STAIRCASE, a term for stairs accompanied by walls. The earliest staircases seem to have been built with walls on both sides, as in Egyptian pylons. Contemporary models of houses, dating back to the Middle Kingdom, show a staircase leading up the side of a court to a roof terrace, with continuous wall below. The origin of such stairs may have been earlier structures in wood, or even ladders cut out of logs. Egyptians may have used the self-supporting staircase in which each step is supported at its front by the step below and prevented from turning by having its end built solidly into a wall.
Greece and classical Greece, interior staircases were common but unimportant; they were placed in out of the way corners, and often built of wood. In Rome, a new treat ments for staircases became necessary. Many of the apartment houses indicated on the marble plan of Rome (c. A.D. 205), now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori at Rome, seem to have had stair towers built in the centre of a courtyard. The Colosseum (q.v.) at Rome (completed A.D. 8o) has elaborate and practical entrance and exit stairs, by which the crowds could be readily handled. These, in general, are supported by sloping vaults and roofed by others. Similar staircases were common in the theatres.
Byzantine and Romanesque.—Merely inclined planes lead up within enormous buttresses at the ends of the narthex of S. Sophia (532) at Constantinople, so giving access to the galleries. In S. George at Salonica (late 5th century), a spiral staircase surrounds an open well. In the early Romanesque there is a grow ing use of the spiral staircase. To this development the great thickness of Romanesque walls and buttresses was particularly congenial, as it allowed the staircases to be built in solid masonry. Not only was the open circular well used, but the solid newel, in which each step had cut upon it a cylindrical form to act as part of the newel. This type of spiral staircase is still in use.
Paris (in which a certain amount of Renaissance feeling is pres ent) are noteworthy. In the larger houses the lack of communi cating passages led to many staircases. Thus in the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges (c. 1450), there are eight separate spiral staircases, whose exterior treatment, in rich, traceried towers, furnishes a great deal of the picturesqueness and varied beauty of such a building.
Renaissance.—During the Renaissance, despite such tours de force as Vignola's spiral stair in the palace at Caprarola (c. 1550), the general practice was to have important staircases run up in a straight flight, sometimes varied by landings, and sometimes with changes in direction between walls often crowned with a slanting vault. The most perfect developments of this type were made chiefly during the Baroque period. The magnificence of the huge interior flights of the Genoese palaces (e.g., the "University," 1623, by Bianco) is famous. The Scala Regia is particularly re markable in the artificial exaggeration of its perspective, through the gradual diminution of width and height as the steps ascend. In France the spiral staircase added by Francis I. to the château at Blois (1515-24) and the double circular staircase of the château of Chambord (begun 1519) are remarkable. The early Renais sance, however, produced its most remarkable results in the richly ornamented wooden staircases of Tudor and Jacobean houses. The usual arrangement was to have the staircase divided into comparatively short flights, at right angles to each other, around a central open well; the heavy newels at the corners were finished with urn-like finials at the top and carved drops at the bottom, the railing consisted of a large rail supported either by miniature arcades or square balusters, whose mouldings were often sloped to follow the stairs, and the whole was covered with intricate surface ornament of strap work. The staircase at Hatfield house (161I) is typical. The early Renaissance staircases of Spanish palaces are in most cases placed in one corner of the courtyard and run up between walls to a landing with a return flight that opens out onto the upper floor gallery. The wails, and sometimes even the treads and rises, are often cased in brilliant faience tiles. Even in staircases of more Italian type, with balusters, the rich ness of wall surface remains, as in the staircase of the hospital of S. Cruz at Toledo (1504-14), by E. de Egas. The climax of Spanish Renaissance monumental stair design is reached in the "Escalera Dorada" at Burgos cathedral (1519), by D. de Siloe, with its exquisite metal railing.