A (through the French ''balustre'', from Italian ''balaustro'', from ''balaustra'', "pomegranate flower" a resemblance to the post , from Lat. ''balaustium'', from Gr. ''balaustion'') is a small moulded shaft, square or circular, in stone or wood and sometimes in metal, supporting the coping of a Parapet or the handrail of a Staircase , an assemblage of them being known as a "'''balustrade'''". The earliest examples are those shown in the Bas-relief s representing the Assyria n palaces, where they were employed as window balustrades and apparently had Ionic capitals. They do not seem to have been known to either the Greeks or the Romans (Wittkower 1974), but late 15th-century examples are found in the balconies in the palaces at Venice and Verona . These quattrocento balustrades are likely to follow Gothic Precedents , and form balustrades of colonnettes as an alternative to miniature arcading. Wittkower withheld judgement as to the inventor of the baluster but credited Giuliano Da Sangallo with using it consistently as early as the balustrade on the terrace at the villa at Poggio a Caiano (ca 1480), and employing balustrades even in his reconstructions of antique structures, and, importantly, with having passed the motif to Bramante (his Tempietto , 1502) and Michelangelo , through whom balustrades gained wide currency in the 16th century. Wittkower distinguished two types, one symmetrical in profile that inverted one bulbous vase-shape over another, separating them with a cushionlike Torus or a concave ring, and the other a simple vase shape, first employed, according to Wittkower, by Michelangelo.
The term is given to the shaft dividing a window in Saxon architecture. In the south transept of the abbey at St Albans , England , are some of these shafts, supposed to have been taken from the old Saxon church. Norman bases and capitals have been added, together with plain cylindrical Norman shafts.
- This article adapts some text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica .
- Rudolf Wittkower, 1974. ""The Renaissance baluster and Palladio" in ''Palladio and English Palladianism'' (London:Thames and Hudson)
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