The capital — Latin for "little head" — is the column's crowning member and, from Corinthian acanthus to the historiated capitals of Vézelay and Autun, the stone carver's principal architectural canvas.
The uppermost member of a column or pilaster, mediating structurally and visually between the vertical shaft and the horizontal entablature it supports; its form is the primary marker distinguishing the classical orders and, in medieval architecture, the principal field for figural and foliate stone carving.
Etymology
From Latin capitellum, diminutive of caput ("head") — literally "little head" — reflecting the capital's position atop the column "body." The Latin term passed into Italian capitello, French chapiteau, and English "capital," all preserving the anatomical metaphor of column-as-body.
Sculptor Notes
The five classical orders — Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite — are distinguished above all by capital design, and of these the Corinthian is the order of greatest consequence for the stone carver, since its capital is not a profile to be turned but a sculpted object built from overlapping registers of acanthus foliage. Vitruvius transmits the origin legend: the sculptor Callimachus, seeing an acanthus plant grown up through a votive basket left on a young girl's grave and pressed into spirals by a covering tile, designed the first Corinthian capital from the sight. Whether or not the story is literally true, it correctly identifies the Corinthian capital's essential logic — a "basket" (kalathos) form wrapped in two tiers of carved leaves, from which caulicles rise to support corner volutes under the abacus — and it explains why the type is bound up from its origin with commemorative and funerary carving. The Composite order, a Roman invention combining Corinthian acanthus with Ionic volutes, extends this same sculptural vocabulary.
Romanesque builders inherited the Corinthian capital's basic armature but redirected its sculptural field toward narrative: the historiated capital, carved with figures rather than (or in addition to) foliage, became a principal vehicle of monastic image-making in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The cloister and nave capitals at Vézelay, the capitals of Autun by Gislebertus (including the celebrated Flight into Egypt and Suicide of Judas), and the tympanum-adjacent capitals at Moissac represent this tradition at its height — each capital functioning as a small independent relief composition wrapped around a structural block, legible from below and from an angle rather than frontally.
As Gothic architecture spread outward from the Île-de-France in the mid-twelfth century, the historiated capital was largely displaced by the foliate capital — the crocket capital on the Continent, the stiff-leaf capital in England — reflecting a broader Gothic preference for abstracted, rhythmic vegetal carving over narrative capital sculpture. For the working stone mason, the capital remains one of the few places in a classical or Gothic building where sculptural invention is structurally sanctioned: it must still perform its architectonic role while carrying whatever foliate or figural program the commission requires.