BALUSTER

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'.^[1] 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^[2] 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.

Contents

Use in period identity

Materials used in modern day balusters

Banisters

References

External links

Use in period identity

The baluster is often a means of dating antique furniture or architectural details. For example, the distinctive twist designs of balusters in oak furniture of the Charles I period in England is characteristic of that specific early 17th century period.
The modern term 'baluster shaft' is applied 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..

Materials used in modern day balusters

★ Primed wood (usually hardwood)

★ Cast iron

★ Polyurethane/Polystyrene

★ Various hardwoods and softwoods

★ Wrought Iron

★ Polymer Stone

★ Cast Stone

Banisters

The word banister (also bannister) refers to the balusters of a staircase.^[3] However the term banister implies a more modern, narrower support to a handrail than a traditional baluster.
The word banister is often used, erroneously, to refer to the handrail of a staircase.

References

1. "A row of balusters surmounted by a rail or coping" 1644. ''OED''; AskOxford
2. A ''colonnette'' is a miniature column, used decoratively.
3. AskOxford


★

★ Rudolf Wittkower, 1974. ""The Renaissance baluster and Palladio" in ''Palladio and English Palladianism'' (London:Thames and Hudson)

External links

★ Baluster Spacing Calculator for Railings

★ Customize a Balustrade System