Tuscan Order

Tuscan Order. One of the five Roman Orders of architecture identified during the Renaissance, and the simplest, also sometimes called the Gigantic Order after Scamozzi, probably because a variety of Tuscan column was used for triumphal columns of the Antonine or Trajanic type in Antiquity. It resembles Roman Doric, but has no triglyphs on its unadorned frieze. Its base is very plain, consisting of a square plinth-block supporting a large torus over which is the fillet and apophyge creating the transition to the plain unfluted shaft (often with an entasis more pronounced than in the other Orders). At the top of the shaft is another apophyge and fillet, then an unadorned astragal over which is a neck or hypotrachelium, then another fillet or fillets, a plain echinus, and a square abacus, usually with a simple fillet at the top, but sometimes an unmoulded block. The entablature has a plain architrave, plain frieze, and crowning cornice of simple bed-moulds, and a cyma recta on top, and there are no modillions, dentils, mutules, or enrichment of any sort. However, in a much more severe version of the Order codified by Palladio based on Vitruvius and used by Inigo Jones at St Paul's Church, Covent Garden, London (1631–3), the conventional frieze and cornice are omitted: instead, there is a very wide overhanging eaves-cornice supported on long, plain, bracket-like mutules, immediately over the architrave.

Bibliography

W. Chambers (1759);
J. Curl (2001);
Normand (1852);
Spiers (1893)