Acanthus Lesson 1: A Proper Leaf, Part One (The Roots!)

Prelude:

This is the first lesson of several that I will post here on the origin, usage, and construction of acanthus leaf ornament in Western classical decoration. Ever since the classical Greeks, acanthus leaves, and their variant forms, have been used to enhance everything from temples to pickle forks. The form of the leaf has become so transformed by usage that most do not recognize the origin of its plant based shape, even if they are familiar with the plant, seen often in temperate climates as a garden specimen.

The leaf of the Acanthus Mollis plant, regularly used as a model for plant based ornament

Part One: Roots

When Louis Sullivan created his book on ornament*, he began with the organic, as conveyed by the shapes of leaves. He listed 14 basic shapes, somewhat less than the myriad collection in this illustration from Wikipedia, which pretty much covers the gamut of just about anything you could find on the planet, at least above the oceans. I also love being able to describe a leaf as a 'doubly serrated dichotomous flabellate"!

Leaf shaped ornaments have been covering man made objects for thousands of years, found on items from around the globe, and the shapes seen in the chart above are doubtlessly an early source of many decorative patterns, translated into other materials by busy hands. The illustration below shows a variety of capitals from Egypt, with ornaments derived from the leaves and blooms of palms, lotus, and papyrus plants. 

Plate 45 from Denon, Dominique Vivant - Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte, pendant les campagnes du général Bonaparte (1802)

The Greek sculptor Callimachus is apocryphally credited with inventing the Corinthian capital by Roman writer Vitruvius, as illustrated by this page of Claude Perrault's book on the Five Orders from 1683. According to Vitruvius, the sculptor came across a votive basket left at the tomb of a young girl, with a stone slab on top to protect the offerings inside. An acanthus plant had begun to grow under the basket, and thus became the basket form covered in leaves that we recognize today as the Corinthian order.

Perrault's illustration of the origin of the Corinthian capital, 1683

The earliest known example of a Corinthian capital is found at the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae (Greece), dated around 450 BC (incidentally , more than 100 years before Callimachus was even born), but it is thought to be a one-off, somewhat of an oddity in a temple that is mostly in the Doric and Ionic orders. A beautifully preserved early example was found in the tholos at Epidaurus, dated to the 4th century BC also.

Corinthian capital found at Epidaurus, Greece, 4th c. BC

As you can see above, the leaf shape used to ring the capital is a fully developed acanthus leaf, clearly derived from the plant itself, although regularized and codified in a way to make it something between a natural form and a geometric shape. That is where we will pick up in the next installment.

*Sullivan, Louis, A System of of Architectural Ornament According with a Philosophy of Man's Powers, New York 1924. Published posthumously by Frank Lloyd Wright.