Ionic order that the Doric column had its initial basis in the proportions of the male body, while Ionic columns took on a "slenderness" inspired by the female body. 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 (now Turkey). 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
Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola company with Baldassare Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, Andrea Palladio and others furnished material for an exhibition in 2001 His two published books helped formulate the canon of classical architectural style. The earliest, "Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura" ["Canon of the five orders of architecture"] (first published in 1562, probably in Rome), presented Vignola's practical system for constructing columns in the five classical orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite) utilising proportions which Vignola derived from his own measurements of classical Roman monuments. The clarity and ease of use of Vignola's treatise caused it to become in succeeding centuries the most published