Piano nobile
The term piano nobile ( Italian , 'noble floor') is synonymous with bel étage ( French 'beautiful floor'). Both forms of the term date from the 17th century. The French form found its way into the German language as a bel étage from the 19th century .
The piano nobile refers to a raised representative floor within a vertically layered structure. It lies above a full-fledged ground floor with windows and is accessed via an inner staircase. The piano nobile is distinguished by its height and equipment compared to the other floors.
prehistory
A representative hall on the upper floor that takes up the length and width of the building, as shown in the palace (564) in Qasr-ibn-Wardan, Syria, appears for the first time to be typical for the eastern Mediterranean, especially for towers and residential buildings. This finding can be interpreted primarily as a sign of the diversity of palace construction in the late Roman period. In any case, in Roman antiquity there was no systematic training of a piano nobile in stately buildings.
For the epoch of the early Middle Ages there is a written reference to a high-standing representation room among the buildings of the Popes in Rome near a tower built under Pope Zacharias (741–752). Otherwise, a continuation of Roman building traditions can be established for defense and palace construction in northern Italy in the early Middle Ages .
When examining the Franconian Empire , the Palatinate Church in Aachen (792f.) Comes into consideration in the area of sacred buildings . In contrast to the two models San Vitale and Baptistery of the Orthodox in Ravenna , there is a raised position of the arcade level in Aachen , which gives it a higher rank. In addition, a so-called westwork appears in the west of the Palatinate Church for the first time in Europe, with a central room raised above an entrance hall, open to the church and equipped with a throne. This component originally appeared in a tower-like manner on the outside. Whether this component plays a central role in the genesis of the piano nobile cannot be proven. But due to the fact that the high clergy came from the nobility, such a connection is plausible.
The hall building of the Palatinate of Paderborn was probably built on a basement-like substructure, as was probably the corresponding building section of the Aachen Palatinate . For the Byzantine and Islamic areas, no clear references to a piano nobile can be found for the time of the early Middle Ages. Even the Alhambra in Granada (1st half of the 14th century) is still characterized by horizontal hierarchical representation.
history
The oldest relevant piano nobile can be found at the Donjon in Loche ( Indre-et-Loire ) (between 1012/13 and 1030/35). It is a four-storey tower that served as a storage facility on the ground floor, for representation on the first floor and residential purposes above. The building belongs to the castle category , which began to emerge in the Franconian territory in the 9th century . The initially wooden post construction was gradually replaced by the solid construction at the turn of the 11th century, so that from this time on it is also possible to construct a piano nobile. In certain territories such as Italy , however, it was only later or, as in Byzantium , not at all that the building type of the medieval noble castle with the piano nobile was adopted.
The development of the piano nobile is linked to the position and shape of the stairs. Until the end of the Middle Ages, a single external staircase was usually found in this context. Their upper and lower pedestals allow greetings. The Scala dei Giganti in Venice (1484–1501) can be cited as a late example of this design . In France, the tower with a spiral staircase in front of the Corps de Logis appeared as early as the 14th century , which subsequently spread throughout Northern Europe. With the castle of Chambord , the stairs move into the structure. As a result, the free position of the stairs and the double walk enable staging the ascent and descent. The corresponding staging reached its climax in the Baroque era .
Changes in the structure of the feudal society with a written administration and civil servants led from the 15th century in city palaces as well as villas, pleasure and hunting castles to an emphasis on the ground floor. The Palazzo Medici in Florence stands for a new type of city palace without a piano nobile. In Italy in particular, the return to the Villa suburbana had a corresponding effect. The Potsdam palaces, on the other hand, show the typological differences: Sanssouci Palace does not have a piano nobile, the New Palais has one. In contrast to the medieval aristocratic castle , the residences of absolutist princes were complex systems with a pronounced horizontal and vertical hierarchy.
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The piano nobile only played a marginal role in the bourgeois building types that appeared from the 19th century. When middle-class apartment building with social mixing the apartment is strongest on the first floor economically with and upwards poorer becoming residents as Beletage referred. Professional representation is shifting to court buildings, museums, administrative offices, etc. with their grand staircases. In the villa , the main level is on the ground floor, in the bungalow anyway.
meaning
The piano nobile is initially explained by the combination of tower and raised living with public functions, which in the early Middle Ages was reserved for the pope and king and signaled an exclusive social position. Only when the central authority could not effectively counter invasions from outside or military conflicts within the nobility after its decline did the aristocratic castle with the piano nobile come into being, a design with which a physical protection could be created and at the same time a high social status could be clearly communicated . In other areas without a counterpart to the formalized Frankish feudal system , such as in the Eastern Roman area, with Japanese castles and Chinese palaces, horizontal hierarchical structures remained.
The restriction of the distribution of the piano nobile to Western Europe may be associated with the fact that the hierarchical size among people is generally expressed on a horizontal level, namely through aloofness. Factors such as size and height can offer additional advantages, but are only absolutely necessary under certain circumstances. Such a special situation apparently prevailed during the time of the creation of the medieval aristocratic castle , while the piano nobile lost its function of security from the modern era and only served as a symbol of power.
When examining the Imperium Romanum , it can already be established that there is a vertical metaphor in Roman literature and philosophy with regard to social status that has no equivalent in architecture. With regard to the piano nobile, it is characteristic that the ground floor below was generally by no means reserved for the lower classes, but the powerful in his power housing appeared to the outside with his entire apparatus of power and the visitor on the piano nobile on the same level faced. The piano nobile should therefore not be understood as a mirror of the classically constituted medieval society .
literature
- Cord Meckseper : The piano nobile: an occidental room category . Hildesheim, 2012, ISBN 978-3-487-14742-0 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 14 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 64 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 23 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 111 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 113 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 115 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 127 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 139.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, pp. 182 f., 205, 207.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 178.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 192 and 196 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 209 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 210.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 211.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 231 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 236 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 241 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 273 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 286 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 151 ff.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 292 f.
- ↑ Meckseper 2012, p. 255.