A lot of historical masonry buildings are characterized by the presence of slender bearing structures (columns or walls) which exhibit in the main flexural rather than shear behaviour when subjected to a seismic excitation. The equilibrium limit state of such resisting elements is investigated here by the following phases of study: choice of a suitable a-e constitutive law able to represent experimental results related to different masonry kinds; consequent modelling of the moment-curvature laws and definition of the equilibrium domain of a column section, assuming the normal compressive load to be constant and the bending moment to be monotonically increasing; limit analysis of the deflected column by modelling the earthquake actions by equivalent horizontal static forces and by including the largedeflection effects; comparison between the results of the previous analyses and the corresponding results derived assuming the horizontal forces to be cyclically acting. Each analysis step is carried out in dimensionless terms so that the results presented in this paper and the solution procedures proposed can be referred to a large class of masonry structures. 1 Analysis of section subjected to static load 1.1 Constitutive law Most studies concerning the flexural behaviour of masonry columns subjected to eccentric compressive forces are based on the assumption that the material has no tensile strength and is affected by a linear infinitely elastic a e law in compression. The first assumption is supported by experimental results which reveal tensile strength values negligible with respect to the strength in compression. The second assumption proves to be acceptable when the maximum stress which a generic column section reaches is fairly small, i.e. when Transactions on the Built Environment vol 26, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3509 398 Structural Studies, Repairs and Maintenance of Historical Buildings column collapse occurs because of instability, before the material's bearing capacity resources are fully involved. This circumstance is typical of very slender columns subjected to a concentrated compressive load acting eccentrically at the top, and in this case the critical load can be evaluated analytically (Frish-Fay [1]). If the first-order bending moment is produced by horizontal actions and/or the column slenderness is not very high, the material cannot be characterized adequately only by means of the tangent modulus of elasticity at the origin of the a 8 law, and, consequently, a more realistic constitutive model of the behaviour in compression has to be assumed. In this study the analytical relationship proposed by Shah et al. (1966) (see Ref [2]) to model the concrete behaviour is utilized with suitable specializations. The original form of this law is expressed by