Columns and capitals can feel like an overanalyzed area of architectural study, but when you take into account the magnitude of what they reveal about an architectural style, such focus is justified. At their inception in ancient Greece, columns served both the functional purpose of bearing entablature load, as well as a means of stylistic expression. Quickly, capitals became a way of distinguishing buildings from one another in a time marked by uniform temple construction. The orders of Greek columns and the capitals used to express them is the most significant takeaway from the study of Greek capitals as they reflect an architectural origin point or austerity, rigid convention, and constructional purity–a post-and-lintel construction emblematic of their utilitarian approach. Following the revelations of Greek architecture, Roman’s paid great respect to the three order system of the Greeks, treating it as a origin point, but also sought to expand upon it. With the addition of two original italic orders, Roman capitals reflected their self-important sensibility and a constant desire to further technology. That expansion of the capital designs is emblematic of expanding upon Greek building principles–take for example their more liberal application of capitals with the introduction of superposed orders–and the introduction of new technology, most notably the invention of arcuation compared to Greek trebeation. Byzantine capitals marked the moving away from styles of antiquity in their abandoning of orders and embracing of variable capital designs. Byzantine capitals reflected an architecture which was prepared to move away from past precedent and embrace various means of ornamentation, marking the beginning of a centuries long tradition of churches with ever-increasing ornamentation and technology as Architecture. The Romanesque period marks a swing in the opposite direction, where antiquity is once again the precedent as Charlemagne, similar to the Russian czar’s and many other aspiring ruling classes, romanticized Rome as the height of human civilization and power and wanted to harken back to Roman architecture as a means of expressing that. The severe solidity of Romanesque columns, and the foreboding massiveness of clustered columns are expressed in the capitals which often reference that of the romans in acanthus leaves various styles of volutes.