User Contributed Dictionary
Noun
Extensive Definition
A Dentil (from Lat. dens, a tooth) is, in
architecture, a
small tooth-shaped block used as a repeating ornament in the
bedmould of a cornice.
Vitruvius (iv. 2)
states that the dentil represents the end of a rafter (asser); and since it
occurs in its most pronounced form in the Ionic temples of Asia Minor,
the Lycian
tombs and the porticoes and tombs of Persia,
where it represents distinctly the reproduction in stone of timber
construction, there is but little doubt as to its origin. The
earliest example is that found on the tomb of Darius ,c. 500 B.C.,
cut in the rock in which the portico of his palace is reproduced.
Its first employment in Athens is in the
cornice of the caryatid
portico or tribune of the Erechtheum (480
B.C.). When subsequently introduced into the bed-mould of the
cornice of the
Choragic Monument of Lysicrates it is much smaller in its
dimensions. In the later temples of Ionia, as in the temple of
Priene, the
larger scale of the dentil is still retained.
As a general rule the projection of the dentil is
equal to its width, and the intervals between to half the width. In
some cases the projecting band has never had the sinkings cut into
it to divide up the dentils, as in the Pantheon
at Rome, and it is then called a dentil-band. The dentil was the
chief decorative feature employed in the bedmould by the Romans and
the Italian Revivalists. In the porch of the Studion cathedral
at Constantinople,
the dentil and the interval between are equal in width, and the
interval is splayed back from top to bottom; this is the form it
takes in what is known as the Venetian dentil, which was copied
from the Byzantine dentil in Santa
Sophia, Constantinople. There, however, it no longer formed
part of a bed-mould: its use at Santa Sophia was to decorate the
projecting moulding enclosing the encrusted marbles, and the
dentils were cut alternately on both sides of the moulding. The
Venetian dentil was also introduced as a label round arches and as
a string course.