page_title: Baluster
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Baluster / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Stone balusters in Basilica of San Zeno
context_page_description: A baluster is a vertical moulded shaft, square, or lathe-turned form found in stairways, parapets, and other architectural features. In furniture construction it is known as a spindle. Common materials used in its construction are wood, stone, and less frequently metal and ceramic. A group of balusters supporting handrail, coping, or ornamental detail are known as a balustrade.
  The term baluster shaft is used to describe forms such as a candlestick, upright furniture support, and the stem of a brass chandelier.
  The term banister refers to the system of balusters and handrail of a stairway. It may be used to include its supporting structures, such as a supporting newel post.
context_section_description: The earliest examples of balusters are those shown in the bas-reliefs representing the Assyrian palaces, where they were employed as functional window balustrades and apparently had Ionic capitals. As an architectural element alone the balustrade did not seem to have been known to either the Greeks or the Romans, but baluster forms are familiar in the legs of chairs and tables represented in Roman bas-reliefs, where the original legs or the models for cast bronze ones were shaped on the lathe, or in Antique marble candelabra, formed as a series of stacked bulbous and disc-shaped elements, both kinds of sources familiar to Quattrocento designers.
  The application to architecture was a feature of the early Renaissance architecture: 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. They form balustrades of colonettes as an alternative to miniature arcading.
  Rudolf Wittkower withheld judgement as to the inventor of the baluster and 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 (c 1480), and used balustrades in his reconstructions of antique structures. Sangallo 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, whose employment by Michelangelo at the Campidoglio steps (c 1546), noted by Wittkower, was preceded by very early vasiform balusters in a balustrade round the drum of Santa Maria delle Grazie (c 1482), and railings in the cathedrals of Aquileia (c 1495) and Parma, in the cortile of San Damaso, Vatican, and Antonio da Sangallo's crowning balustrade on the Santa Casa at Loreto installed in 1535, and liberally in his model for the Basilica of Saint Peter. Because of its low center of gravity, this "vase-baluster" may be given the modern term "dropped baluster".
caption: Stone balusters in the Basilica of San Zeno, Verona (constructed 967–1398 AD)
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