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Balustrade The word balustrade may refer to: A row of balusters, usually topped by a rail and terminated by a newel. The section beneath the handrail on an escalator, known as the "balustrade." A baluster (through the French balustre, from Italian balaustro, from balaustra, "pomegranate flower" [from a resemblance to the post], from Lat. balaustium, from Gr. balaustion) is a moulded shaft, square or circular, in stone or wood and sometimes in metal, standing on a unifying footing and supporting the coping of a parapet or the handrail of a staircase. Multiplied, they form a balustrade. The earliest examples are those shown in the bas-reliefs representing the Assyrian 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 fifteenth-century examples are found in the balconies of palaces at Venice and Verona. These quattrocentos balustrades are likely to be following yet-unidentified Gothic precedents, and form balustrades of colonnades as an alternative to miniature arcading. Rudolph Wittkower withheld judgement as to the inventor of the baluster but credited Giuliano da Sangalo with using it consistently as early as the balustrade on the terrace and stairs at the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano (ca 1480), with 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. |
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Sutherland Shire Balustrade - Staircases - Handrails Business Directory and Community Guide |
