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Estipite is a Spanish word derived from the Latin stipes, stipitis, meaning a log, stock, or trunk of a tree. The Williams Spanish and English Dictionary defines estipite as "a pedestal in the form of an inverted, truncated, rectangular pyramid."

Michelangelo was the first to use the estipite pilaster, wider at the top than the base on the walls of the vestibule to the Laurentian Library in Florence in 1526. In Spain, estipites were used by Jeronimo Balbas, Francisco Hurtado Izquierdo, Pedro Duque Cornejo, Pedro de Ribera, and others, principally on wooden retables, but sometimes on stone facades, in place of columns and pilasters. The estipites were broken into several sections which were smothered with ornament. Jeronimo Balbas introduced estipites into Mexico when he used them on the Altar of the Kings for the Cathedral of Mexico (1718-1737). Afterwards, Lorenzo Rodriguez transferred the interior estipite to the limestone facade of the Sagrario Metropolitano (1750-1760). The new mode, in an increasingly complicated form, was used on facades and retables throughout Mexico. By 1780, the estipite fashion had run its course and was replaced by the rock and shell forms of international rococo.

Lambrequin is derived from the French lamper, meaning a kind of crepe veil, and the Middle English -kin, Middle Dutch -kijn, and German -chen, meaning little. In Gothic sculpture a lambrequin was a row of scalloped or cut-out cloth ornaments used in strip form under a canopy or baldachin. In Mexico, lambrequins, also known as pinjantes, faldoncitos and guanteletes, are single or overlapping aprons or flaps on wood and stone pedestals.

Piccirilli Brothers In his biography Attilio Piccirilli, Life of an American Sculptor (New York, 1944, 291), Josef Vincent Lombardo identifies Masaniello (Thomas) and Orazio (Horatio) as the two brothers who "designed all the sculptured work for the San Diego Tower in California." Carleton M. Winslow, Sr., credits the modeling of the ornament on the California Building to Thomas and Horatio Piccirilli and the sculptured work on the frontispiece to Attilio and Furio Piccirilli (The Architecture and Gardens of the San Diego Exposition (San Francisco, 1916), 32, 43, 40). Of the two authorities, Winslow was closest to the scene. Copies of original drawings, in the possession of the City of San Diego, show Goodhue to be the designer of ornamental details. The figure sculpture is thinly-drawn which indicates Goodhue wanted the Piccirillis to flesh out his pale ideas.

Attilio, the most famous of the brothers, may have helped in the design, though he was busy at the time on the Firemen's Memorial Monument on Riverside Drive and the pediments of the Frick Reference Library in New York City. The figures have a family likeness to statues of Velazquez, Murillo and Zurburan on the facade of the San Diego Museum of Art. Lombardo states Furio was commissioned by the New Art Gallery in San Diego to design the statue of Murillo in 1925; therefore, it seems reasonable to assume he designed the other statues as well.