoid in profiling. The cornice is crushingly heavy for the frieze and architrave, the parts are disproportionate, the corona having almost disappeared to make room for the
Fig. 185.—Roman Corinthian. Entablature, capital, and base of the Pantheon.
extra crowning member, and the floral ornaments on some of the mouldings are gigantic. Its main importance to us is from the use made of it by the Renaissance architects, some of whom, however, greatly improved its appearance, by making it a four-faced capital, by adding a necking and putting festoons from the eyes, thus giving the capital greater depth and importance.
The Roman Corinthian.
The magnificence of this capital took the Romans, so that good examples of the other orders, except of the Composite, are rare. As I said before, the only undoubted Greek Corinthian order that has come down to us is that of the Lysikrates monument, though we have many Greco-Roman examples. The best Roman example I can give you is that of the Pantheon; the existing portico is believed by M. Chedanne to be a copy of Agrippa’s, made in the days of Septimius Severus. At any rate, it has the comparative simplicity that characterized some of the buildings just before our era. The capital has two rows of eight leaves, the upper row not rising to quite so great a height above the lower ones as these do above the necking, and there is space between the upper leaves to show the stalks of the sheaths of the cauliculi; the inner ones finish under the rim of the basket, the outer ones form the volutes under the angles of the abacus, and above these a curled leaf masks the overhanging of the angles of the abacus. From some foliage on the top of the upper
