Carving Roman Acanthus Leaf

Have you carved the Greek leaf already and found yourself wanting more movement in it? Does the word Roman make you picture something grander than what you have cut so far? Then clear the bench, find a block six inches by eight, and we will do what Rome did with a Greek idea. I am talking to you, not to a room.

One warning before we start. I do not want to entertain you. This runs the way a shop ran three hundred years ago, where the master worked and the apprentice repeated what he saw, and that is the arrangement I am offering.

What makes an acanthus leaf Roman rather than Greek?

Elaboration, not a different plant. Rome ran half a thousand years and it never settled on one style. Most of its architectural detail came out of Greece, from Greek architects, and in the earliest work the two leaves look the same. They copied it.

What came afterwards is the part worth carving. Romans beautified the Greek leaf. They added movements, they added subdivisions, and above all they added pipes, so the structure underneath got more complicated to carry them. Same plant, still the bear claw. Just developed further.

A habit of that empire explains it. Whenever Rome took new ground it tried to learn something there and adapt it, and the acanthus is that habit in wood.

Our short side by side with photographs lives in Greek vs Roman acanthus. Here we carve one.

Why are the tips of a Roman leaf round?

Sharp points belong to the Greek leaf and to the later ones, not to this one. On a Roman acanthus the end of each leaf comes round. A little point stays in it, only not much, and that small difference changes how the whole panel catches light.

Carve a Roman tip sharp and it stops being Roman. Nobody will be able to say why it looks wrong, and it will look wrong.

Why is the Roman volute angled instead of straight?

An older Greek volute runs straight up and down, and this one leans. Look at a Greek volute square on and it reads vertical. Mine is angled, with the center sticking out, and honestly it is more work than it looks from the drawing.

One rule saves more panels than any tool. Never drive a chisel straight down into fresh wood as your first move. Pressing it in crushes the fibers on both sides, and yes, the cut works, and then you look tomorrow and those crushed fibers have come back up at you. Run a V tool or a small gouge along the line first, then take the wood out.

Know what you are cutting before you cut it. The shape is not a volute in the round. This is a relief volute, which means it only resolves when you stand square to it and never from the side, and it still has to read three dimensional from there. So I spend real time on those lines while the wood is untouched.

The raised centers are the fun part. They look like the end of an egg, so around the shop we just call them eggs.

What is the concave inside a Roman leaf?

A hollow scooped down the inside of each leaf, where a Greek leaf takes a V groove. Sometimes it is cut as a V, sometimes as a true concave, and on Roman work the concave is what you keep finding.

Let me be careful about how I say this. Whatever I could find in the history books and in old pictures, they all carry that concave inside the leaves. I have not seen every Roman leaf ever cut, so take it as what one carver has looked at rather than a law. Greek work uses it too, and Byzantine carvers kept it after Rome. Later European leaves drift away from it.

You do not have to include it. I want to stay honest to the history, so I do.

What is the difference between a chisel, a gouge and a veiner?

Sweep decides the name. None at all makes a chisel, any sweep up to number 9 makes a gouge, and past the half round the tool becomes a veiner. Nine is the true half round. Anything more curved than that, a U rather than an arc, has changed its name.

V tools sit around 12 to 16, ground at 60, 45 or 35 degrees. Then comes number 17, which everybody still calls a V tool although it is not really one, because instead of a sharp point at the bottom it carries a small gouge. It cuts a V with a rounded root, and it does most of my undercutting here at 6 mm and again at 3 mm.

Learn what the number means and you can walk up to a rack you have never seen and pick the right tool by eye.

How do you lay out a Roman acanthus on a ten by ten grid?

Split the block into ten equal parts across and ten equal parts down, then build the whole design on that grid. My name for it is the ten parts division. Almost mathematical. That is exactly what makes it easy.

Midlines on a six by eight land at four inches and four inches. Rule ten parts along each edge, number your lines so you can find a space again when you are three hours into the drawing, and set a border you will not cross. Roughly 10 mm along the top edge, call it three eighths of an inch, and about an eighth of an inch at the sides.

Subdivide each of those spaces by ten again and count six of them. Six out of ten is where I build from, and it is a fair representation of the golden rule without any arithmetic. Some days I start with the eyes, other days with the flow line. On this panel the eyes came first, because how many there are decides everything above them.

Now the part nobody tells beginners. Be accurate, but not to the extreme, not the way a machine would be. It is not a machine doing this carving, it is a human being, and you have to leave some imperfection in it or the thing comes out looking plasticky. Please make sure it still looks human-like.

Before any tool touches it I shade the paper with charcoal, black for the low ground and white for the high, which shows me at a glance which leaf runs under which. Nobody is going to ask you to do it. This one is for me.

Why does the Roman leaf carry so many more pipes?

Pipes and eyes were brought into the acanthus in the Roman era, and once they arrived carvers could hardly stop. Red pen marks mine and then I count them, and on this panel there are lots. You just cannot go wrong with pipes on an acanthus.

Underneath, the arithmetic stays simple. Main divisions in three, then every small section subdivided in threes again. More pipes means more eyes, and more eyes means more places for a shadow to sit down.

Rome also put returns on the eyes, so a shape appears to come from inside out. Nobody carved returns for centuries afterwards, and then the Renaissance dug them back up, and by the Rococo they were everywhere.

Two habits make a pipe read. Round it, because a pipe is supposed to look round, and then cheat one side of it with a small gouge so a shadow line falls where the eye expects one. They also want to sit a touch proud of the middle. Not really higher. They only need to appear that way.

Does a Roman acanthus have to be symmetrical?

This one does. The reason is where it lives. Symmetrical leaves are what you meet on capitals, and they are what works on furniture. Greek, Roman, Byzantine and the European carvers after them all used the symmetrical design in one shape or another.

Watch both sides at once while you work. When you cut the left, keep looking at the right, because a leaf that drifts a sixteenth over eight inches is a leaf everybody notices and nobody can name. Check and recheck. Furniture makers are cutting this same form onto aprons and sides. Right now.

How big is the block and how deep does the carving go?

Six inches by eight, one inch and seven eighths thick, which is 47.5 mm. Set the background in at about a quarter inch to begin with, using a marking gauge so all four sides agree.

Depth arrives in stages after that. Sections come down roughly 10 mm, three eighths of an inch, and where I want more shadow later I take them to 13 mm, half an inch. By the time the undercutting is finished the deepest work sits about half an inch below the top face.

None of that gets measured while I carve. Eyeballed, and eyeballing is close enough, because most of the material you are staring at early on is going to be gone anyway.

Which gouges does this panel actually need?

More than a purist would tell you, and any of them can be swapped for what you own. Those two statements sit together and both are true, so let me untangle them.

People love the idea that a carver gets by on a minimum kit. That idea gets no support from me. A true master can work with one gouge, and I have done it, and it limits you every single hour. Grinling Gibbons kept collecting tools his whole life and you can watch his designs grow as the collection grew. Some carvers say they use ten or twelve tools regularly. Not my case.

Now the other half. Your tools do not need to match mine. Any V tool will work, 60 degrees or 45, whatever is in your rack. A back bend is lovely and a straight number 5 reaches most of the same places. Small tools do not have to be my small tools. Ashley Iles is what I love and it is a preference, nothing more, and one of my favorite gouges is unbranded because my teacher handed it to me.

The one thing that is not negotiable is sharpness. Really, really sharp. That is the whole secret behind deep excavation, and my teacher put it better than I can. There is no such thing as bad wood, only dull tools.

Species matters less than people believe. Walnut and cherry hold a detail beautifully, basswood holds it fine too, and on basswood the micro work goes fast and breaks fast, so a small pipe wants a light hand. The problem is almost never the wood.

How much do you undercut a Roman acanthus leaf?

To the point where the edges are nearly paper thin, and never before the shape above them is finished. I am extreme about this. Extreme undercutting creates the beauty, and I understand perfectly why some carvers refuse it, because the piece becomes fragile and easy to break. You can break anything.

Timing has a physical reason, not a stylistic one. Knock the point of a leaf that has not been undercut and nothing happens. Do the same after an extreme undercut and it snaps, every time. So the hollowing waits until every shape above it is finished and nothing is left to take.

Two places stay solid. The central part is not undercut, ever, and anywhere a section has to carry the design keeps its meat. Everywhere else the number 17 goes underneath and the leaf begins to hang in air, one leaf passing under another, because the whole idea of the acanthus is an interweaving.

All of it is light and shadow in the end. Carving is about the smallest details, and the smallest details only exist because a shadow lands on them. Halfway through a session I rotate the vice and look at the panel under a different light, and half the time a ridge appears that I could not see from where I was sitting.

Two safety habits go with deep work, and I have earned both. Never put a hand in the path of a tool. Never hold a tool in the air either, because a hand with no support is a hand that slips.

Here is something I believe and cannot prove. Look at historical work and the undercutting is often shallow, and people read that as a stylistic choice. I think it was money. Not undercutting is a great deal quicker, and everybody wants to get paid.

Ancient carvers did this without a V tool at all. That tool came much later, so a Roman leaf was cut with gouges and straight chisels, which tells you something about how much a sharp gouge can do.

Why is there no sandpaper and no finish?

You leave the chisel marks, because those marks are what makes a carving beautiful. Old work is not smooth. When a carving does come out perfectly smooth, somebody sanded it completely, and what got sanded away was the point of the exercise, the feel of a hand having been there.

I will be honest, since you are going to watch it happen. Near the end of this panel one rough patch annoyed me and I cheated with 80 grit, just a little, and then I went back with a gouge and cut it out again because it did not look right.

If a fragile point does let go, thin glue can save it. Dilute yellow carpenter's glue with plenty of water, more water than glue, and let it soak into the weak part before you carve any further.

Nothing goes on the finished wood either. No oil and no wax. Over the years your hands darken it through oxidation into a patina, which is why I put on painter's gloves once a panel is close to done.

The last stage is the one that makes people ask who carved it. Every sharp edge takes a tiny knife bevel, no more than a thirty second of an inch, one millimeter. A small step sits near the flipped end, a Roman ogee shape about a sixteenth deep, and that one detail makes the whole world of difference. Three round beads finish the volutes. Beads are probably the oldest architectural detail there is.

Which acanthus should you carve first?

Corinthian, then Greek, then this one. Difficulty sets that order rather than tradition, and you feel it the moment you begin the second one. The Corinthian leaf runs on straight divisions, the Greek leaf adds curls and the groove down the inside, and Rome keeps all of it and piles on pipes, subdivisions, returns and an angled volute.

Carve them out of order and you will still finish a panel. Take them in order and each one hands you exactly what the next assumes you already own. Afterwards the leaves get more elaborate again, and by then you will be hungry for that.

How is this Roman acanthus course put together?

Seventeen lessons broken into 76 short videos, filmed over the shoulder, from a bare grid to a finished panel. Drawings come with it to download, and printing two is the smart move, one to lay beside the bench and one to glue on the block and carve straight through.

You will watch me cut myself off camera and admit it, break a piece and glue it, get too close to an edge because I got excited, and stop halfway through the course because life happened, I moved house and became a grandfather. Then the work picks up again.

When I started this school I promised to teach the way I really do it, and I teach the same way in person at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. Ask me anything as you go. I read the comments and I answer them.

It follows the Greek acanthus, and the Byzantine leaf waits on the other side. If your edges are letting you down before any of this, spend a week on Carving Tool Sharpening and come back.

My father used to say that repetition is the mother of knowledge, knowledge is the mother of wisdom, and wisdom is the mother of understanding. Rome spent five centuries repeating a leaf it borrowed. You get a winter.

So. Is there a piece of six by eight in your shop tonight? Would you rather rule a grid on it than watch something you will not remember tomorrow? Then let us carve one together. Shall we carve?