"Apse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Mr. Albert Goodwin. They started about the middle of April, and on the journey out he wrote, beside his "Fors" which always went on, a preface to the Rev. R. St. John Tyrwhitt's "Christian Art and Symbolism." He drew the Apse at Pisa, half-amused and half-worried by the little ragamuffin who varied the tedium of watching his work by doing horizontal-bar tricks on the railings of the Cathedral green. Then to Lucca, where, to show his friends something of Italian landscape, he took them for rambles through the olive farms ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... 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 ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... first little Lyceum, New York, both now pulled down. The pyramidal pediment above this opening projects above the upper cornice into a coved ceiling, which would appear from the rendering of the drawing to form an apse above the semi-circular stage. Behind the proscenium is a large space with staircases of approach, two windows at the rear, and apparently a fireplace for the comfort of the waiting players. Communication with the front of the house is provided by a door in the proscenium wall opening ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... is 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 pulpit, and ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... 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 ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... 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 with leather-covered ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... 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 of ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... 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
... 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
... 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 a dusky undergrowth, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... "The 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
... 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 encouraging. ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol 1, No. 11, November, 1895 - The Country Houses of Normandy • Various
... to-day I wish To pray another way; come face to face, O Christ, that I may clasp your knees and pray I know not what; at any rate come now From one of many places where you are, Either in Heaven amid thick angel wings, Or sitting on the altar strange with gems, Or high up in the duskness of the apse; Let us go, You and I, a long way off, To the little damp, dark, Poitevin church. While you sit on the coffin in the dark, Will I lie down, my face on the bare stone Between your feet, and chatter anything I have heard long ago. What matters it So I may ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... provided with north and south aisles covered with high-pitched wooden roofs, while the north and south transepts were also roofed in a similar manner, and a small apsidal chapel projected from the eastern face of each. The archway of the south transept apse is now the entrance to St. Catherine's Chapel. With the exception of the present elaborate entrance to the south transept and the window above it, the transept is identical with that ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... was considered 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 ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... 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 ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Above its vaults, barely indicated by a higher mound in the waving ground of the pasture land, had once stood a Christian church, as ancient almost as the supposed temple below, whose Byzantine columns lay half hidden by the high grass, and the walls of whose apse had become overgrown by ivy and weeds, the nest of lazy snakes. The Gothic soldiers, Arians or heathens, who had burned down, in some drunken bout, the little church above-ground, had penetrated at the same time into the tomb beneath in search of treasure, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of the 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 ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... reredos; rood loft, rood screen. [parts of a church: list] chancel, quire, choir, nave, aisle, transept, vestry, crypt, golgotha, calvary, Easter sepulcher; stall, pew; pulpit, ambo^, lectern, reading desk, confessional, prothesis^, credence, baldachin, baldacchino^; apse, belfry; chapter house; presbytery; anxious-bench, anxious-seat; diaconicum [Lat.], jube^; mourner's bench, mourner's seat. [exterior adjacent to a church] cloisters, churchyard. monastery, priory, abbey, friary, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... calcined by the heat. Above 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
... run up of sufficient height to clear the roofs of the aisles, and were perforated by a range of windows to admit light to the whole building. At the north-east end of the nave was a great arch leading into a chancel, and an apse with three lancet windows in stained glass. The building was roofed with teak timber, with a sarking of lighter wood as a lining to form a contrast, and then covered with slates imported from England. Over the main entrance is a vaulted ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... 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
... the 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 bewildering. Dark, winding steps, slippery with the drippings ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... 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
... chanting some wild and thrilling 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, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... steep gable is the form most proper for 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, or at the great and celebrated porch of the Cathedral of Rheims, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... 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 was right on this ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... 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 pure; and fought the clay at his crest, and built crest over crest ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... 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 on the east side of the ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... rood loft, rood 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. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... lain, under the 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... called by the Greeks the church of St. John, though it was certainly not the church under which the saint was buried. There are the remains of a Christian church behind those of the mosque, and below a ruined Turkish castle with a Roman gateway which crowns the hill still farther north. The apse of this ruined church, also called St. John by the native Greeks, is still visited ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... 14 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 the ...
— 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
... 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, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 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, and is enhanced ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... Mafulu 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
... 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 ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... 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 ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... before St. Paul. He was crucified near the middle of the circus of Nero, on a spot afterwards marked by a "chapel of the crucifixion." He was buried nigh at hand. His tomb, probably in the form of a cella or open apse, is mentioned by Caius of Rome about A.D. 200. A huge basilica was built over it by the Emperor Constantine, and remained until it was replaced in the 16th century by the present St. Peter's. In spite of his unique position, St. Peter in 1 Pet. v. ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... the Greek Church, 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... rose-window above the 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 pines standing close against the ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... just as pitifully appealing in their appalling wreck—where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts, pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris and left to petrify ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... 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
... oldest and most numerous romanesque churches exist and where three types may be seen. Of these the simplest and probably the oldest is that of an aisleless nave with simple square chancel. In the second the nave has one or two aisles, and at the end of these aisles a semicircular apse, but with the chancel still square: while in the third and latest the plan has been further developed and enlarged, though even here the main chancel generally still ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... 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, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
