### great hall, loggia, barbican, hanging garden
great hall The largest hall of castles and palaces used for representative events, feasts, receptions, negotiations, and even tournaments. GB loggia A corridor or balcony with columns; a favoured structure of Renaissance architecture. The columns stand on a banister or are connected with a railing, and carry an arcade or an entablature. Loggias were either vaulted, or covered by a flat wooden ceiling or an open truss roof. The first time when a loggia was used together with a ballustrade, another popular motif of Renaissance architecture, was in the middle of the 15th century on a balcony of the ducal palace of Urbino. But the first ballustraded loggia that surrounded an entire inner courtyard was built in the royal palace of Visegrád in 1484. The sophisticated versions of this system became the most important elements of renaissance palace architecture in the following decades. GB barbican An isolated bastion built in the castle moat in front of the gatehouse of a castle. It usually had a round ground-plan, and was sometimes fortified with towers. It could only be approached through bridges, one from outside and another from the direction of the gatehouse. The path leading into the castle usually had a right angle turn inside the barbican. Barbicans are characteristic elements of 15th-16th-century military architecture. GB hanging garden A garden situated above some kind of a vaulted space, for example, a cistern or a stable. It was a very popular motif of Italian Renaissance urban palaces (the ducal palaces in Urbino and Mantova, the archepiscopal palace in Trier, the Pitti palace and the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence). In these palaces the garden was usually surrounded by the residential wings of the palace from three sides; from the fourth side it was closed off by a wall with windows or a columned walkway. GB