"Apse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... massive stalls they are, separated by grooved Corinthian pilasters, wondering what was to become of me, and if I was not already mad; and there are some little angels with extraordinarily human Greuze-like faces, supporting the nerves of the apse, which, after a time, every time I passed them, seemed conscious of me and my existence there; and the wood-work which ornaments the length of the nave, and of the choir also, elaborate with carved marguerites and roses, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... golden domes, seems a part of Moscow. On Montmartre I know a picturesque and crowded corner which is simply Algiers. Little, low, clean houses, each with its brass plate and little front garden, are English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees while all behind the apse of Saint-Sulpice, the Rue Feron, the Rue Cassette, lying peaceably in the shadow of its great towers, roughly paved, their doors each with its knocker, seem lifted out of some provincial and religious town—Tours or Orleans, for example—in ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... of opinion having again veered round, the then incumbent, Dr. Duncan, desiring to preserve this "object of superstition," now become a precious relic, had the main shaft removed to his newly-enclosed manse garden where it remained till 1887, when an apse being added to the church, the Cross was again enclosed within the building. Meanwhile two other fragments had entirely disappeared. The cross-beam has never been recovered,* but the top-stone suddenly reappeared in the following ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... jewels of French religious architecture. It was built under St.-Louis, and consecrated in his presence. It shared, in 1793, the fate of the almost equally beautiful church of St.-Leger at Soissons, the apse, transepts, and cloisters of which, even in their present condition, suffice to show what Soissons lost when it was looted and desecrated. A worthy bishop of Soissons, M. de Garsignies, bought what remained ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... stood among the pastures. The hills rose again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the fall of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... and 15, after the Germans had evacuated the city and the French had entered, the bombardment recommenced, but without touching the cathedral. On Sept. 17 two bombs struck, one on the apse and the other on ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... plan was adopted, and this was the provision of a nave and chancel having a transept between them so as to make the form of a cross. The nave had aisles along its whole length. These were extended on both sides eastward of the transept, and continued as an ambulatory round a semicircular apse. The transept also had a small apsidal chapel on the east side of both its north and south arms. At the point of intersection between the transept and the nave the supports of the central tower rose. Between this and the west end there were eight arches in each ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... they set their cannon in its way. There is no gable now, nor wall That does not suffer, night and day, As shot and shell in crushing torrents fall. The stricken tocsin quivers through the tower; The triple nave, the apse, the lonely choir Are circled, hour by hour, With thundering bands of fire And Death is scattered broadcast ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... large, oblong hall, with a great figure of Buddha, cross-legged, imperturbable, enthroned in a niche at its further end, like the apse or recess in a church in Italy. Before it stood an altar. The Buddha sat and smiled on us with his eternal smile. A complacent deity, carved out of white stone, and gaudily painted; a yellow robe, like the Lamas', dangled across his ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... north-east of the choir, and inserted a new clerestory, in the then fashionable style, in place of the original. He also made a considerable alteration in the chancel by substituting a square east-end for the circular apse, part of which was taken down and used as building material for the innovation. But de Walden's work was cut short by his death, when he had scarcely held the See of London for two years, and was buried in his Chapel at ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... together. It was almost so. The walls were of native greystone in its natural roughness; all over the front and one angle the American ivy climbed and waved, mounting to the tower; while at the back, the closer clinging Irish ivy covered the little "apse," and creeping round the corner, was advancing to the windows, and promising to case the first one in a loving frame of its own. It seemed that no carriage-road came to this place, other than the dressed gravelled path which the pony-chaise had travelled, and which made a circuit ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... The round apse exhibits ornamental half columns, divers rosettes, and a number of raised figures, and masonic symbols. In the interior of the church the most notable thing to be seen is the Renaissance altar-piece and a Romanesque arch that gives ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... have a whole chapter of study, too, over the eleventh- century apse, but here at Mont-Saint-Michel, Abbot Hildebert's choir went the way of his nave and tower. He built out even more boldly to the east than to the west, and although the choir stood for some four hundred years, which is a sufficient life for most architecture, the foundations gave way at last, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... some say nine, some say eight hundred years ago; its apse was built yesterday, but the whole of it is ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the apse of the Duomo of Pisa, was a colossal image of Christ, in coloured mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as possible, the relation which the statue of Athena bore to the Parthenon; and in the same manner, concentrating the imagination of the Pisan on the attributes ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... hymn, once more we started forward, this time along a narrow gallery closed at the end with double wooden doors. As our procession reached these they opened, and before us lay the crowning wonder of this marvellous fane, a vast, ellipse-shaped apse. Now we understood. The plan of the temple was the plan of the looped pillar which stood upon the brow of the Peak, and as we rightly guessed, its ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... side; and he has laid crystal over that, and lived on, in his purity. Then the clay came on at his angles, and tried to cover them, and round them away; but upon that he threw out buttress-crystals at his angles, all as true to his own central line as chapels round a cathedral apse; and clustered them round the clay; and conquered it again. At last the clay came on at his summit, and tried to blunt his summit; but he could not endure that for an instant; and left his flanks all rough, but ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... The apse of the Chapel of Queen's on the left belongs to a building already spoken of, which is the most perfect example of a small basilican church in Oxford. The church tower in the centre, though itself dating from the fourteenth century, is the most modern part of one of the oldest churches ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... well as she could and crossed to the other side, hoping to find more shelter. She was nearing the Via della Frezza, and she knew some of the ins and outs of the narrow streets behind the tribune of the great church. It was very dark as she turned the semicircle of the apse, and the rain fell in torrents, but it was shorter to go that way, for Griggs lived nearer to the Ripetta than to the Corso, and she followed a sort of crooked diagonal, in the direction of his house. She thought the streets led by that way to the point she wished to reach, ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the name given to a chamber on the south side of the central apse, where the sacred utensils, vessels, &c., of the church were kept. In the reign of Justin II. (565-574), owing to a change in the liturgy, the diaconicon and protheses were located in apses at the east end of the aisles. Before that time there was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... of the streets leading out of the Place Royale you can see the cathedral, and as you come nearer you see that it is clear enough of houses or such like things; the great apse rises over you, with its belt of eastern chapels; first the long slim windows of these chapels, which are each of them little apses, the Lady Chapel projecting a good way beyond the rest, and then, running under the cornice of the chapels ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... in church which is an admirable one for reflection, but I cannot see or hear much that is going on in what we like to call the apse. There is a splendid stone pillar, a clustered column, right in front of me, and I am as much protected from the minister as Old Put's troops were from the British, behind the stone wall at Bunker's Hill. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... wouldn't be able to get hold of another (as he used to say) so easily. Anyhow, for one reason or another, it was 'Rubbish' and 'Stuff and nonsense' for the good lady. I overheard once young Mr. Apse himself say to her confidentially: 'I assure you, Mrs. Colchester, I am beginning to feel quite unhappy about the name she's getting for herself.' 'Oh,' says she, with her deep little hoarse laugh, 'if one ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... the Order of St. Francis, were gathered, in an attitude of attention with their hands crossed upon their wands of office, the great dignitaries of the Anti-Pyrotist association, Viscount Olive, M. de La Trumelle, Count Clena, the Duke d'Ampoule, and Prince des Boscenos. Father Agaric was in the apse with the teachers and pupils of St. Mael College. The right-hand transept and aisle were reserved for officers and soldiers in uniform, this side being thought the more honourable, since the Lord leaned his head to the right when he died on the Cross. The ladies ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... frescoes and coloured marbles, and surrounded by aisles and galleries, in which the inferior magistrates were hearing causes, and doing such justice as the complicated technicalities of Roman law chose to mete out. Through a crowd of anxious loungers the youth passed to the apse of the upper end, in which the Prefect's throne stood empty, and then turned into aside chamber, where he found himself alone with the secretary, a portly Chaldee eunuch, with a sleek pale face, small pig's eyes, and an enormous ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... which St Justus built, he and his successors, nothing remains but the foundations discovered in 1888. This church, which was very small, about forty-two feet long by twenty-eight feet in breadth, was furnished with an apse, but had ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... among them just such a church as this, with just such a belfry. Of architecture and its different styles I knew nothing; but, comparing the church before me with what I could recollect of the painting, I recognized every detail, from the cupola, high-set upon open arches, to the round, windowless apse in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... clover. Three doors give entrance from the atrium to the basilica, which is divided by rows of green marble columns into three aisles. The galleries spread out along the side aisles. The floor was in mosaic. In the apse, behind the altar, stood the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... like her name, looking at me now with her sad eyes, blue and clear still in spite of her almost seventy years, and full of the patience born of long struggle and acceptance! St. Etienne had drawn me as it had drawn her, and it was in the apse, the light streaming from the ancient windows, each one a marvel of color whose secret no man to-day has penetrated, that I saw first the patient face and the clasped hands of this suppliant, who ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... connected with churches. Use of the apse. Monastic communities. S. Pachomius. S. Benedict and his successors. Each House had a library. Annual audit of books. Loan on security. Modes of protection. Curses. Prayers for donors. Endowment of libraries. Use of the cloister. Development ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... are of brick, with stone dressings. In the Moore Park Road, which branches off the Fulham Road near the boundary, stands St. James's Church, an ugly brick building with no spire or tower, which was consecrated on June 28, 1867, and the apse was built out at the east end about a dozen years later. There is a row of stained-glass windows low down across the west end. Going back to Walham Green proper, we find a double row of almshouses, shut off from ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... thirteen hundred years old, began in 1733 to pull it down, to break up the beautiful capitals and columns of precious marbles, and to make out of the fragments the pavement of the new church we still see, begun in 1734 by Gian Francesco Buonamici da Rimini. Only the apse with its beautiful great mosaic remained for a few years till at last ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... practised this art with the most severe labour, that one would soon come who would give them more assistance with greater ease. It was Niccola also who in the year 1240 designed the church of S. Jacopo at Pistoia, and set some Tuscan masters to work there in mosaic, who did the vaulting of the apse. But although it was considered a difficult and costly thing at the time, it rather moves one to laughter and compassion to-day, and not to admiration, oh account of the poorness of the design, a defect which was prevalent not only in Tuscany, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the rooms at Montauto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern of a parlor, or ball-room, I remember to have seen only once. There was a painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... worn by the young, whose troubles were still to come, were black. These veils were carried in the hand during the earlier part of the rite. Throughout a very wide region of Southern France the custom prevails. The church belonged to different ages. Upon the exterior of the Romanesque apse were uncouth carvings in relief of strange animal figures. They were more like lions than any other beasts, but their outlines were such as ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the roof itself. And now observe this most interesting fact, that all the loveliest Gothic architecture in the world is based on the group of lines composed of the pointed arch and the gable. If you look at the beautiful apse of Amiens Cathedral—a work justly celebrated over all Europe—you will find it formed merely of a series of windows surmounted by pure gables of open work. If you look at the transept porches of Rouen, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse, its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early Plantagenets. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the churchyard was also crowded. The church barely held the procession itself and the ladies who, by influence, had been accommodated with seats in advance. Thousands of persons filled the churchyard, and to prevent them from crushing into the packed fane and bursting it at its weakest point, the apse, the doors had to be locked and guarded. Four women swooned during the service: neither Mrs Machin, senior, nor Nellie, was among the four. It was the first time that any one had been known to swoon at a religious service held in ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... seemed empty but for sound and color, there lingered among its shadows a few persons who loved it well. There were priests and a few worshipers. There was also Father Varennes, the Verger, and far away in one of the small chapels opening from the apse in the eastern end good Mother Meraut was down upon her knees, not praying as you might suppose, but scrubbing the stone floor. Mother Meraut was a wise woman; she knew when to pray and when to scrub, and upon occasion did both with equal energy ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... similar accident—desiring to transfer myself from Bourges to Auxerre—that I discovered the wonderful junction-town of Nevers, which, despite the guide-books, is more interesting than either of the others. It possesses a Gothic cathedral with an apse at either end, that looks as if two churches had collided and telescoped each other. There is also a Romanesque church at Nevers which is just as simple and as manly as either of the famous abbeys in Caen; and a chateau with rounded towers, which once ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... cathedral that stood before us in such grand proportions. The spires seemed to touch the skies. The west front was in deep shadow. We traced the outlines of flying buttresses, of heavier buttresses between the windows, of the beautiful apse. The windows, faintly lighted up, added wonderfully to the effect. Surely the church was not closed? We tried the west door, it yielded, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... arms folded close about the little form now breathing softly and at rest, while an agony of questioning filled her prayer to that beseeching Mater Dolorosa, who, wrapped in the clinging folds of her long blue robe, still leaned forward from the marble background of the apse, compassionate for the suffering ones of earth, with imploring hands and ceaseless dropping tears, symbol of love abounding—a symbol, too, of the dignity of those who suffer and are pure ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... lime in the court. I used to sit under it and have a glass of vin cris de Lorraine with the old people.... Over there, where that cinder-heap is, all their children are buried." He walked across to the grave-yard under a blackened wall—a bit of the apse of the vanished church—and sat down on a grave-stone. "If the devils have done this here—so close to us," he burst ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... the veined alabasters of San Miniato; and looked to the rich blue of the quinquipartite vault above, as to the mosaic of the older concha, for conspicuous aid in the color decoration of the whole; the northern builder burst through the walls of his apse, poured over the eastern altar one unbroken blaze, and lifting his shafts like pines, and his walls like precipices, ministered to their miraculous stability by an infinite phalanx of sloped buttress and glittering ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of the past. The use of gilded relief in the upper part recalls the methods of Pintoricchio, and the hint of the whole arrangement was doubtless taken from those semidomes which existed in many churches. But what an original idea it was to transform the flat wall of a room into the apse of a cathedral, and what a solemnity it imparts to the discussion that is going on! The upper part is formal in the extreme, as it need be for the treatment of such a theme, but even here there is variety as well as stateliness in the attitudes and the spacing. In the lower part ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... several peculiar features, comprising a nave with two west towers, side aisles, and chapels, filling up what would in other cathedrals be intervals between buttresses; north and south transepts, with an octagonal tower at their intersection; a choir with a polygonal apse, double aisles, with radiating chapels, and a Lady chapel at the east end. The nave, which is 100 feet high, consists of six bays, with triforium and lofty clerestory. The effect is exceedingly grand, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the southernmost examples, those of Dijon and Besancon, are of manifest Romanesque or Byzantine conception. Each, too, is somewhat reminiscent of the early German manner of building, the latter in respect to the double apse, which is often found across the Rhine, but seldom seen in France. The most northerly of all is at St. Omer, where are the somewhat battered remains of a satisfactory Gothic cathedral, although Amiens, not far to the ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... sat, telling each other all, on the step of the ruined chancel, among the lights and shadows of the apse. How unlike to stately Louvre's halls of statuary and cabinets of porcelain, or the Arcadian groves of Montpipeau! And yet how little they recked that they were in a beleaguered fortress, in the midst of ruins, wounded sufferers all around, themselves in hourly jeopardy. It was enough that they ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... converted into a mosque by the Turks, the roof is in good repair, and its magnificent proportions remain, but they are marred by the stopping of the windows with rough stones and mortar. The total length of the cathedral is 172 feet 6.5 inches. Length of apse (included in above) 30 feet 9 inches; breadth of apse 32 feet 3 inches; breadth of cathedral 74 feet 1 inch; circumference of pillars 15 feet 3 inches, there ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... nearest left-hand pillar of the canopy that covers the high altar, as you go up from the door. Constantine's church was founded, on the south side, within the lines of Nero's circus, outside of it on the north side, and parallel with its length. Most churches are built with the apse to the east, but Constantine's, like the present basilica, looked west, because from time immemorial the bishop of Rome, when consecrating, stood on the farther side of the altar from the people, facing them over it. And the church was consecrated ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... fear, the assembled thousands gazed on the god dimly revealed to them in the twilight, when suddenly, for a moment of solemn glory, a ray of the setting sun—a shaft of intense brightness—pierced the star-spangled apse of the niche and fell on the lips of the god as though to kiss ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... part of her—she kept before their eyes on the exterior of this ancient church in the market-place where her merchant-princes daily met, her admonition to uphold them in righteous dealing. One might decipher it wrought into the wall of the apse under the stones of the frieze, in quaint lettering that tempted to the perusal and endowed the mastered motto with the impressiveness of a rite—for the legend assumed a quality of mystery, being much ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... of the parish, had dug a grave in the half-acre cemetery behind the church,—a church well known, a classic church, with a square tower and pointed roof covered with slate, supported on the outside by strong corner buttresses. Behind the apse of the chancel, lay the cemetery, enclosed with a dilapidated wall,—a little field full of hillocks; no marble monuments, no visitors, but surely in every furrow, tears and true regrets, which were lacking to Ida Gruget. She was cast ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... carried off and thrown into the bog of Orsava during the revolution under Kossuth. It was, however, recovered and restored, and was worn by the present emperor at the splendid and picturesque ceremonial of his coronation at Pesth. The design reminds us of the mosaics in the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore and other churches at Rome, and it is extremely beautiful. It consists of an arrangement of medallions and inscriptions, with "metal-work" ornaments in bands alternated with smaller medallions. Yet the figures ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... St. Peter's Church that summer evening, and thought upon what she had just done, a great sadness filled Elisabeth's soul. The sun shone brightly through the western window, and wrote mystic messages upon the gray stone walls; but the lights of the east window shone pale and cold in the distant apse, where the Figure of the Crucified gleamed white upon a foundation of emerald. And as she looked at the Figure, which the world has wept over and worshipped for nineteen centuries, she realized that this was the Symbol of all that she was giving ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... Community of Villages 4. Diagram of Front of Emone (Front Hood of Roof and Front Platform and Portions of Front Timbers omitted, so as to show Interior) 5. Diagram of Transverse Section across Centre of Emone 6. Diagrammatic Sketch of Apse-like Projection of Roof of Emone and Platform Arrangements 7. Diagram Illustrating Positions of People during Performance at Big Feast 8. Mafulu Net Making (1st Line of Network) 9. Mafulu Net Making (2nd, 3rd, and 4th Lines of Network) 10. Mafulu Net Making (5th Line of Network, ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... to occupy the site of Mizpeh, the highest mountain near Jerusalem, where the national assemblies were held at the time of the Judges. The present mosque is dilapidated, but the substructure, which dates from the Frank period, is beautifully jointed. The apse is raised. The reputed tomb of Samuel is on the western side of the church. It is still called Nebi Samwil, venerated alike by Jew ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... the choir, with a line of white surpliced and furred canons on either side, and the vast baldachino in the midst, beneath which burned the six lights as they had burned day by day for more than a century; behind that again lay the high line of the apse-choir with the dim, window-pierced vault above where Christ reigned in majesty. He let his eyes wander round for a few moments before beginning his deliberate prayer, drinking in the glory of the place, listening to the thunderous chorus, the peal of the organ, and the thin mellow ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... a moment and then John continued, 'That dreadful addition of my mother's cannot remain in its present form; it is hideous, but it can be converted very easily into a chapel. It will not be difficult. A high-pitched timber roof, throwing out an apse at the end, and putting in mullioned and traceried windows ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... or upper floor, from which spectators may look down upon the interior, or, from the outer side, upon the open Forum. At the far end is a recess with a raised tribunal, shut off, if necessary, by railings. In other basilicas there may be an apse at this point, similarly enclosed. This serves as a court of justice, round which the curious may stand, or upon which listening spectators may gaze from the ends of the galleries above. Meanwhile up and down the open space of the nave all kinds of verbal business ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... make any Gothic architect take lodgings in its vicinity for a fortnight, though it was just now crowded with a forest of scaffolding for repairs in progress. Mrs. Goodman sat down outside, and Paula, entering, took a walk in the form of a horse-shoe; that is, up the south aisle, round the apse, and down the north side; but no figure of a melancholy young man sketching met her eye anywhere. The sun that blazed in at the west doorway smote her face as she emerged from beneath it ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Moscow. On Montmartre there is a picturesque, crowded spot that is pure Algiers. Low, clean little houses, with their copper-plates on the doors, and their private gardens, stand in line along typical English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees; while the whole circuit of the apse of Saint-Sulpice, Rue Ferou, Rue Cassette, lying placidly in the shadow of the great towers, roughly paved, with knockers on the front doors, seems to have been transplanted from some pious provincial city,—Tours or Orleans for instance, in the neighborhood of the cathedral ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... before the Throne . . . . and before the Throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal.' Here is exactly represented an arrangement of the altar familiar to the whole Eastern Church and to the early Church of England, in which it occupies the centre of an apse in front of the seats of the Bishop and Clergy, which are placed in the curved part of the wall. And, although there is no reason to think that the font ever stood near the altar, yet nothing appears more likely than that the 'sea of glass like unto ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... temple which Hadrian consecrated, and the site of the Ulpian Library which was divided into two chambers—one for Greek books, and the other for Latin; and finally the situation of the basilica, opening on to the forum and with its apse in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... screen. [parts of a church: list] chancel, quire, choir, nave, aisle, transept, vestry, crypt, golgotha, calvary, Easter sepulcher; stall, pew; pulpit, ambo[obs3], lectern, reading desk, confessional, prothesis[obs3], credence, baldachin, baldacchino[obs3]; apse, belfry; chapter house; presbytery; anxious-bench, anxious-seat; diaconicum[Lat], jube[obs3]; mourner's bench, mourner's seat. [exterior adjacent to a church] cloisters, churchyard. monastery, priory, abbey, friary, convent, nunnery, cloister. Adj. claustral, cloistered; monastic, monasterial; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... court on the south side. More even than most Gothic buildings, the Sainte Chapelle is supported entirely by its massive piers, the wall being merely used for enclosure, and consisting for the most part of lofty windows. As in most French Gothic buildings, the choir terminates in a round apse, whereas English cathedrals have usually a square end. The beautiful light flche or spire in the center has been restored. Observe the graceful leaden angel, holding a cross, on the summit of the chevet or round apse. To see the facade, stand well back opposite it, where ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... buildings, which once were filled with lads from different Melanesian isles—farm buildings, barns, &c. Last of all, the little chapel of kauri wood, stained desk, like the inside of a really good ecclesiastical building in England, porch S.W. angle, a semicircular apse at the west, containing a large handsome stone font, open seats of course. The east end very simple, semicircular apse, small windows all full of stained glass, raised one step, no rails, the Bishop's chair on the north side, bench on the south. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering's room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house. At one end of the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch flashed up a succession of brilliant lights ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... opening from a cloister (C). The inner court is surrounded by a cloister (EE), from which open the monks' cells (II). In the centre of this court stands the catholicon or conventual church, a square building with an apse of the cruciform domical Byzantine type, approached by a domed narthex. In front of the church stands a marble fountain (F), covered by a dome supported on columns. Opening from the western side of the cloister, but actually standing in the outer court, is the refectory (G), a large cruciform ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the bridge, and there widened into glassy lakelets, as if weary from the mad plunge over a distant rocky ledge in mid-stream, whence the dull steady roar of the "falls" thrilled the atmosphere, like the "tremolo" in a dim cathedral, where fading daylight dies on painted apse and gilded pipes. As a chessboard the squares of buildings were spread out, defined by wide streets, where humanity and its traffic sped, busy as ants. In a green plot, the sombre facade of the court-house surmounted by an eyeless ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Otterbourne Church, when an apse had been added to the choir, and several other alterations made, with the view of rendering it more suitable for devout worship than knowledge or means had made practicable when the church was built; and other alterations have since been made in the ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... and Mr. Hopkins replied with an afternoon musical vespers: how a vested choir of boys was installed in the brown church, and a cornet and a harp appeared in the gallery of the white church: how candles were lighted in the Episcopalian apse, (whereupon Erastus Whipple resigned from the vestry because he said he knew that he was "goin' to act ugly"), and a stereopticon threw illuminated pictures of Palestine upon the wall behind the Congregational pulpit (which induced Abijah Lemon to refuse to pass the plate the next Sunday, because ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... which are supported by the pillars of the great nave. Thus it is impossible for the boldest curiosity, if any such should dare to mount the narrow balustrade of these galleries, to see farther into the choir than the octagonal stained windows which pierce the apse ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... over his memories of the morning, Durtal saw again, as he closed his eyes, at the end of the semicircular apse, the procession of red and black robes, white surplices, joining in front of the altar, descending the steps together, making their way together to the catafalque, dividing again on each aide, joining to mix afresh in the great ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... entirely overshadowed by its Roman neighbour, Downside Abbey. It is a poor little building, with a debased tower; but preserves one or two remnants of Norm. work (e.g. a S. doorway and a fragment of the original apse). Within is a small 15th cent. stone ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... doubt the destruction was the work of the Danes, who plundered the whole of this part of Yorkshire. The church that exists today is of Transitional Norman date, and the beautiful little crypt, which has an apse, nave and aisles, is coeval with ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... Christ Child," a life-size painting, copied in mosaic for the Conrad memorial, St. Mary's Church, Wayne, Pennsylvania; "The Arts" and "The Sciences," executed in association with Charles R. Lamb, for the Sage Memorial Apse designed by ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... by degrees the vast space of the apse before us became alive with forms. At first these were vague and shadowy, not to be separated or distinguished. Then they became so real that until he was reproved by a kick, Tommy growled at them and threatened to break out into one of ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... Renaissance has passed over these churches, defacing sometimes the chancel, sometimes the nave. One of the most interesting of the churches of Ravenna[120] has "the cupola disfigured by wretched paintings which mislead the eye in following the lines of the building". Another[121] has its apse covered with those gilt spangles and clouds and cherubs which were the eighteenth century's ideal of impressive religious art. The Duomo, which should have been one of the mosf interesting of all the monuments of Ravenna, was almost entirely rebuilt ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... choir and apse we found ourselves in the midst of complexity. The ownership of the different altars with their gilt ornaments, of the swinging lamps, of the separate doorways of the Greeks and the Armenians and the Latins, was ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows, "high in color," which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers to hesitate between the rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse? And what would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral? He would remember that it was the color with which the hangman smeared ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... sketched for you, when I was last at Pisa, a few arches of the apse of the duomo, and a small portion of the sculpture of the font of the Temple of St. John. I have placed them in your rudimentary series, as examples of "quella vecchia maniera Greca, goffa e sproporzionata." My own judgment respecting them is,—and it is a judgment founded on knowledge ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... before stated, in A.D. 1083, by Simeon, in the Norman style; the Choir, with its apse or semicircular end—altered however to a square end before it had proceeded far—the central Tower, the great Transept, and part of the Nave were begun by him, but were not finished at his death in 1093; of this work, only the ground-story of the great Transept now remains; the original ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... from those surrounding aisles branched off a series of radiating chapels or cells, each dedicated to some separate saint. This conception of the company of Christ with His saints, (the eastern chapel of all being the Virgin's,) was at the root of the entire disposition of the apse with its supporting and dividing buttresses and piers; and the architectural form can never be well delighted in, unless in some sympathy with the spiritual imagination out of which it rose. We talk foolishly and feebly of symbols ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... of the Cloth Hall, the highest thing in Ypres. The tower is a skeleton. As for the rest of the building, it may be said that some of the walls alone substantially remain. The choir—the earliest part of the Cathedral—is entirely unroofed, and its south wall has vanished. The apse has been blown clean out. The Early Gothic nave is partly unroofed. The transepts are unroofed, and of the glass of the memorable rose window of the south transept not a trace is left—so far as I ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... ecclesiology, ecclesiolatry, ecclesiasticism, parish, hierarch, hierarchy, hierocracy, hierolatry, hierology, hierarchism, irenics, cure, evangelical, verger, beadle, chancel, clearstory, nave, transept, vestry, presbytery, prebend, prebendary, lectern, apse, irenicon, living, benefice, sinecure, glebe, see, prelacy, convocation, synod, conference, conclave, consistory, crypt, schism, orthodoxy, heterodoxy, unchurch, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the palace. When we entered the place in charge of a guard, as though we were prisoners, we found some hundreds of Abati gathered there who were seated in orderly rows upon benches. At the farther end, in an apse-shaped space, sat the Child of Kings herself on a gilded or perhaps a golden chair of which the arms terminated in lions' heads. She was dressed in a robe of glittering silver, and wore a ceremonial veil ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Its streets are narrow and irregular, but the town is surrounded by wide boulevards lined with trees. The only building of consequence is the church of St Julian (12th and 13th centuries) in the Romanesque style of Auvergne, of which the choir, with its apse and radiating chapels and the mosaic ornamentation of the exterior, is a fine example. Brioude is the seat of a sub-prefect, and of tribunals of first instance and of commerce. The plain in which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of the first battlements set on the swamp grew, by the twelfth century, to the lines of the modern boulevards on the north and west, but at the Tour Jeanne d'Arc they turned east and southwards, round the apse of St. Ouen, down the Rue de l'Epee and the Rue du Ruisseau by way of the Rue des Espagnols to the Porte Guillaume Lion and the quay. The walls besieged by the English under Henry V. had expanded almost exactly to ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... through which the morning sunlight was streaming slantwards like the light through the windows of a clerestory, its running water below, its rustling leaves above, and the chirping of its birds on every side, making a sound that was like the chanting of a choir in some far-off apse and the rumbling of ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... illustrate this. In studying vaulting, we once got so far as to understand how oblong vaults were thrown across a nave, while square vaults covered the aisles. A class of fifteen or twenty students were then asked to find out how a semi-circular or polygonal apse could be added to a choir roofed on this system. In the course of a couple of hours' figuring I found that they had worked out among them all the five solutions of this problem, which in the Middle Ages it took one or two hundred years to develop. This was very ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol 1, No. 11, November, 1895 - The Country Houses of Normandy • Various
... still remains. This has a semi-conical roof with chevron table moulding under it, and two windows—one of original Norman work, the other a three-light Early English window. A sacristy of Early English date stands to the east of the apsidal chapel, and occupies the space between the apse and the south choir wall. At the south-east corner of the transept there is a circular stair turret corresponding to some extent with the turret at the north-east angle of the north transept; this, in the second stage, becomes octagonal in section, and rises above the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... composition, whilst the dresses of the other personages fall in broad masses to the ground. The light and shade are cleverly handled, and the spaciousness of the scene is enhanced by the rows of columns and the apse of mosaics behind Solomon's head. The painter was clearly versed in the laws of perspective, and indicates depth inwards by placing the figures behind one another on a tesselated pavement or on the receding steps of the throne, giving at the same time a sense of atmospheric space between one ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... radius.[226] A smaller edifice of basilican type is generally supposed to have been a Christian church. It stands east and west, and consists of a nave 30 feet long by 10 broad, flanked by 5-feet aisles, with a narthex of 7 feet (extending right across the building) at the east end, and at the west an apse of 10 feet radius, having in the centre a tesselated pavement 6 feet square, presumably ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... called Testudo, and which we now call the nave. On each side of this were rows of pillars, which formed what we should call the side-aisles, and which the ancients called Porticus. The end of the Testudo was curved, like the apse of some of our churches, and was called Tribunal, from causes being heard there. Hence the term Tribune is applied to that part of the Roman churches which is behind the high altar."—Burton's Antiq. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... the south side of the chancel arch is a rood-loft staircase turret, of which both the upper and lower doorways remain. The chancel east end is apsidal, modern, and out of keeping with the rest of the structure. There are three two-light windows in the three faces of the apse. In one of these the present rector, Canon Arthur Wright, has placed a two-light memorial window, to his deceased wife, of some beauty. South of the Communion table, attached to the wall as a credence table, is ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... people filled the church, crowded together in the old black pews, standing closely thronged in the nave and aisles, pressing shoulder to shoulder even in the two chapels on the right and left of the apse, a vast gathering of pale men and women whose eyes were sad and in whose faces was written the history of their nation. The mighty shafts and pilasters of the Gothic edifice rose like the stems of giant trees in a primeval forest from ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... the apse behind the chief of the ten altars gazes down the striking image of the Virgin, executed in ancient mosaic, with her hands raised in prayer, whom the people reverently call "The Indestructible Wall." This, with other mosaics ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... projecting porch was adorned with blue campanula, like the first page of an illuminated missal. The side which communicated with the parsonage, toward the north, was not less decorated; the wall was gray and red with moss and lichen; but the other side and the apse, around which lay the cemetery, was covered with a wealth of varied blooms. A few trees, among others an almond-tree—one of the emblems of hope—had taken root in the broken wall; two enormous ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the arch of a door was a little row of angels' heads carved in stone, but when we touched them they fell to powder. The heat inside must have been terrific, for all the features of the church had disappeared, and we were surrounded by merely a mass of debris. In the apse a few fragments of old gold brocade buried beneath masses of brick and mortar were all that remained to show where ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... appeared a fully developed plan for places of Christian worship. The normal Christian church of the fourth century of our era was an aisled building with the entrance at one end, and a semi-circular projection known as the apse at the other. The body of the building, the nave with its aisles, was used by the congregation, the quire of singers occupying a space, enclosed within low walls, at the end nearest the apse. In the apse, raised above the level of the nave, was the altar, behind which, ranged round the wall, ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... the great apse of the cathedral slanted over the end of the Deanery garden, leaving the house in the blaze of the afternoon sun, and divided the old red-brick wall into a vivid contrast of tones. The peace of centuries brooded over the place. No outside convulsions could ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... chapel crypt, until the little building has become a place of pilgrimage. In the larger chapel, also, tablets and windows were erected from time to time; and the mosaic and other decorations of the memorial apse, recently erected as a place of repose for the remains of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sage, are a beautiful development of the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... attempt at decoration has been made. It seems a shapeless pile of towers and machicolated and battlemented curtains, falling into almost complete ruin. But on passing through the single entrance, one finds oneself in a well-proportioned church of nave and side aisles, a south chapel, and an apse. Each buttress of the apse is battlemented outside and forms a turret, and two strong towers are adapted internally to serve as a transept and ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... to one so much that is beautiful and interesting in architecture and history. It was a lovely afternoon even for summer and we passed in and out under the superb arches of the bridges, beholding the noble apse of Notre Dame with the twin towers rising beyond, structures associated with grim events of the Revolution, the masonry of the quays and the master work of Haussmann who was then putting a new face upon the old city. Now all was bright and no thought of danger entered ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... of what has proved to be the north-west semi-circular exedra of the Great Bath was found, and six to nine years later a part of the south-west rectangular exedra of the same bath. The discovery of 1799 (or rather 1809) is shown on the Rev. Prebendary Scarth's map as being the northern apse of a bath on the western end of the great bath, as suggested by Dr. Sutherland's plan and was to correspond with Lucas's Bath. The semi-circular exedra discovered subsequently to a deed dated Sept. 1808 (therefore in that year or subsequently) is ...
— The Excavations of Roman Baths at Bath • Charles E. Davis
... church, in which the apses or chapels radiate round the choir aisle. The two earliest examples (11th and 12th century) are found in the churches of St Hilaire, Poitiers, and Notre Dame-du-Port, Clermont, where there are four apses. A more usual number is five, and the central apse, being of larger dimensions, becomes the Lady chapel. This was the case in Westminster Abbey, where Henry III. introduced the chevet into England; Henry VII.'s chapel is built on the site of the original Lady chapel, which must have been of exceptional ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... we had strolled along the road which Nourrigat had originally indicated as the direction of our friend Pistre. Presently he led us into the church, a humble little village sanctuary. A shell had carried away half the apse, and sadly damaged the altar. The belfry had been demolished and the old bronze bell split into four pieces had been carefully fitted together by some loving hand, and stood just ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Mr. C—— called and took me over to Murano in a beautiful pair-oared boat that simply flew. There I saw a wonderful apse filled with mosaic of dull gold, wherein is set a blue-black figure of the Madonna, ten heads high and ten centuries old, which almost made me become a Mariolatrist on the spot. She stands leaning up the bend with two pale hands lifted in ghostly blessing. Underfoot the floor ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... d'Alsace may be made, but the place itself must on no account be missed. No more exquisite church in the region, and most beautifully is it placed amid sloping green hills! It may be said to consist of nave and apse only. There are but two lateral, chapels, evidently of a later period than the rest of the building. The interior is of great beauty, and no less so the faade and side porch, both very richly decorated. One's first feeling is of amazement ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... work which runs round the summit of the apse is another beautiful feature of the exterior of the eastern part of the church. It seems to be formed of stalks from a thorn tree intertwining in such a way as to form triangular openings. This parapet or coronet is as much like lacework ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... you a carte postale of a battery passing behind the apse of the village church, just as a ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... service in St. Andrew's, a fine colonial cathedral, prettily situated on a broad grass lawn among clumps of trees near the sea. There is some stained glass in the apse, but in the other windows, including those in the clerestory, Venetian shutters take the place of glass, as in all the European houses. There are thirty-two punkahs, and the Indians who worked them, anyone of whom might have been the model ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to be a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of notice that his eastern front, conspicuous from the rear as he bends forward over his machine, shows a patched and jointed mullionry that is not unlike the tracery of some cathedral's rounded apse. But I go too far in imagery. Plain speech is best. ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... destroyed, as we suppose. Some of the stones are covered with white plaster, showing they are parts of the interior of a building, and they are of the same red sandstone as the remains of the transept apse, which was undoubtedly built ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... Or-San-Michele was being built; the Loggia of the Lansquenets was scarcely begun; the baptistery had as yet only one of its famous doors of bronze; the cathedral disappeared under scaffoldings; the workmen were busy with the nave and the apse. Giotto's campanile had been finished by his pupil Gaddi, the Ponte Vecchio, which did not deserve that name any better than the palace, had been rebuilt by the same Gaddi, and along the causeway which continued it, through clusters of cypress and olive trees, the road led up to San Miniato, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Apse.—An architectural term descriptive of the semicircular or polygonal shape in which the Chancel is frequently built. From a Greek word meaning a joining; also a bow, an arch, ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... nephew, Jehan le Bouteiller. These stone carved screens are quite usual in the Ile de France. The finest are at Chartres, where they go straight around the ambulatory, the whole choir being fenced in, as it were, about the apse, by this exquisite work. This screen is more effective, too, for being left in the natural colour of the stone: where these sculptures are painted, as they usually are, they suggest wood carvings, and have not as much dignity as when the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... and in their adaptation of this form of building, the early Christians devoted this place to the purposes of an altar. This, by an easy and natural transition, is thought to have given rise to the formation of the semi-circular recess at one end of the building, known as the apse (from the Latin apsis, a bow or arch), which is still to be found in some ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... meet some of the confraternita, past the great gazing statue of Brunellesco, till, at the top of Via del Proconsolo, I shall turn to look at the Duomo, which, seen from there, seems like a great Greek cross under a dome, that might cover the world. And so I shall pass round the apse of the Cathedral till I come to the door of the Cintola, where Nanni di Banco has marvellously carved Madonna in an almond-shaped glory: and this is one of the fairest things in Florence. And I shall go on my way, past the Gate of Paradise to the open ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... compartments above and below. Quite at the northern end of Holland Road is the modern church of St. John the Baptist; the interior is all of white stone, and the effect is very good. There is a rose window at the west end, and a carved stone chancel screen of great height. The church ends in an apse, and has a massive stone reredos set with coloured panels representing the saints. All this part of Kensington which lies to the west of Addison Road is very modern. In the 1837 map, St. Barnabas Church, built seven years earlier, and a line of houses ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... years of the present century, constructed a plan from the reports of travellers, in which he divided the building into a nave and two aisles, with an ante-chapel in front, and a sacrarium at the further extremity.[627] M. Gerhard also added, beyond the sacrarium, an apse, of which General Di Cesnola found no traces, but which may possibly have disappeared in the course of the sixty years which separated the observations of M. Gerhard's informants from the researches of the later traveller. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... tower into the church below, apparently for the bell-ropes. In the church are remains of early painting, and some shallow sculpture, the character of which appears to be of the twelfth century. Adjoining to the church, on the south side, is a detached chapel of transition Norman work, with an apse vaulted with good ribs and vaulting shafts. A considerable part of the old painting is preserved; some of the ribs are painted with zigzags. Under this chapel is a crypt or cave cut out of the rock called the Grotto of St. Emilion, with a spring of water in it. The work is of the same ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... baldacchino was given by one rich old lady, the pavement of the church by another; the Duke of Birmingham contributed a thurible; Oxford Old Siltonians decorated the Lady Chapel; Cambridge Old Siltonians found the gold mosaic for the dome of the apse. Father Rowley begged money for the fabric far and wide, and the architect, the contractors, and the workmen, all Chatsea men, gave of their best and asked as little as possible in return. The new church was to be opened on Easter morning. But early in Lent the ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... next morning, December third, the weather being cloudy, Max, accompanied by his seconds and the Pole, arrived on the little meadow which then surrounded the apse of the church of the Capuchins. There he found Philippe and his seconds, with Benjamin, waiting for him. Potel and Mignonnet paced off twenty-four feet; at each extremity, the two attendants drew a line on the earth with a spade: the combatants were not allowed to ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... skylight in the top. High up on either side of it are the three small openings mentioned when speaking of the exterior. A curtain hangs in front of them, and in point of fact they were never used. In the west wall is an apse with a gilt semi-dome, which appears in some of Lord Leighton's pictures. Across the east end runs a gallery at about eight feet from the floor with bookshelves under it on either side, and in the middle a broad passage leads into the glass studio, and still ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... not possible to get the complete expression of these ravines, any more than of the apse of a Gothic cathedral, into a picture, as their elevation cannot be drawn on a vertical plane in front of the eye, the head needing to be thrown back, in order to measure their height, or stooped to penetrate their depth. But the structure and expression of the entrance to one of them have been ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... 1125, but pulled down and rebuilt by the family in a slightly different position in 1278. On this occasion is recorded a remarkable anticipation of the feats of American engineering: "As there was an ancient and very fine picture of Christ upon the apse of the Church, it was thought a great pity that so fine a work should be destroyed. And so they contrived an ingenious method by which the apse bodily was transported without injury, picture and all, for a distance of 25 ells, and firmly set upon the foundations where it now ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... with less sympathy here than in the deserted streets of the Quartier St. Marc, whose antique houses maintained a friendly silence. They returned to the heart of the old quarter where they were most liked; they went as far as St. Saturnin, the cathedral, whose apse was shaded by the garden of the chapter, a sweet and peaceful solitude, from which a beggar drove them by himself asking an alms from them. They were building rapidly in the neighborhood of the railway station; a new quarter was growing up there, and they bent their steps in that direction. ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... restaurant occupies the entire left transept, with a great brick fireplace at the far end. There is another fireplace in the centre of the side of the arm beyond the crossing; that part which would correspond in a cathedral to the choir and apse being given over to the uses of a reading and writing room. The right transept forms a theatre, on occasion, terminating as it does with a stage. The central floor spaces are kept everywhere free except in the restaurant, the sides and angles being filled in ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... with polished oak rail in front, resting on carved pillars. On this is a Reading Desk and Communion Table. The carpet and communion cushion were presented by the late Mr. T. Tapling, carpet manufacturer, of London, who was a native of Lincolnshire. In the centre of the apse is a carved oak chair, having the monogram I.H.S., which was given by Mr. C. Blyton. In front, standing on the Chapel floor, is a harmonium by Alexandre & Sons, of Paris; it is a fine instrument, having four sets of vibrators and 14 stops. It was obtained partly at the cost of the congregation, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... what I had not been able to see from the fact of my approach from the west of the clearing. The eastern end of the hut was not built squarely as the other, but roughly rounded in what elsewhere I should unhesitatingly have called an apse, and since on either side there were still visible a couple of those narrow pointed windows, while the floor space was practically empty, the suggestion of a chapel was complete. I ought, perhaps, to have guessed it before, but the thought ...
— The Priest's Tale - Pere Etienne - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • Robert Keable
... rise of land to the left of the Thune. As all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very pretty one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the upper end of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a parsonage, its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a graveyard. The sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which was originally built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on land which she had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from which the eye looked down upon Blangy, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... thenceforward to the present time used by them as a place of worship. The building was of much architectural interest. The old Christian nave and aisles were preserved intact; but the Jews had destroyed the apse which must have existed, and had replaced it by a square Eastern sanctuary, and over the niche, within which were preserved the Holy Books of the Law, had adorned the wall with numerous Hebrew texts executed in gesso, forming an interesting example of Jewish taste ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... of Hertfordshire churches—rare elsewhere—is the narrow tapering fleche, or leaded spire; a feature almost wholly absent is the apse, which is, I believe, present only at Bengeo, ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... side; and beyond, yet higher, on this side of the high altar, rose the lofty air of the vault ninety feet above the pavement. To left and right opened the two western transepts, and from where he knelt he could make out the altar of St. Martin in the further one, with its apse behind. The image of St. Pancras himself stood against a pillar with the light from the lamp beneath flickering against his feet. But Christopher's eyes soon came back to the centre, beyond the screen, where a row of blackness on either side ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... the flowers on the altar and the crucifix above it. The dawn flowed in silently and coldly; the birds stirred faintly; and the white mists on the lawn and fields outside made their way through the open windows, and dimmed the glow of color on the walls and in the apse. ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a long serpentine trench stretching from the Alps to the sea. Only then did the spirit of France draw breath for a moment, and the next flash as of lightning showed her offering thanks and making supplications before the white statue of Jeanne d'Arc in the apse of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, sacred to innumerable memories. On the Feast of St Michael 10,000 of the women of Paris were kneeling under the dark vault, and on the broad space in front of ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... devout Paschal to adorn the church that had been so signally favored. All the Art of the time (and at that time the arts flourished only in the service of the Church) was called upon to assist in making the new basilica magnificent. The mosaics which were set up to adorn the apse and the arch of triumph were among the best works of the century, and, with colors still brilliant and design still unimpaired, they hold their place at the present day, and carry back the thought and the imagination of the beholder a thousand years into the very heart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... for nearly a century had been rising by the united exertions of the burghers, without any assistance from without. The foundation had been laid in 1377; and at length, in the year of grace 1472, the crown of the apse had been closed in, and matters were so forward that Master Gottfried's stall work was already in ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are some remains of stalls in the apse of the Cathedral which were commissioned from Bernardino da Lendinara in 1501, though not made by him owing to the defalcations of a dishonest steward. In 1519 the Chapter of the Cathedral renewed the contract with Pietro de' Rizzardi and Bernardino, ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... unfortunate thing for the poor children. We are thinking of a plan of living which will, I hope, be more convenient than this is; but we have not yet decided what to do.' At this minute a carriage and pair of horses became visible through one of the angular windows of the apse, in the act of turning in from the highway towards the park gate. The boy who answered to the name of Joey sprang up from the table with the promptness of a Jack-in-the-box, and ran out at the door. Everybody turned as the carriage ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... goats was all about them as they sat before the cafe in the sun under a bare acacia tree, looking at the tightly proportioned brick arcades of the mudejar apse of the church opposite. Don Alonso was in the cafe ordering; the dumpling-man had disappeared. Telemachus got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs. "Ouf," he said, "I'm tired." Then he walked over to the grey horse that stood with hanging head and drooping knees hitched ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... St Placid, have no relation to the present narrative, which opens when the ladies Ebag began to seek for a new organist. The new church of St Placid owed its magnificent existence to the Ebag family. The apse had been given entirely by old Caiaphas Ebag (ex-M.P., now a paralytic sufferer) at a cost of twelve thousand pounds; and his was the original idea of building the church. When, owing to the decline ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... forward to the carved stone balustrade of the high gallery, and gazed down from the height upon the scene below. The multitude of worshipers surged like crested waves blown obliquely on a shingly shore. For the apse of the Christian church is not built so that, facing it, the true believer shall look towards Mecca, and the Mussulmans have made their mihrab—their shrine—a little to the right of what was once the altar, in the true direction of the sacred city. The long lines of matting ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... is always pure, and often severe; but this chapel is remarkable, even among the severest forms, for the absence of decoration. Its plan, seen in the marginal figure on p. 26, is a pure oblong, with a narrow advanced tribune, terminating in a trilateral apse. Selvatico quotes from the German writer Stieglitz some curious observations on the apparent derivation of its proportions, in common with those of other buildings of the time, from the number of sides of its apse. Without entering ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... small fourteenth-century church, I found that it had been decorated for a funeral. A broad band of black drapery, upon which had been sewn at intervals Death's heads and tears, cut out of white calico, was hung against the wall of the apse, and carried far down each side of the nave. To me all those grinning white masks were needless torture to the mourners; but here again we are brought to recognise that taste is ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... sister in the shape of the Museo di Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, situated in the Piazza opposite the apse; and we should go there now. This museum, which is at once the smallest and, with the exception of the Natural History Museum, the cheapest of the Florentine museums, for it costs but half a lira, is notable for containing the two cantorie, or singing galleries, made for the cathedral, one ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... nothing yet to adore, except up there to the left, where a very pale glimmer shone on polished marble among the shadows before the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. There was one other exception; for overhead, against the half-lighted apse, where a belated sacristan still moved about, himself a shadow, busy with the last preparations of the High Altar—there burgeoned out the ominous silhouette of the vast hanging cross, but so dark that the tortured Christ upon it was invisible.... Yet surely that ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... of the Guards' Institute was devoted to the purpose of a complete internal reconstruction. The work was put into the hands of Sir G. E. Street, R.A., who carried it out in the Lombardian style, with an apse at the eastern end, and ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... afternoon they walked down the hill towards the river, that flowed through a quarter of tottering, peak-gabled houses and mills, from which came a sound of grinding wheels. Above them, towering over gardens full of pear trees in bloom, the apse of the cathedral bulged against the pale sky. On a narrow and very ancient bridge they stopped and looked at the water, full of a shimmer of blue and green and grey from the sky and from the vivid new leaves of the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... building is surmounted by a high belfry tower. In 1883-84 a thorough investigation of the church took place. The interior was restored in the Italian Renaissance style, the architect employed being T. Harris. An apse was added and other alterations made. The necessary funds were raised by a bazaar held in the Portman Rooms, Baker Street, in which all the features of the old Marylebone Gardens were reproduced. Close beside the church are the Central National Schools of St. Marylebone, with a higher grade ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... and more perfect than this; the semicircular apse is entire, and there are remains of other buildings attached to the church. It stands on high ground, and commands a ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... enter and stroll about the desolate interior, crowned by a tiny Romanesque chapel of the twelfth century, that well deserves its name of Our Lady of the Fair View (Notre Dame de Belvezet), with a graceful apse (restored). From its summit, or from the tall old watch-tower of the monastery, a marvelous view is obtained of the gaping ruins of the Charterhouse of Avignon, the County Venaissin, the Cevennes, Mount Ventoux, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... north front along the apse to the Chapel of Henry VII., and, as we turn the corner and have a clear view of the beautiful Early English Chapter House, with its flying buttresses, rejoice in the absence of the houses which were formerly close ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... prodigious radiance of the Basilica above. Cut in the rock, the crypt formed two narrow passages, parted by a massive block of stone which upheld the nave, and conducting to a subterranean chapel under the apse, where some little lamps remained burning both day and night. A dim forest of pillars rose up there, a mystic terror reigned in that semi-obscurity where the mystery ever quivered. The chapel walls remained bare, like the very stones of the tomb, in which all men must some ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... gone through different phases. It is given in the mosaics of S. Apollinare in Classe, at Ravenna (Sixth Century), in that reticence of form and emblematical character significant of classic Art. By the uninitiated the subject would not be readily deciphered. In the centre of the domed apse is a large jewelled cross, in the middle of which is the head of Christ. This represents the Lord. On each side are bust-lengths of Moses and Elijah, while below are three sheep, emblems of the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... passed the bridge, when, glancing to the left, he saw a fifth person in the landscape—a man under a sycamore near the church, gazing up, with hung jaw, at the apse window—dressed in a grey jacket, but a clerical hat, and he had a note-book, in which he wrote, or drew. Hogarth, whose mind was in weathercock state, rolled the barrow to the hill, left it, went stealing fleetly up, and gripped the man's collar, to whisper: "In the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... frames by hail and tempest. But the main body of the cathedral seemed yet as massively intact as when the master-builders of the twentieth century had taken down the last scaffold, and when the gigantic organ had first pealed its "Laus Deo" through the vaulted apse. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... completeness and security, for no matter how far we go in any one direction, we have to proceed along a line which brings us back to our starting point; in following to the top the movement of the curved line of a dome or an apse, the continuation of the same line carries us down on the other side to a point corresponding to the one from which we set out; if ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... mass at St. Etienne's in the morning. I had only just left father, but Mademoiselle Adelaide took me with her, and a priest sent us up into the triforium—you understand what the triforium is? a gallery in the apse looking down on the choir. The triforium at St. Etienne's is wide enough to drive a coach and four round; at the Augustines, where we went once to see three sisters take the white veil, it is quite narrow, and without anything to prevent you falling over—a dizzy place. ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... his guards went down from the town to where the faggot burned, near the road upon a rock was a chantry, it stood at a cliff's edge steep and sheer, and it turned to the sea-breeze; in the apse of it were windows glazed. Then Tristan said ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... again renewed, in the same way. The Pope and his cortege disappeared behind the Confession, behind the High Altar, and presently, Lucy, craning her neck to the right, could see dimly in the furthest distance, against the apse, and under the chair of St. Peter, the chair of Leo XIII. and the white shadow, motionless, erect, within it, amid a court of cardinals and diplomats. As for the mass that followed, it had its moments of beauty for the girl's wondering ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Ste. Petronelle showed the way to the little side chapel, close to the noble apse. There, beneath the six altar-candles, a priest was hurrying through a mass in a rapid ill-pronounced manner, while, besides his acolyte, worshippers were very few. Only the light fell on the edges of a dark-green ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge |
