What is an Acanthus?
The acanthus is a plant that has inspired artists and architects for millennia. It stands for quality, longevity, and creativity. Below we provide a basic dictionary definition, an artistic and botanical perspective, an architectural perspective, and finally why we chose the name to represent our company. Along the way, you will find several pictures and our photo galleries of this beautiful plant, both as ornamentation and in its natural state.
Natural Beauty Inspires Art
The Acanthus plant (Acanthaceæ), also known by the common name of "Bear's Breech," is considered to be one of the finest foliage plants for the shrub border. It is native to the Mediterranean and bears flowers that can be white, lilac-pink, or purple tinged. However, it is the leaves, not the flowers, which historically attracted the most attention, creating mounds of long, dark green, arching foliage.
There are two varieties of acanthuses, one wild and thorny (Acanthus spinosus), and one with soft branches without spines (Acanthus mollis).
The acanthus appears for the first time in the arts in ancient Greece, where it was chosen for decorative purposes owing to the beauty of its leaves and its proliferation across the Greek islands. Initially, the Greek artists rendered the plant faithfully. Many of the examples of Acanthus leaves carved in the 4th and 5th centuries B.C.E. are extremely lifelike, whether it is of the soft or the spiky variety, showing the character, texture, and model of the leaf.
Later, the representations grew more stylized and fanciful, and can be found today in ornamental friezes, Crewel embroidery patterns, wallpaper patterns, and most notably in architectural designs. The Acanthus leaf covers space well, it can curl, coil, or be doubled.
In Victorian England its symbolic meaning in the language of flowers was "art" or "artistic". It has changed and been adapted a little by each culture using it.
Please visit our Artistic Photo Gallery.
Building on Beauty
It was around the 4th Century B.C.E. that the acanthus became tightly integrated with architecture, and specifically, the Corinthian order. Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic, are the three orders, or organizational systems, of classical Greek architecture.
The Corinthian order was said to have been invented by the poet and architect Callimachus (c. 305 - c. 240 BC), who was inspired by the sight of a basket that had been left on the grave of a young girl. A few of her effects were in it, and a square tile was placed over the basket, to protect them from the weather.
An acanthus plant had grown through the woven basket, mixing its spiny, deeply cut leaves with the weave of the basket. Seeing this led him to adapt the Doric and Ionic columns by making the columns slimmer, more elegant, and square cornered, with acanthus leaves curling up to touch the capital (representing the tile) at the top.
The oldest known example of a Corinthian column is in the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae in Arcadia (circa 450 - 420 B.C.E.); however it was not until the time of the Romans that the Corinthian order really became popular.
Today, lots of important buildings, including Buckingham palace and the United States Capitol building, along with many other not-quite-so-important ones, all use these columns. They can be found everywhere, from office buildings to museums, but only if you take time to look for them.
Please visit our Architectural Photo Gallery.
Why We Chose the Name
We chose the name Acanthus Technology and used an acanthus leaf our logo to represent both the longevity and classic nature of the Corinthian order, as well as the creativity and attention to detail commonly found in art featuring the acanthus. Also, being based in Sacramento and Reno, it is very easy to find beautiful examples of the acanthus leaves in buildings ranging from the California State Capitol building to the casinos in Reno.
The acanthus ties us to the past and the present, and it will continue to be around long into the future—just as we plan to be.
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