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TEXT II. HOW THE BASILICA BECAME A CHURCH.





"Building a basilica was oriented on Christian belief: basilicas face eastwards in the direction of the Holy Land."

 

In the Middle Ages the most important architectural task was church building. Whether parish churches or monasteries, simple churches for mendicant orders or magnificent cathedrals, the requirements for sacred buildings created innumerable large building projects all over Europe. With the basilica form church building imposed a building type that had originally fulfilled quite different purposes. The basilica is not a medieval invention-they had already been developed in ancient Rome and frequently built there. In the Roman era basilicas served as assembly halls for all kinds of uses. They were law courts, places of worship, and even market halls. When Emperor Constantine acknowledged Christi­anity at the beginning of the fourth century, a lot of new church building began. The Emperor himself, or his bishops, founded churches, and soon the basilica was established as the building form for this task. Santa Sabina in Rome is a basilica from the early Christian period . The church was built c. 430 A. D. on the Aventine Hill, on the site where the house of the martyr St. Sabina is thought to have stood.

 

 

 

A glimpse of the interior shows the orientation of the church: the longitudinal axis ends with a semi-circular space called the apse, and the building is orientated towards this. The nave has a flat ceiling, and the upper section of the walls is set with round-headed windows. Below, round arches create the entrance to the side aisles. This sums up the characteristics of a basilica: it consists of a high central aisle illuminated independently by windows, and lower side aisles, which are separated from the central section by arches. The easterly end of the church is formed by the semi-circular apse, which contains the altar.

In medieval Christian teaching, each architectural component of a basilica had a particular meaning. This started with the orientation of the buildings:basilicas face eastwards as, according to Christian belief, this means they point in the direction of the Holy Land. The clear orientation of these elongated buildings contrasts with centrally planned buildings, which are based on a symmetrical ground-plan, taking the form of a circle or an octagon, for example. According to the orientation of a basilica the en­trance faces west, while the choir is located in the east of the church. The west facade with the main entrance was understood to be the entrance to the house of God and was accentuated with towers or a porch.



In the Romanesque period the basilica was finally established as the building form for churches. Yet the concept of Romanesque is a 19th-century invention. It is understood to mean art from the eleventh to the mid-thirteenth centuries, a period when architecture reverted to forms from Roman Antiquity. In fact it was only after the turn of the millennium that clear correspondences in artistic production emerged in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and England, despite regional differences. It is an aspect of this inter­national common ground in Romanesque architec­ture that the basilica is the most frequently used type of sacred building. Another characteristic of the architecture of this period is the round arch. The construction of arches, which had already been employed in Roman architecture, was taken up again by the architects of the Romanesque period. In church interiors there were to be no more straight-headed openings, but instead round arches supported by columns and pillars. The construction of stone roofs was also tackled using round arches. The vaulting, firstly of the side aisles, then of the church's central aisle as well, is a further character­istic of the Romanesque style. Sculptural elements attached to the architecture were also used more and more at this time: the portals and facades of Roma­nesque buildings were shaped in a rich sculptural and ornamental way. An excellent example of this is the Portico de la Gloria on the west facade of the great pilgrimage church of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, which has been the main entrance to the basilica since the late twelfth century.



 

 

One of the first buildings that shows the essential features of Romanesque architecture is the cathedral in Speyer, Germany, which was begun in the years after 1020 . The plan of the church shows the basilica form. In addition, between the nave and the choir a section of the building has been intro­duced at right angles: this is the transept, a typical feature of Romanesque sacred architecture. Thus the ground-plan of the body of the church forms a cross, The cathedral in Speyer was planned as the burial place for the Salian emperors: Conrad II, who ascended the throne as first Salian emperor in 1027, ordered work to begin on his church around 1030. The entrance lies within a massive westwork (west-facing entrance section), its central axis surmounted by a tower. Beyond this is a three-aisled nave. The transept intersects with the nave in front of the east-facing, semi-circular choir. This point, at which the spatial axes of nave and transept meet, the so-called crossing, is marked on the outside of the building by a tower. Two further towers are attached to the choir area, which can be recognized on the plan as a semi-circle. Like many Romanesque church build­ings, Speyer Cathedral seen from the outside looks as if it has been made up of individual architectural elements joined together. This would change with the advent of the Gothic cathedrals. Even in the late Middle Ages, however, the ground-plan of the basilica remained dominant. This was the case too for Amiens Cathedral, which was begun in the period of High Gothic, around 200 years after Speyer.

 

 

In its ground-plan it is above all the east-facing part of the church which is emphasized by comparison with Romanesque buildings: already the transept has three aisles, attached to which are even more vaulted areas of the nave, which in its transition to the choir, has five aisles. For a long time now the choir area has no longer been just a semi-circular apse: instead, at­tached to this is an ambulatory, which is surrounded by more semi-circular apses. Even if the shape of the choir in particular in Gothic cathedrals was essenti­ally more extravagant than in Romanesque churches, the basic form of the basilica remained the most influ­ential in Western church architecture for centuries.

 

 

 








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