To these the Romans added, in practice if not in name, the Tuscan, which they made simpler than Doric, and the Composite, which was more ornamental than the Corinthian.

This treatment continued after the conscious and "correct" use of the orders, initially following exclusively Roman models, returned in the Italian Renaissance.

It has a load-bearing function, which concentrates the weight of the entablature on the supportive column, but it primarily serves an aesthetic purpose.

It is the simplest of the orders, characterized by short, organized, heavy columns with plain, round capitals (tops) and no base.

It is distinguished by slender, fluted pillars with a large base and two opposed volutes (also called "scrolls") in the echinus of the capital.

The Roman writer Vitruvius credited the invention of the Corinthian order to Callimachus, a Greek sculptor of the 5th century BC.

The oldest known building built according to this order is the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, constructed from 335 to 334 BC.

The Renaissance period saw renewed interest in the literary sources of the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, and the fertile development of a new architecture based on classical principles.

The treatise De architectura by Roman theoretician, architect and engineer Vitruvius, is the only architectural writing that survived from Antiquity.

To describe the four species of columns (he only mentions: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian) he uses, in fact, various words such as: genus (gender), mos (habit, fashion, manner), opera (work).

The term order, as well as the idea of redefining the canon started circulating in Rome, at the beginning of the 16th century, probably during the studies of Vitruvius' text conducted and shared by Peruzzi, Raphael, and Sangallo.

Commentary on the appropriateness of the orders for temples devoted to particular deities (Vitruvius I.2.5) were elaborated by Renaissance theorists, with Doric characterized as bold and manly, Ionic as matronly, and Corinthian as maidenly.

[5] Following the examples of Vitruvius and the five books of the Regole generali di architettura sopra le cinque maniere de gli edifici by Sebastiano Serlio published from 1537 onwards, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola produced an architecture rule book that was not only more practical than the previous two treatises, but also was systematically and consistently adopting, for the first time, the term 'order' to define each of the five different species of columns inherited from antiquity.

A first publication of the various plates, as separate sheets, appeared in Rome in 1562, with the title: Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura ("Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture").

[7] The book consisted simply of an introduction followed by 32 annotated plates, highlighting the proportional system with all the minute details of the Five Architectural Orders.

The result is an arithmetical model, and with its help each order, harmoniously proportioned, can easily be adapted to any given height, of a façade or an interior.

The Bauhaus promoted pure functionalism, stripped of superfluous ornament, and that has become one of the defining characteristics of modern architecture.

[citation needed] The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles contains pilasters with bronze capitals in the "French order".

Designed by Charles Le Brun, the capitals display the national emblems of the Kingdom of France: the royal sun between two Gallic roosters above a fleur-de-lis.

[11] Robert Adam's brother James was in Rome in 1762, drawing antiquities under the direction of Clérisseau; he invented a "British order" and published an engraving of it.

Its capital the heraldic lion and unicorn take the place of the Composite's volutes, a Byzantine or Romanesque conception, but expressed in terms of neoclassical realism.

[16] His design for the new city's central palace, Viceroy's House, now the Presidential residence Rashtrapati Bhavan, was a thorough integration of elements of Indian architecture into a building of classical forms and proportions,[17] and made use of the order throughout.

[18] In the United States Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, designed a series of botanical American orders.

Most famous is the Corinthian order substituting ears of corn and their husks for the acanthus leaves, which was executed by Giuseppe Franzoni and used in the small domed vestibule of the Senate.

[19] With peace restored, Latrobe designed an American order that substituted tobacco leaves for the acanthus, of which he sent a sketch to Thomas Jefferson in a letter, 5 November 1816.

In 1809 Latrobe invented a second American order, employing magnolia flowers constrained within the profile of classical mouldings, as his drawing demonstrates.