MonoMonday: "Bar"

Today’s MonoMonday challenge, hosted by laurie54, is “BAR”.
 
Sadly, owing to the continued lockdown, few of us are in a position to "prop up a bar" at the moment. However my Editor came to my rescue with a suggestion for my blip.
 
This shows a close-up of some of the wooden bars which make up the back of an old dining chair. Of particular interest is the upright “barley twist” bar (so a double whammy of “bar”!). The chair is part of a dining table & chairs which used to belong to my Editor’s great uncle and which came to us eventually via my Editor’s sister. We don’t know how old it is.
 
I’ve always wondered about the origin of the term “barley twist” as it never seemed to me to have any connection with barley growing in the fields, so we decided to do some research. The shape resembles the twists in a rope, although they’re usually cut deeper than in a rope. It seems that the term actually comes from the “barley sugar twists” - sweets (candies) - which were popular some years ago.
 
In regard to furniture, the use of the barley twist was originally Baroque, of Spanish-Moorish origin, and came to England from Portugal when Katherine of Braganza married Charles II in 1661. It became very popular here and subsequently had many revivals, including in the early 1800s and throughout the reign of Queen Victoria. However the history of the shape goes back a lot longer: in architecture the helical shape is called a “Solomonic Column” as apparently such columns were used as structural pillars for the roof of Solomon’s temple (?circa 600BC). Also, the carved bronze canopy which sits over the high altar of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican has barley twist columns supporting it.
 
Originally wooden barley twist bars would have been meticulously hand-carved (impressive!), but the process must have become (marginally!) easier when mechanical lathes were invented about 200 years ago. More recently open-spiral barley twist has been developed and can be seen in some more modern furniture designs.

So now we know!

This information has been summarised from two web articles, here and here.