The Ionic Order

The Ionic was born in the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the Aegean islands in the sixth century BC, at Samos, Ephesus and Didyma, where colossal temples surrounded by forests of columns rose in rivalry with one another. It is the order of the volute: a capital with two spiral scrolls, one on each side, like a cushion pressed between the shaft and the beam. It is taller and lighter than the Doric, its shaft more deeply fluted, and it stands on a moulded base.

In the capital they placed the volutes, hanging down at the right and left like curly ringlets.

The capital

An Ionic capital has three parts. At the bottom is the echinus, an ovolo carved with egg-and-dart, ringing the top of the shaft. Above it, spanning the whole width of the capital, lies the pulvinus or cushion, which rolls up at each end into a volute; the channel between the two spirals is the canalis. On top is a thin, moulded abacus. Seen from the side, the cushion appears as a bolster, pinched in the middle by a band called the balteus.

The volute is a spiral that winds inward in three turns to a small circle called the eye. How to draw it was one of the great questions of Renaissance architecture, because the relevant illustration in Vitruvius had been lost. Solutions multiplied: spirals drawn with compasses from a sequence of centres arranged in a small square inside the eye (the method of Giuseppe Salviati, 1552, adopted by Palladio), or from twelve centres on the diagonals, each quarter-turn an arc of a smaller circle. The volutes in this book are drawn as smooth logarithmic spirals, the curve that such compass constructions approximate.

The corner problem

The Ionic capital has a front and a side, which makes it awkward at the corner of a colonnade: a capital that faces the front shows its bolster to the side. The Greeks solved this with a special corner capital whose two outer volutes are pulled out diagonally and meet at the corner. In 1615 Vincenzo Scamozzi proposed a more radical solution: a capital with volutes on all four corners, identical on every face, like a small Composite capital without the leaves. The Scamozzi capital became the standard Ionic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Base and shaft

Vitruvius gives the Ionic its own base (two hollow scotiae separated by pairs of astragals, beneath a large torus), but the Romans and the Renaissance preferred the simpler Attic base, which is now almost universal. The shaft carries twenty-four flutes separated by fillets. Ionic columns were made progressively taller: eight diameters in the early Greek examples, nine in Vitruvius and Vignola.

The entablature

The Ionic architrave is divided into two or three fasciae, each stepping forward a little from the one below, like overlapping planks. The frieze is usually plain or carved with a continuous relief; the Parthenon’s famous frieze is Ionic, set on a Doric building. Palladio liked to make the frieze swell outward in a convex curve, a pulvinated frieze. The cornice is marked by a row of dentils, small square blocks that may represent the ends of the rafters in the timber roofs of Ionia.

Character and use

For Vitruvius the Ionic was feminine (a matron, dignified and graceful) and suited to temples of Juno, Diana and Bacchus. For the Renaissance it became the order of learning and of the middle path between Doric strength and Corinthian luxury. Palladio’s Villa Rotonda wears four Ionic porticoes; the British Museum and countless libraries and universities use it. Its volutes make it the most recognisable of all the orders, and the easiest to spot in any street.