Solomonic Column - in Baroque Architecture

In Baroque Architecture

The Solomonic column was revived as a feature of Baroque architecture. The twisted S-curve shaft gives energy and dynamism to the traditional column form which fits these qualities that are characteristically Baroque.

Easily the best-known Solomonic columns are the colossal bronze Composite columns by Bernini in his Baldacchino at St. Peter's Basilica. The construction of the baldachin, actually a ciborium, which was finished in 1633, required that the original ones of Constantine be moved.

During the succeeding century, Solomonic columns were commonly used in altars, furniture, and other parts of design. Sculpted vines were sometimes carved into the spiralling cavetto of the twisting columns, or made of metal, such as gilt bronze. In an ecclesiastical context such ornament may be read as symbolic of the wine used in the Eucharist.

Peter Paul Rubens employed Solomonic columns in tapestry designs, ca 1626, where he provided a variant of an Ionic capital for the columns as Raphael had done, and rusticated and Solomonic columns appear in the architecture of his paintings with such consistency and in such variety that Anthony Blunt thought is would be pointless to give a complete list.

The columns became popular in Catholic Europe including southern Germany. The Solomonic column spread to Spain at about the same time as Bernini was making his new columns, and from Spain to Spanish colonies in the Americas, where the salomónica was often used in churches as an indispensable element of the Churrigueresque style. The design was most infrequently used in Britain, the south porch of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, being the only exterior example found by Robert Durman (Durman 2002), and was still rare in English interior design, an example noted by Durman is the funerary monument for Helena, Lady Gorges (died 1635) at Salisbury perhaps the sole use.

After 1660, such twist-turned columns became a familiar feature in the legs of French, Dutch and English furniture, and on the glazed doors that protected the dials of late 17th- and early 18th-century bracket and longcase clocks. English collectors and dealers sometimes call these twist-turned members "barley sugar twists" after the type of sweet traditionally sold in this shape.