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Most of these colonies were founded in consequence of the changes in the population of Greece which attended the conquest of Peloponnesus by the Dorians. The Ionic cities were early distinguished by a spirit of commercial enterprise, and soon rose superior in wealth and in power to their AEolian and Dorian neighbours.
The examples which we possess are comparatively small works, and in them the order resembles the Ionic, but with the important exceptions that the capital of the column is quite different, that the proportions are altogether a little slenderer, and that the enrichments are somewhat more florid.
Nothing could be more delightful than the setting of the red-tiled roofs, with their dragon-decorated ridges and parapets, on the wooden trellis fronts and canvas blinds of the Chinese houses. Weltevreden, too, is not without attractions. The broad porticoes of dazzling white, with their Ionic columns and marble floors, are often set in a fair surrounding of green trees.
The dipteral also is octastyle in both front and rear porticoes, but it has two rows of columns all round the temple, like the temple of Quirinus, which is Doric, and the temple of Diana at Ephesus, planned by Chersiphron, which is Ionic. The hypaethral is decastyle in both front and rear porticoes.
Stairs lead up in each corner to the flat roof, above which they rise in a short dome-bearing drum. In this upper cloister the arches are much narrower, springing from square Ionic pilasters, two on each side, set one behind the other, and leaving an open space beyond so that the whole takes the form of a Venetian window.
Here at Chateau Desir, in the panelling of the old hall, might you see fantastic scrolls, separated by bodies ending in termini, and whose heads supported the Ionic volute, while the arch, which appeared to spring from these capitals, had, for a keystone, heads more monstrous than those of the fabled animals of Ctesias; or so ludicrous, that you forgot the classic griffin in the grotesque conception of the Italian artist.
The ground is strewed with shells and covered with acanthus-leaves; but no shell had suggested the Ionic volute, no acanthus-leaf had suggested the Corinthian foliage. The vast columns, with the sudden tapering, the overhanging capitals, the stern, square abacus, all betoken the infancy of art.
"Why you are my beau ideal of a merchant, the Ionic capital of the pillar of trade. Now, let not your mind be 'Tossing on the ocean; There, where your argosies with portly sail, Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood; Or, as it were the pageants of the sea, Do overpower the petty traffickers. Quiet, my dear boy, both of mind and body, are your indispensables.
After what has been said of the gradual changes in the Doric order, it will be understood that the Ionic order was not the same in the sixth century as in the fifth, nor in the fifth the same as in the third. The most striking change concerns the spiral roll of the capital.
That monarch preferred it to every science; he was fond of conversing on it, and took such an interest in it, that, in order to promote its improvement, he built this handsome edifice for the ci-devant Academie et Ecoles de Chirurgie. The architect was GONDOUIN. The facade, extending nearly two hundred feet, presents a peristyle of the Ionic order.
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