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
quattrocento balustrades are likely to be following yet-unidentified
Gothic precedents, and form balustrades of colonnettes as an alternative to miniature arcading.
Rudolf 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 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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