THE EVOLUTION OF THE STAIRCASE
The very latest phase of the Gothic style with its new appreciation
of space had sometimes tried to endow them with spatial expression.
A proper show however was only made of staircases when Italian
splendour had revealed to the peoples of the West the crabbed tight-
ness of mediaeval forms. Then the French of Francis Ts time could
enjoy the exterior newel staircase of Blois (pi. LXXIX) and the
splendid interior double newel staircase—two parallel spirals within
the same well—in the centre of the symmetrical palace of Chatn-
bord, and the Spanish, bolder still, could create shortly after 1500 a
new type of staircase to be of the greatest influence in the centuries
to come: the squared-up newel staircase, with three straight flights
of steps around a spacious open well and the landing on the fourth
side. This type occurs for the first time in Enrique de Egas's Hospital
of the Holy Cross at Toledo (1504-14 ; fig. 75) and in Michele
Carlone's castle of Lacalahorra (1508-12). Now Michele Carlone
came from Genoa, and it has often been said that the Genoese, who
made wide and airy staircases open towards courtyards the happy
rule in the later i6th century, were the inventors of this influential
type. No case has however yet been pointed out quite as early as the
first Spanish examples. Moreover, Spanish architects also seem to
have conceived the other most spectacular Baroque type of stair-
case, and conceived it as early as the 1560*5 (fig. 91). This type,
which runs in a large oblong cage, starting with two straight arms
and then, after turning by 180 degrees at the landing, leads up to the
upper floor in one arm between the two below (or starting with one
and continuing with two), appears to my knowledge for the very
first time in Juan Bautista de Toledo's and Francisco de Herrera's
Escorial (1563-84). It is eminently characteristic that these staircases,
in which space is experienced most vividly by those who ascend them
or descend them, originated outside Italy. The Italian Renaissance had
no use for them, no use for this flow of spatial strata or compart-
ments into one another. The best Italian Renaissance staircases, such
as the one in the Palazzo Farnese (fig. 57), were comfortably wide,
but led up between solid walls. Bramante's most interesting staircase,
in the Vatican Palace, was of the traditional newel type, though with
a wide open well and of gentle rise and generous measurements.
Serlio and Palladio followed Bramante in this, although they knew
and used the Spanish square three-flight type. However their hearts
were not in staircase design. The only innovation in their books
which is worth noting because it is so characteristically Mannerist
E.A.—ii " I43