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The engraving above shows the origin of the Corinthian capital. The Athenian sculptor Callimachus is said to have come across a woven straw basket containing the few possessions of a poor girl from Corinth who had died tragically. The basket had been covered with a slab or roof tile, and acanthus leaves had grown up around it, and curled beneath the overhang. Moved by the pathos and simple charm of the composition, Callimachus sketched it and later carved it in stone with such skill that it became part of the classical language of architecture - one of the Five Orders that have fashioned the aesthetic of building from the Renaissance to the present day. (From John Evelyn's translation of Roland Fréart's A Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern, published in England in 1664; second edition 1707).
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