The Ionic order forms one of the three orders of classical architecture, the
other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian. The Ionic columns
are the most thin and small columns out of the three canonic orders.
The Ionic capital is characterized by the use of volutes. The Ionic columns
normally stand on a base which separates the shaft of the column from the
stylobate or platform; The cap is usually enriched with egg-and-dart.
Description = Capital =
The major features of the Ionic order are the volutes of its capital, which
have been the subject of much theoretical and practical discourse,
based on a brief and obscure passage in Vitruvius. The only tools required were
a straight-edge, a right angle, string and a compass. Below the volutes, the
Ionic column may have a wide collar or banding separating the capital from the
fluted shaft, as at Castle Coole. Or a swag of fruit and flowers may swing from
the clefts formed by the volutes, or from their "neck."
Originally the volutes lay in a single plane; 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 BC:
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 Scamozzi designed a version of
such a perfectly four-sided Ionic capital; Scamozzi's version became so
much the standard, that when a Greek Ionic order was eventually reintroduced,
in the later 18th century Greek Revival, it conveyed an air of archaic freshness
and primitive, perhaps even republican, vitality.
= Columns and entablature = The Ionic column is always more slender
than the Doric: Ionic columns are eight and nine column-diameters tall, and even
more in the Antebellum colonnades of late American Greek revival plantation
houses. Ionic columns are most often fluted.
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.
In some instances, the fluting has been omitted. English architect Inigo Jones
introduced a note of sobriety with plain Ionic columns on his Banqueting House at
Whitehall Palace, London, and when Beaux-Arts architect John Russell Pope
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 City, 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 built up with dentils, with a
corona and cyma 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. History of use
The Ionic order originated in the mid-6th century BC in Ionia, the
southwestern coastland and islands of Asia Minor settled by Ionian Greeks,
where an Ionian dialect was spoken. The Ionic order column was being practiced
in mainland Greece in the 5th century BC. It was most popular in the Archaic
Period in Ionia. The first of the great Ionic temples was the Temple of Hera on
Samos, built about 570 BC–560 BC by the architect Rhoikos. It stood for only a
decade before it was leveled by an earthquake. A longer-lasting 6th century
Ionic temple was the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of
the Ancient World. The Parthenon, although it conforms mainly to the Doric
order, also has some Ionic elements. A more purely Ionic mode to be seen on the
Athenian Acropolis is exemplified in the Erechtheum.
Vitruvius, a practicing architect who worked in the time of Augustus, reports
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. 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 as it was understood in the 5th and 4th centuries BC remains tenuous,
though during the Renaissance it became part of the conventional "speech" of
classicism. From the 17th century onwards, a much
admired and copied version of Ionic was that which could be seen in the temple
called that of "Fortuna Virilis" in Rome, first clearly presented in a
detailed engraving in Antoine Desgodetz, Les edifices antiques de Rome.
See also Doric order
Corinthian order Tuscan order
Composite order References
External links Ionic order exemplified in architecture
of Buffalo, New York Ionic order, after Vitruvius Archived
from the original on August 26, 2005 "Understanding buildings" website: Ionic
order Denis Andrey and Mirko Galli, "Geometric
methods of the 1500s for laying out the ionic volute"
Early Development and Formal Definition of the Ionic Capital