Portal and Windows Party Hall

I now invite you to climb the fifteenth-century staircase and reach the first floor.

 

On your left there is a door that leads to the guest apartments: La Foresteria.

On the marble architrave is engraved between two cranes enveloped in flames, the phrase "ET NOVA SINT OMNIA" which translated from Latin means: "and all be renewed"

There are different theses on the meaning of this writing; according to Gioacchino Lanza Tommasi's thesis, the phrase would take on a meaning of cultural renewal in the social and architectural fields, engraved before "the massacre of the Baroness" took place; according to Don Vincenzo Badalamenti's thesis, this writing dates back to the massacre of the Baroness and that Baron Vincenzo La Grua would have demanded "the cancellation of any presence that could remain linked to the memory of his unfaithful wife."    

 

Looking at the access portal to the Salone delle Feste, we can say that it is a work of high level of craftsmanship, most likely created in the second half of the sixteenth century.

It constitutes, together with the two adjacent windows, a valuable example of late local elaboration of Renaissance forms.

The portal is surmounted by the coat of arms of the La Grua family, featuring a crane inserted in a garland of acanthus leaves.

The artisanal quality of the work is evident as the signs of extemporaneous interventions do not reveal the rigorous geometric calculation both overall and in the details. The work is probably the result of the simultaneous intervention of several stonemasons and this can be seen by framing the composition. around its axis of symmetry.

The capitals, for example, are not mirror images of each other. Note the volutes in particular: those of the left capital emerge from the acanthus leaves with a soft undulation; those of the right capital appear according to two more decidedly upward curves and also note the dentils placed above the architrave element in which the rampant lions are inserted in low relief: on the left there are five on the right six.
It is clear that we do not formalize this, but it is also clear that in a system where everything is regulated by precise laws of symmetry, desired by the geometric rigor and logic of the time, the application of the principles that constitute the rule would be expected Before classical architecture.

The entablature rich in dentils, sculptures, ovules and leaves, joining the vertical elements, generates, through a process of synthesis, a very suggestive unitary motif.

As regards the adjacent windows, the situation is different because they fall into that type of intervention which ignores the concept of coherence towards the portal just described and towards one another.

The architectural lines of the windows clearly differ from that of the entrance portal due to a more accentuated essentiality and the presence of motifs linked to a more advanced style.

For this reason, we are led to believe in the presence of a different hand of creation from that which worked in the creation of the entrance portal to the Salone delle Feste.

From each other, however close they are and how much they fall within the same environment, they too tend to differ in some plastic details even though they fall within the same compositional scheme made up of the usual classical elements: (semi-cylindrical columns placed against the wall, Corinthian-type capitals, entablature with frieze and grooves) where the differentiating element is given by the supports of the windowsill, with polygonal brackets in the window adjacent to the entrance portal and with modillions in the other.

The other windows existing in the same wall, and which open into the rooms adjacent to the hall, show clear signs of subsequent interventions in the eighteenth century.

 

I now invite you to go back and continue your visit to the Salone delle Arcate.