Corinthian (kuh-rin-thee-uhn)
(1) Of,
pertaining to, or characteristic of Corinth, the ancient Greek city-state.
(2) One of the five styles of classical architecture in
Ancient Greece (the others being Doric, Composite, Tuscan & Ionic).
(3) Something
ornate and elaborate
(4) In
literacy criticism, an ornate style.
(5) Something
luxurious or licentious.
(6) A
native or inhabitant of Corinth.
(7) Someone
given to living luxuriously; dissolute.
(8) An amateur sportsman (archaic).
(9) A
phony descriptor of a type of leather used by Chrysler Corporation in the US
during the 1970s.
1350–1400:
From the Middle English Corinthi(es) (the men of Corinth) from the Latin Corinthiī from the Greek Korínthioi. The sense “of or pertaining to Corinth"
the ancient Greek city-state is from the 1590s, gradually replacing the mid-fifteenth
adjective Corynthoise. The sense as a classification in what was becoming
a formalised architectural order is from the 1650s. The noun meaning literally "inhabitant
of Corinth" dates from the 1520s; Corinthies
was attested from the late fourteenth century.
During
Antiquity, other Greek cities regarded the inhabitants of Corinth as a bit
gauche, noting their preference for ornate, almost ostentatious architecture
and their notorious fondness for luxury and licentiousness. There was intellectual snobbery among the
Athenians too, the Corinthians thought too interested in commerce and profit
and not sufficiently devoted to thought and learning. Corinthian the noun and adjective thus, in
various slang or colloquial senses in English, came to be associated with extravagance,
sin and conspicuous consumption, especially in the decades after the 1820s.
In
scripture, the implications of that association were later reflected in the New
Testament, most memorably in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 1). The second letter is thought to have been
written circa 56 AD, shortly after he penned the first and was addressed to the
Christian community in city of Corinth, a major trading centre which, although
by then noted for its rich artistic and philosophic traditions, was a place
also of vice and depravity. It was this
last aspect that compelled Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church and in
it he sharply rebuked them for permitting immoral practices in the community. In response, the Corinthians had cracked-down
on some of the worst excesses and Paul wrote his second letter to congratulate
them on their reforms and even commended forgiving sinners and welcoming them
back to the flock. Harsh though his
words could be, Paul’s preference is always restoration, not punishment. The letter then discusses some sometimes
neglected characteristics of the Christian church such as generosity to others
and devotes some time to defending himself against attacks on his ministry,
reminding the Corinthians both of his own poverty and the harsh reality of what
it meant to be a minister of Christ in the Roman empire: beatings,
imprisonment, hunger, and the constant threat of death.
The triangle tattoo Lindsay Lohan had inked in 2013 was inspired by 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. In the King James Version (KJV; 1611) it read:
4 Charity
suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself,
is not puffed up,
5 Doth
not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked,
thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Charity
never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there
be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
Most quoted now are modern translations which are more accessible such as the International Bible Society's (now Biblica) New International Version (NIV; 1978):
4 Love
is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It
does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it
keeps no record of wrongs.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
In Paul’s prescriptive way, verses 4-7 details the workings of love in three steps. There are firstly the positive aspects of love being patient and kind but then elaborated are the eight negatives love must never be: not jealous, boastful, arrogant, rude, irritable or resentful, nor does it insist upon its own way or glat at wrong. Finally, Paul notes the five positive ways in which love reacts, joining in rejoicing at truth, supports, believes, hopes and endures all things. Verse 8 returns to the theme of superiority of love but explicates the contrast between love and spiritual gifts as the contrast between permanence and transience; spiritual gifts which are incomplete will pass when wholeness comes whereas love will not. The contrast is thus between the imperfect and the perfect.
The Corinthian style of
architecture was one of the five classical orders created in Ancient Greece. Similar in many ways to the Ionic, the points
of difference were (1) the unusually slender proportions, (2) the deep capital with its round bell, decorated with acanthus leaves and a square abacus with concave
sides. The Corinthian capital typically has
two distinct rows of acanthus leaves above which appear eight fluted sheaths,
from each of which spring two scrolls (helices), one of which curls beneath a
corner of the abacus as half of a volute while the other curls beneath the centre
of the abacus. The marble pillars used
on the east and west pediments of the United States Supreme Court building,
constructed between 1932-1935, are a fine example of the Corinthian style.
Much less known than the more
frequently photographed West Pediment, the East Pediment of the Supreme Court Building
is at the rear of the structure and is much admired by architects because of
the elegance of the thirteen symmetrically balanced allegorical figures in the sculptural
group designed by Hermon A MacNeil (1866–1947).
The ornate details in the two rows of acanthus leaves are the defining
characteristic of the Corinthian pillar.
Corinthian
leather was a term coined by the Bozell advertising agency in 1974 to describe
the tufted upholstery available as an alternative to the standard velour in the
Imperial LeBaron. Although merely a term
of marketing, the Imperials trimmed with the same leather produced by the Radel
Leather Manufacturing Company of New Jersey the corporation used in
its other up-market offerings, the name successfully conveyed the association
of something rich in quality, rare, and luxurious. Religiosity in the US somewhat more entrenched
than elsewhere in the West, it’s likely many were sufficiently well-acquainted with
the New Testament to understand the reference but for those less pious, Corinthian
was one of those words which somehow carried the desired connotations, even
among those with no idea of its associations.
Perhaps it was because it sounded European that some thought the leather
came from Spain or Italy. Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974)
noted that linguistic phenomenon when he discussed the circumstances in which
President Eisenhower (1890-1969; US president 1953-1961) had to dismiss his Chief of Staff, Sherman
Adams (1899-1986), who had accepted as a gift, inter alia, a vicuña coat. Nixon observed that while there was no doubt
most Americans had no idea what vicuña was, just the perceived mystique of the word
was enough to convince them it was something expensive and therefore corrupting.
The 1974
Imperial marketing campaign was restricted to print advertising and whether the
attraction of Corinthian leather generated may sales isn’t known but the the word seems barely to have been noticed amid the cacophony of exaggeration
and puffery which had long sustained modern capitalism.
That changed the next year when Chrysler introduced the Cordoba, a
down-sized model for consumers suddenly interested in fuel economy in the post
oil-crisis world. The manufacturers knew
those who wanted smaller cars didn’t necessarily want them to be any less luxurious
and that became the theme for the promotional campaign, switched this time to television
and fronted by a celebrity spokesperson, the actor Ricardo Montalbán
(1920-2009). Born in Mexico of Spanish
descent, Montalbán looked distinguished and spoke in cultivated English with
just enough of a Spanish accent to make plausible the link of Corinthian leather
to the cattle on the plains of Spain.
In the
advertising, he spoke of “the thickly-cushioned luxury of seats, available even
in fine Corinthian leather” and although sometimes he’d call it "soft"
instead, all people seemed to remember was the leather was Corinthian. So successful was the campaign that Chrysler
decided to make the Corinthian label exclusive to the Cordoba and when Montalbán
was later assigned to advertise other Chryslers, in the same mellifluous
tone, he commended the “rich leather".
Later when interviewed on late night television, Montalbán cheerfully
admitted that the term meant nothing but that wasn't quite true: it meant
whatever people who heard it wanted it to mean and that made it a perfect word
for advertising.
The Rolls-Royce Camargue
Although it’s never been confirmed by the factory, one source claims that a consequence of Chrysler in 1974 conjuring up “fine Corinthian leather” was that Rolls-Royce was force to abandon the idea of calling their new model the Corinthian, adopting instead Camargue, (a region on the Mediterranean coast in the south of France). For Rolls-Royce, Camargue was probably a better choice, tying in with their existing Corniche two-door saloon and convertible (the factory had not yet abandoned the archaic designations fixed (FHC) and drophead coupé (DHC)). The French word corniche has certain technical meanings in geology and architecture but Roll-Royce used it in the sense of “a coastal road, especially one cut into the face of a cliff”, specifically using the imagery of the Grande Corniche on the French Riviera, just north of the principality of Monaco. The factory had first used the Corniche name in 1939 for a prototype light-weight, high-performance car which could match the pace of the big straight-eight Mercedes-Benz able to explore Germany’s newly built autobahns at sustained high speeds never before possible. The car was damaged during testing in France and was abandoned there after the outbreak of hostilities, only to be destroyed in a bombing raid although whether the Luftwaffe or the Royal Air Force (RAF) was responsible isn’t known.
1968 Bentley T1 Coupe Speciale by Pininfarina (chassis CBH4033). It wasn’t as if Rolls-Royce weren’t aware of how Italians thought a Rolls-Royce or Bentley coupé should look. The Speciale should have been a warning heeded although, to be fair, it probably is better than the Camargue.
So whether as some minor ripple of chaos theory or the factory always intended to continue allusions to continental geography, in 1975 the Camargue was released with few technical innovations of interest other than the automatic split-level climate control system which was an industry first and said alone to cost about as much to produce as a middle-class buyer might spend on a whole vehicle. Other footnotes included it being the first Rolls-Royce designed and produced (except of some shared components) using metric measurements and the first with the famous grill inclined at a rakish 7o rather than the perfectly vertical aspect always before used (although the now noticeably lower grill was built still with the same trick of entasis used for thousands of years to make slightly curved Corinthian pillars appear perfectly perpendicular). What attracted the most comment however was it being the world’s most expensive production car. At that end of the market, the 30%-odd cost premium against the mechanically similar Corniche wasn’t going to produce the same effects in the elasticity of demand as would be noted lower in automotive pecking order and indeed, the Veblen effect can operate to make the more expensive product more desirable.
Lancia Florida II (1957, left), Fiat 130 Coupé (1971, centre) & Rolls-Royce Camargue (1975, right). The origin of the shape is most discernible in Pininfarina’s Lancia Florida, a different approach to the big coupé than would be taken in the 1950s by the Americans. The 130 coupé was one of those aesthetic triumphs which proved a commercial failure while the Camargue is thought a failure on all grounds although, for those who prize some degree of exclusivity, it remains a genuine rarity.
Unfortunately, the Camargue, while it did what it did no worse than a Corniche saloon, while doing it, it looked ungainly. Styled by the revered Italian studio Pinninfarina, the look was derided as dated, derivative and clumsy and it’s this which has usually been thought to account for production barely topping 500 over the decade-odd it remained available. In the years since, some tried to improve things and a number have been made into convertibles, an expensive exercise which actually made it worse, the roof-line one of the few pleasing aspects. One buyer though was sufficiently impressed to commission a one-off Bentley version, one of the few instances of a model which genuinely can be claimed to be unique. The same designer at Carrozzeria Pininfarina who signed off on the Camargue was also responsible for the earlier Fiat 130 coupé, something in the same vein but on a smaller scale and the Fiat is a rectilineal masterpiece.
Platform by Mercedes-Benz, coachwork by Pininfarina. 1956 300 SC (left), 1963 230 SL (centre) & 1969 300 SEL 6.3 (right).
Whether the knife-edged severity of the 130 coupé could successfully have been up-scaled to the dimensions Rolls-Royce required is debatable but Pininfarina had lying around a styling exercise done years earlier, based on a Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3 and it was this which seems to have inspired the Camargue. The Italian studio’s interest in Mercedes-Benz had in preceding decades produced some admired designs although the occasional plans for limited production runs were never realized. In 1955, a coupé based on the 300b saloon had been shown, followed a year later by a 300 SC which most thought better executed, and certainly more contemporary, than the Germans' own effort. The best though was probably the 1963 230 SL which lost both the distinctive pagoda roof and some of leanness for which the delicate lines are most remembered but it was thought a successful interpretation. Mercedes-Benz should of course have produced a two-door 300 SE 6.3 because the W111/W112 body was their finest achievement but the planet lost nothing by Pininfarina's take on the idea being rightly ignored. In retrospect Rolls-Royce probably wished they too had "failed to proceed" and when the time came to do another big coupé, the job was done in-house, the Bentley Continental (1991-2003) an outstanding design and neither Rolls-Royce nor Bentley have since matched the timeless lines.
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