Base, shaft, volutes: reading an Ionic column
Read it from the bottom up. First the base, a moulded foot that lifts the column off the platform; a Doric column has none. Then the shaft, taller and thinner in proportion than a Doric one and cut into vertical channels, the flutes: Vitruvius, the Roman architect who wrote in the first century BCE, gives the Ionic twenty-four of them. At the top comes the capital, with its two volutes (from the Latin voluta, rolled), spirals that curl down on each side like a scroll of paper rolled from both ends.
Above the columns the Ionic entablature often carries a continuous frieze, one long carved band with no interruptions, which suited long sculpted scenes. That is why the Parthenon frieze, on a Doric temple, counts as an Ionic feature.
Next to the three orders laid side by side, the difference is easy to put in numbers. Vitruvius sets the later Doric column at seven lower diameters high and the Ionic at eight and a half, so an Ionic column of the same width is about a fifth taller.
A woman’s proportions, according to Vitruvius
Vitruvius explains the shape with a story. The Ionians, he writes, had already built a Doric temple on the proportions of a man; when they came to build one for Artemis they wanted something different and took a woman as their standard. They placed a base under the column like a shoe on the foot, carved volutes on the capital like curls of hair hanging on each side, and cut flutes in the shaft like the folds of a long dress.
Should you believe it? As history, probably not: Vitruvius wrote some five centuries after the first Ionic temples, and he was explaining forms he had inherited. As a way to remember the parts, it works perfectly: shoe, folds, curls.
Where the Ionic order began
The order is named after Ionia, the stretch of the Asia Minor coast and the nearby islands settled by Ionian Greeks. There, and in the Ionian islands, it was the natural way to build, while mainland Greece and the western colonies built Doric. In the seventh and sixth centuries the cities of this coast competed with one another in huge stone temples, and the Ionic grew big with them. On Samos the architects Rhoikos and Theodoros raised a temple of Hera around 570-560 BCE measuring 52.5 by 105 metres, the earliest temple in the new Ionic order.
At Ephesus the famous Temple of Artemis rose on the same coast, but little of it remains today. The best way to grasp the scale of these eastern temples is the column from Sardis, the old capital of Lydia, at the Metropolitan Museum. It comes from a temple of Artemis dedicated in the late fourth century BCE and was reassembled from fragments found by American excavators in the early twentieth century. The section on display is 3.61 metres high; the complete column was about 17 metres, as tall as a six-storey building.
Ionic in Athens: the Erechtheion and Athena Nike
Athens built its great temples in the Doric order, but used the Ionic for its most refined buildings on the Acropolis. The Erechtheion (421-406 BCE), dedicated to Athena and Poseidon, is an Ionic temple from end to end: a porch of six Ionic columns on the east, a north porch of six more arranged in the shape of a Greek Π, an Ionic colonnade on the west, and on the south the porch of the six korai. One of the east columns is not in Athens: Lord Elgin’s men took the north column of the east porch, and the British Museum, which bought it from Elgin in 1816, still has it.
Just above the entrance to the Acropolis, the small Temple of Athena Nike (about 425 BCE) shows the order at its most compact: four single-block Ionic columns at each end, front and back, and none on the sides.
After Athens
The Ionic never went away. It returned in force in the Greek cities of Asia Minor after Alexander, in the huge temples of Hellenistic architecture such as the one at Sardis. Faced with any column, the test is the same as in antiquity: a base underneath and two scrolls on top mean Ionic.
Where to see them
On the Acropolis of Athens, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike; the original korai and parts of the Erechtheion are in the Acropolis Museum, and the column taken by Elgin’s men is in the British Museum in London (1816,0610.110). The Heraion is an archaeological site on Samos. In New York, the Sardis column stands in the Metropolitan Museum. Check opening times on the official websites before you go.
Sources
- Vitruvius, On Architecture 3.5.14 and 4.1.5-8, trans. M. H. Morgan (LacusCurtius, University of Chicago).
- C. Hemingway, “Architecture in Ancient Greece” and “Greek Art in the Archaic Period”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA): Erechtheion; Parthenon.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Temple of Athena Nike.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Pythagoreion and Heraion of Samos (595); Ephesus (1018).
- British Museum, collection record 1816,0610.110, Ionic column from the east porch of the Erechtheion.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 26.59.1, “Marble column from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis”.
