Riflessioni sull'ordine dorico tra la tarda repubblica e il principato augusteo

This essay investigates the diffusion of the Doric order in Italy between the Late Republic and the early Augustan Age. In Roman hands this order, which has long been the subject of repeated study, was emancipated from the Greek paradigms fixed in the Archaic period in favour of a greater versatility. In the first phase, Italic Doric underwent multiple changes, both aesthetic and syntactical, above all in religious architecture, as is evidenced by the well-known examples of the Temple of Hercules at Ostia, of Hercules at Cori, and the sanctuary at Praeneste. From the late 2nd century B.C. onwards, therefore, the morphology of Doric alternated between fidelity to Greek models and a pioneering new language that would reach full fruition in Augustan architecture. Between the mid-1st century B.C. and the first decades of the 1st century A.D., the dynamic mutability of the Doric, alongside innovations in construction, enabled unprecedented syntax in elevational design, such as the engaged wall order that partly replaced the previous post-and-beam articulation of porticoes. As a result, new decorative forms emerged from the architectural debate that characterised the late republican age, which crystallized during the early principate in a new architectural language that was idiosyncratically Roman. In this light, we must number among the novae scalpturae vitruviane, which were mainly incarnations of the well-established Corinthian order, also the multiple capital types derived from the Doric, and which may collectively be called ‘Doricising.’