In his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius provides the earliest surviving account of the origins of what we have called, since the Renaissance, the orders of Greek architecture. Vitruvius, however, wrote during the early years of the Roman Empire—some six hundred years after the orders first developed—and his first-hand experience of early Greek architecture must have been limited at best. The numerous Greek treatises on architecture that he had at his disposal and to which he routinely refers in his writings were for the most part relatively late, dating by and large to the Hellenistic period, again, long after the orders began to exist. As a result of archaeological exploration and study undertaken during the last two centuries in Greece, Turkey, and Italy, we find ourselves today in the paradoxical situation that, even after an additional two millennia, we are better positioned than Vitruvius to study and understand the origins of the orders. This is the premise of Barbara Barletta’s interesting book on this subject.

The Origins of the Greek Architectural Orders has a straightforward arrangement: six chapters, each of which closes with a succinct summary of its main points and arguments, are organized in relevant pairs. Numerous photographs, line drawings of architectural members, building plans, and reconstruction drawings accompany the text, providing much of the raw material for the discussion; all are compiled from earlier publications. Probably to provide greater autonomy to the individual chapters, several illustrations appear more than once in the book (e.g., figs. 21/85; 31/82; 61/77; and 32/83). One such double appearance, of Oscar Broneer’s reconstruction of the early Temple of Poseidon at Isthmia, is infelicitous because it gives visual prominence (and thus provides visual legitimacy) to a reconstruction that has been rejected by the author and a majority of scholars of ancient architecture (figs. 21/85).

The first pair of chapters deals with the literary evidence, especially from Vitruvius (chapter 1), and with the architectural “primordial soup” that existed in the seventh century B.C.E. and before (chapter 2). Clearly Vitruvius was no great architectural theorist. Rather, he was a practicing architect who in the waning years of a successful career set out to write a manifesto prescribing a conservative architecture in order to hold the tide against the practice of his day. His sometimes-explicit ideological approach colored many of his statements, including his musings on the origins of the architectural orders. Barletta is generous in her assessment of Vitruvius as an anthologist, stating that “he may not have fully understood his sources or that they were inadequate” (10). Be that as it may, modern scholarly perception discerns two primary orders, Doric and Ionic, largely based on Vitruvius’s writings. Of these, the Doric originated first, on the mainland of Greece, and the Ionic developed later, in Ionia. Both reached their zenith during Periklean Athens, and both declined thereafter. These notions have been persistent. For instance, the so-called petrification theory, in which the orders are considered to have developed from wooden precursors, finds its strongest evidence almost exclusively in Vitruvius’s text (18). Clearly, it is necessary to look well beyond him to pursue the origins of the Greek architectural orders.

In chapter 2, Barletta turns to the archaeological record. She reiterates the view that the early Greeks looked to the Late Bronze Age in constructing their own cultural identity. With respect to architecture she notes the reoccupation of the megaron at Tiryns during the Geometric period (21), and more generally the transmission of the megaron plan from a Mycenaean elite context into the Greek religious sphere, as seen, for instance, at Dreros (30–31). She limits her inquiry mostly to plans and individual elements of the orders. But the similarities in form (though not in structure) between the visible exterior part of the “Treasury of Atreus” at Mycenae (a doorway flanked by columns and surmounted by a large triangle) and the façades of Dark Age and Geometric shrines known directly from models (Argive Heraion and Perachora) and indirectly from reconstructions (Eretria and, to a lesser extent, even Lefkandi) are striking and probably deliberate, especially since archaeological evidence indicates that that tholos accommodated Geometric cult activity. Still, these examples of early Greek architecture have only a very limited connection to the later orders. It is not until the seventh century B.C.E. that some forms can be associated with elements that will evolve into the vocabulary of the Greek architectural orders. The dismembered blocks of one (or perhaps two) early-seventh-century buildings on Temple Hill in Corinth testify to the existence of a monumental, permanent, stone architecture with terra-cotta tiles, but nothing in the remains points to anything that can be associated with the formal vocabulary of the orders (48). The slightly later temple at Isthmia, according to Robin Rhodes, who has been restudying this material, displays a “proto-geison” as well as traces of half-timbering that tied the roof structure to the lower reaches of the wall, forming large wall panels that contained painted or stuccoed decoration (36–38). Barletta agrees that there is no good reason to assume a wooden peristyle for that building, as Broneer and others have done, let alone a wooden sheathing for the stone members it presumably carried. Peristyles, it seems, do not appear frequently until the end of the century (52–53). What emerges, then, is that the orders, as syntactical formal systems, developed late and gelled rapidly—according to Barletta, perhaps within the span of two generations—between ca. 625 and ca. 575 B.C.E. (54).

In the second pair of chapters, the author examines the emergence of the Doric and Ionic orders respectively, the two most fundamental Greek orders, by surveying archaeological publications (chapters 3 and 4). She discusses the origins and early instances of the formal vocabulary that make up the orders: capitals, antae, antae capitals, architrave, frieze (with triglyphs and metopes in the case of Doric), geison, and pediment. Many of these isolated discussions focus on formal etymologies, and only rarely are they related to the function of the various members. What, for instance, does a geison do? And how does its function necessarily affect its shape? Moreover, by looking at the elements that make up the orders in a piecemeal fashion, the discussion loses a sense of the whole, particularly in regard to aspects of meaning. Still, Barletta’s survey and discussion of early Doric forms undeniably indicates that at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the sixth century B.C.E. the Doric order evolved out of the exciting experimentation that was taking place in various parts of the Greek world, generating ideas that were exchanged, shared, and merged. The evidence thus contradicts the view that the orders were invented as more-or-less complete formal sets at a specific moment in time. As the author makes clear, that also precludes the Vitruvian notion of full-blown wooden antecedents for the orders (80).

With regards to the Ionic order (chapter 4), Barletta follows the same piecemeal approach. Her interesting discussion of the origins of the Ionic capital suggests that it began as either the support of a votive dedication or within an architectural context (99–109). As she points out, the archaeological evidence favors the former. But so does the very shape of the capitals, especially the early ones: the long rectangular soffit, created by the volute cushion, provides an appropriate support for a votive dedication such as a sphinx. It is much less suitable as an architectural member—the Ionic capital would never be good at turning corners. The Ionic volute capital seems to have originated on the Cyclades, especially on the island of Naxos (101). In early Ionic architecture in Ionia proper, a rather Doric-looking capital with a leaf echinus was used, perhaps as late as the Rhoikos Temple of Hera at Samos (ca. 570 B.C.E.) and the Temple of Apollo at Naukratis (ca. 566 B.C.E.) (106). The compilation and juxtaposition of these materials is, at least to this reader, fascinating and thought provoking.

The book closes with a final pair of chapters, an assessment that arbitrates between the Vitruvian theory and the archaeological reality (chapter 5) and a short conclusion. Here the author is more synthetic in her approach, focusing on a number of issues: wood as an early material (125); Vitruvius’s perceptions of the orders as differing structural systems that either emphasize ceiling beams, in the case of Doric triglyphs (130), or rafters, in the case of closely-spaced Ionic dentils (133); and the orders that Vitruvius called “ornaments” (143). In her conclusion, the author takes the discussion into the classical period and beyond. She holds the prominent and well-preserved cluster of high-classical buildings in Athens responsible for the modern perception of Attica as a hotbed of architectural innovation—a notion she convincingly debunks, much to the benefit of the early architectural laboratories on the Cyclades, in the Peloponnese, and in Western Greece (155). The orders, the author concludes, should be seen—at least early on—as flexible systems of architectural expression that only over time morphed into what we now call “canonical.”

In painstakingly exploring the origins of the orders, Barletta has done so much more than proving Vitruvius and his “petrification theory” wrong. Instead, she provides us with a comprehensive understanding of the exciting experimentation with monumental architectural form that took place throughout the Greek world at the dawn of the Greeks’ remarkable cultural adventure. Her accomplishment should be appreciated by anyone interested in Western architecture dating to practically any time period between classical antiquity and the postmodern present.