Full text: Vitruvius: The architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, in ten books

eve, and let the other extend to the top of the cymatium, 
then describing a semicircle, its extreme part will equal the 
projection of the band of the pillow. The centres, from 
which the volute is described, should not be more distant 
from each other than the thickness of the eye, nor the 
channels sunk more than a twelfth part of their width. 
The foregoing are the proportions for the capitals of co¬ 
lumns which do not exceed fifteen feet in height: when 
they exceed that, they must be otherwise proportioned, 
though upon similar principles, always observing that the 
square of the abacus is to be a ninth part more than the di¬ 
ameter of the column, so that, inasmuch as its diminution 
is less as its height is greater, the capital which crowns it 
may also be augmented in height and projection. The me¬ 
thod of describing volutes, in order that they may be 
properly turned and proportioned, will be given at 
the end of the book. The capitals being completed, and 
set on the tops of the shafts, not level throughout the 
range of columns, but so arranged with a gauge as to fol¬ 
low the inclination which the small steps on the stylobata 
produce, which must be added to them on the cen¬ 
tral part of the top of the abacus, that the regularity 
of the epistylia may be preserved: we may now con¬ 
sider the proportion of these epistylia, or architraves. 
When the columns are at least twelve and not more than 
fifteen feet high, the architrave must be half a diameter 
in height. When they are from fifteen to twenty feet in 
height, the height of the column is to be divided into 
thirteen parts, and one of them taken for the height of the 
architrave. So from twenty to twenty-five feet, let the 
height be divided into twelve parts and a half, and one 
part be taken for the height of the architrave. Thus, in
	        
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