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IONIC
(eye-ON-ik)
A
style of Greek architecture Common clues: Greek column style;
Architectural order; Kind of column; Corinthian alternative;
Classical architectural style; Column style; Like some
columns Crossword
puzzle frequency:
3 times a year Frequency
in English language:
20047 / 86800 Video: Athens
Acropolis and the Parthenon
The
Ionic order column 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 column 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. 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. 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 Ancient World.
Ionic
order: 1
- entablature, 2
- column, 3
- cornice, 4
- frieze, 5
- architrave or epistyle, 6
- capital (composed of abacus and volutes), 7
- shaft, 8
- base, 9
- stylobate, 10
- stereobate.
Unlike
the Greek Doric order column, Ionic columns normally stand on a
base which separates the shaft of the column from the stylobate
or platform. The capital of the Ionic column has characteristic
paired scrolling volutes 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 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.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Ionic".
17
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