The place set aside for the administration of justice, the tribunal, was ordinarily an apse projecting from the rear end.
The two smaller apsidal niches at the rear were no higher than the colonnade, but the central apse projected above and terminated in a marble pediment (Fig.
At the rear of the apse and in the walls at the sides were niches for the statues of members of the imperial family and of those who had rendered important services to the city.
This difference in height, taken with other indications, obliges us to conclude that the central room was treated as a paved court open to the sky; only the apse and the wings were roofed.
Opening into the main room at the rear is a large apse (Fig.
The design of the pavilion is suggested by that of a shrine, such a shrine as the one in the apse of the sanctuary of the City Lares (Fig.
The small rooms of irregular shape at the sides of the apse (11) were light courts, left open to the sky in order to furnish light to the corridor at the rear, which was shut off from the colonnade.
At times birds would fly across the deserted apse uttering a shrill cry.
The whole great carcase of the nave and the aisles, the transept and the apse was standing.
The roofs of the nave, transept, and apse were of equal height above the entablature, which was decorated with simple mouldings.
However, it was these portions of the transept and the apse which had the least suffered.
Then, as he passed the apse of St. Peter's, the enormity of the colossus was brought home to him more strongly than ever: it rose like a giant bouquet of architecture edged by empty expanses of pavement sprinkled with fine weeds.
Nave of five bays, quire of three, triple apseto the east, clumsy-looking tower to the west.
Built into the south wall of the apse is a Runic stone--here sketched--put up to the memory of his father by Sigvid, who had fared to England and come safely back.
Its nave is vaulted in two bays and flanked by western turrets; the roof of the apse is sustained by four clustered pillars bearing pointed arches.
The quire and apse with the central space and one bay of the nave are higher in floor-level than the rest of the church, and underneath is a crypt whose vaulting rests on a row of square columns, and whose small windows open to the aisles.
The clearstorey has no passage along its windows, but round the apse there is an extra arcade between it and the blindstorey, which greatly improves the effect.
Both consist of nave and aisles all of the same height, with a short quire ending in a buttressed triple apseprojecting from the east; both were Romanesque altered to the so-called Decorated style.
This remarkable little building, like several others of its class, consists of nave with aisle all round, aisled chancel with apseand an open cloister girdling the structure.
Round the apse these two tiers of arches rest on shafts of granite, elsewhere stone is very sparingly used for capitals and a few other details.
Perhaps this light represents part of a design for the apse which was afterwards modified in order to get more figures in.
Five of the seven great lancets of the clerestory of the apse are devoted to the glorification of the Virgin Mother, or perhaps one should say, to the fact of the Virgin Birth.
They have been collected and placed in the chapels of the apse of the church, embedded in garishly coloured ornament--the work of M.
The seven great lancets of the apse are given up to the glorification of the Virgin, the especial patroness of Chartres.
The other six lights of the apse have each three figures or figure subjects, set one above the other in elongated medallions,--Plate XI.
One of the chapels in the apse is remarkable for the charming use of heraldry in the border.
These remains, on examination, proved to have belonged to the east end of a building, which, in this direction, terminated in an apse that occupied almost the entire width.
The southern junction of this apse was found first within the present church; and later, in lowering a gas main under the road outside, the north-east corner of the nave was discovered.
If a western porch or apse ever existed, and has left any remains, these remains must lie beneath the road, so that excavation would be necessary to get at them.
The difference is chiefly in the apse, and the apse of Chartres is the most interesting of all apses from this point of view.
The Chartres apse is as entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it overrides the architect.
The choir of Chartres is as long as the nave, and much broader, besides that the apse was planned with seven circular projections which greatly increased the window space, so that the guidebook reckons thirty-seven windows.
They were among the refinements of light and colour with which the apse of Chartres is so crowded that one must be content to feel what one can, and let the rest go.
Following him, we must take the choir separately, and the aisles and chapels of the apse also.
Indeed, as far as concerns the exterior, one might even risk thinking it more charming than the exterior of any Gothic apse ever built.
The treatment of the apse and choir is the architect's severest standard.
This philosophical apse would have closed the lines and finished the plan of his church-choir had the universe not shown some divergencies or discords needing to be explained.
The proportions of the church have been spoiled by the cutting off of the apse of the chancel--an entirely unwarrantable piece of destruction.
The Cathedral is more interesting, though the apse is over richly stuccoed, covered with scrolls and cherubs in gold and white.
The great dome of the main apse is completely filled by a bust of the Christ in the same glittering, marvelous, indescribably mellow glass mosaic that covers thousands of square feet upon the walls.
Look out in the Apse for the Altar of St. Denis, and his fellow-martyrs.
In other basilicas there may be an apse at this point, similarly enclosed.
The choir and the apse are surrounded by square and polygonal chapels.
In the apse are subjects--the Four rivers of Paradise, and the Seven Sacraments in the form of rivers.
In the choir and the apse the windows were ornamented with colossal figures 18 ft.
The apse of this church is the only part that is old; the rest is Italian, and very poor of its kind, which makes the groined vault of the apse all the pleasanter to contemplate.
In the apse are a series of fluted and spiral columns.
The châsses are in their old places upon the raised apse behind the altar; but they are of no artistic value.
The earliest part of the present church dates from the beginning of the 11th century, the choir and apse from the second half of the 12th century.
The apsehas been disfigured, after the manner of S.
All the arches of the choir and chapels are round, but those of the apse and clerestory are pointed.
The choir and apse belong to the middle of the 12th century, and are peculiar in their arrangement.
On one side of the apse is a very beautiful piscina.
The nave and porch were floored with plain red tesserae: in the apse was a simple mosaic panel in red, black and white.
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.
Turning to churches, there is workmanship considered to be of pre-Norman date in Wing church, in the neighbourhood of Leighton Buzzard, including a polygonal apse and crypt.
This type comprised nave and aisles, ending at one end in an apse and two chambers resembling rudimentary transepts, and at the other end in a porch (narthex).
The apse is rounded in the usual form, and on either side extend transepts to the width of two bays.
The apseis flamboyant, as are also the windows of the south transept.
The half-obliterated frescoes of the domed vaulting of the western apse indicate that it was completed after the pure Italian manner at a considerably later time than the opposite end.
The rose window over the western apse is pitifully weak and quite lacking in effectiveness.
One distinctly northern feature there is; namely, the singular effect given by the doubleapse of the nave and choir, reminiscent mainly of the Rhine builders, that of the eastern end being much the older.
The bomb thrown at the apseand which fell in the garden was not this time a shrapnel bomb, but an incendiary bomb, which only threw out a sheet of flame.
The sanctuary and apse are in the style of Auvergne, with this peculiarity, that the capitals of the slender columns are singularly massive, and bear only the mere outline of the acanthus-leaf for ornament.
The apse and transept are Romanesque, but the nave is Gothic.
It is a jumble of heavy Gothic and Italian, and the apse is twisted out of line with the nave, in which respect, however, it is like the cathedral of Quimper.
In the apse are two rows of columns with cubiform capitals carved in accordance with the florid Romanesque taste, as it was developed in Southern France.
Nibby, who conducted the excavations of 1828, saw traces of religious paintings in the apse of the eastern aisle.
Another was erected by the same Pope near the apse of S.
In 1633, when Giovanni Severano wrote his book on the Seven Churches, only one bit of ruins could be identified, the door and apse of the church of S.
Pope Felix not only accepted them as an ornament to his church, but tried to copy them in the apse which he rebuilt.
The name of the sculptor of the Concordia in the apseis not known.
The annals of discoveries begin with 1374, when the obelisk now in the Piazza della Rotonda was found, under the apse of the church of S.
We looked and by degrees the vast space of the apse before us became alive with forms.
Walking the length of the great church, if so it could be called, we came to an apse at the head of it where, had it been Christian, the altar would have stood.
The apse rests on arched abutments that are worthy of a cathedral.
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 southern apsewas not found by Mr. Slater, but is put in on the authority of Dr.
There seems no doubt that this chapel was originally a Norman apse with a vaulted chamber[15] above, like that in the sister transept, and that it was enlarged in the thirteenth century by Prior Henry Sipton.
The parapet of open work which runs round the summit of the apse is another beautiful feature of the exterior of the eastern part of the church.
Beyond the crossing towards the east there were three similar arches in the arcades which connected the apse with the large piers of the central tower.
In the fourth bay, above the point of the window arch, the curve of the original apse of the ambulatory is just traceable; but beyond this point eastwards the twelfth-century walling has disappeared until we meet it again in the lady-chapel.
They, and the apse above them, were probably the work of those monks of Whitby who founded the Abbey of St. Mary at York, and seem to have paused here for ten years on their way thither.
The Benedictine monks who founded this community came from Whitby, and were perhaps the builders of the Norman apse we saw at Lastingham, where they paused for a time on their way to York.
