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The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian. (There are two lesser orders, the stocky Tuscan order and the rich variant of Corinthian, the Composite order , added by 16th century Italian architectural theory and practice.)The Ionic order originated in the mid-6th century B.C. in Ionia, the southwestern coastland and islands of Asia Minor settled by Ionian Greeks, where an Ionian dialect was spoken. The Ionic order was being practiced in mainland Greece in the 5th century. The first of the great Ionic temples, though it stood for only a decade before an earthquake levelled it, was the Temple of Hera on Samos, built about 570 - 560 BCE by the architect Rhoikos. It was in the great sanctuary of the goddess: it could scarcely have been in a more prominent location for its brief lifetime. A longer-lasting 6th century Ionic temple was the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Ionic base at the Erechtheum, Athens, 421-407 BCE. The shaft everts gracefully at the base to meet the torus (enriched with interlaced guilloche) it stands upon.
Unlike the Greek Doric order, Ionic columns normally stand on a base (but see illustration, left) which separates the shaft of the column from the stylobate or platform. The capitalComposite order In Western architecture, the capital (from the Latin caput 'head') forms the crowning member of the column, which projects on each side as it rises, in order to support the abacus and unite the square form of the latter with the circular s of the Ionic column has characteristic paired scrolling voluteA volute is a spiral scroll-like ornament such as that used on an Ionic capital.s that are laid on the molded cap ("echinus") of the column, or spring from within it. The cap is usually enriched with egg-and-dart. Originally the volutes lay in a single plane (illustration at right); then it was seen that they could be angled out on the corners. This feature of the Ionic order made it more pliant and satisfactory than the Doric to critical eyes in the 4th century BCE: angling the volutes on the corner columns, ensured that they "read" equally when seen from either front or side facade. The 16th-century Renaissance architect and theorist Vincenzo ScamozziVincenzo Scamozzi ( September 2, 1548 August 7, 1616) born in Vicenza, Italy, was an architect and a writer on architecture, active mainly in Vicenza and Venice area in the second half of the 16th century. He was perhaps the most important figure there be designed a version of such a perfectly four-sided Ionic capital, which became so much the standard, that when a Greek Ionic order was eventually reintroduced, in the later 18th century Greek RevivalGreek Revival was a style of classical architecture which became fashionable in Europe in the 18th century, and in the United Kingdom and United States in the early 19th century. It rebelled against the fussy Palladian style (after Andrea Palladio), which, it conveyed an air of archaic freshness and primitive, perhaps even republican, vitality.
Below the volutes, the Ionic column may have a wide collar or banding separating the capital from the fluted shaft. Or a swag of fruit and flowers may swing from the clefts of the volutes, or from their "eyes." After a little early experimentation, the number of hollow flutes in the shaft settled at 24. This standardization kept the fluting in a familiar proportion to the diameter of the column at any scale, even when the height of the column was exaggerated. Roman fluting leaves a little of the column surface between each hollow; Greek fluting runs out to a knife edge that was easily scarred.
The Ionic column is always more slender than the Doric: Ionic columns are eight and nine column-diameters tall, and even more in the AntebellumThe term Antebellum is a Latin phrase meaning "before the war". In United States history and historiography "Antebellum" is sometimes used instead of the term "pre-Civil War," especially in the South. Antebellum applies to the period of increasing section colonnades of late American Greek revival plantation houses. Ionic columns are most often fluted: Inigo JonesInigo Jones ( July 15, 1573 June 21, 1652) is regarded as the first significant English architect. He also made valuable contributions to stage design. Beyond the fact that he was born in the vicinity of Smithfield in central London, the son of a Catholic introduced a note of sobriety with plain Ionic columns on his Banqueting House at WhitehallThe Banqueting House at Whitehall is a famous London building, formerly part of the Palace of Whitehall, designed by architect Inigo Jones in 1619, and completed in 1622, with assistance from John Webb. It is located close to the Houses of Parliament. Palace, London (q.v. for illustration), and when Beaux-Arts architect John Russell PopeJohn Russell Pope ( April_24, 1874 August 27, 1937) was an architect most known for his designs of the Jefferson Memorial (completed in 1943) and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art (completed in 1941) in Washington, DC. Pope was born in New wanted to convey the manly stamina combined with intellect of Theodore Roosevelt, he left colossal Ionic columns unfluted on the Roosevelt memorial at the American Museum of Natural History, New York (q.v. for illustration), for an unusual impression of strength and stature.
The entablature resting on the columns has three parts: a plain architrave divided into two, or more generally three, bands, with a frieze resting on it that may be richly sculptural, and a cornice bult up with dentils (like the closely-spaced ends of joists), with a corona ("crown") and cyma ("ogee") molding to support the projecting roof. Pictorial often narrative bas-relief frieze carving provides a characteristic feature of the Ionic order, in the area where the Doric order is articulated with triglyphs. Roman and Renaissance practice condensed the height of the entablature by reducing the proportions of the architrave, which made the frieze more prominent.
Vitruvius, a practicing architect who worked in the time of Augustus, reports (De Architectura, iv) that the Doric has a basis of sturdy male body proportions while Ionic depends on "more graceful" female body proportions. Though he does not name his source for such a self-conscious and "literary" approach, it must be in traditions passed on from Hellenistic architects, such as Hermogenes of Priene, the architect of a famed temple of Artemis at Magnesia on the Meander in Lydia (now Turkey). Renaissance architectural theorists took his hints, to interpret the Ionic Order as matronly in comparison to the Doric Order, though not as wholly feminine as the Corinthian order. The Ionic is a natural order for post-Renaissance libraries and courts of justice, learned and civilized. Because no treatises on classical architecture survive earlier than that of Vitruvius, identification of such meaning in architectural elements in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE remains tenuous, though in the Renaissance it became part of the conventional "speech' of classicism..
The Parthenon, although it conforms mainly to the Doric order, also has some Ionic elements. A more purely Ionic mode on the Athenian Acropolis is exemplified in the Erechtheum.
