United States or Liechtenstein ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The bishop's throne is from the earlier church. Beneath the late-Gothic seats round the apse are the seats of Poppo's time, with remains of inscriptions: the pavement of marble slabs and mosaic patterns is also due to him. In 1896 frescoes of the eleventh century were discovered beneath the rococo plaster-work in the semi-dome.
Though the nave is like that of Santiago, the transepts and choir are much simpler. There the transept is long and has an aisle on each side; here it is short and aisleless. There the choir is deep with a surrounding aisle and radiating chapels, here it is a simple apse flanked by two smaller apses.
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 defaced from time. "Hoc circa templum sit jus mercatoribus æqum, pondera ne vergant nec sit conventio prava."
Yet I hold that the true art of my craft lies as much in the furnace as in the brush. See this rose window, which is from the model of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Vendome, and this other of the 'Finding of the Grail, which is for the apse of the Abbey church.
Paul, and a very interesting relic of this saintly patronage has lately been discovered. Apparently, in order to strengthen the building, two of the three windows in the chapel were blocked up, and a buttress was built across a chord of the apse, in the early part of the thirteenth century.
We had no great certainty that we would ever get out of it alive again. The temple was a 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.
All at once a rich full contralto voice surely he had heard it before came floating out on the torrent, every tone bearing a word of sorrowful triumph in its bosom. He reached the door. Very gently he opened it, and peeped in. But the back of the organ was towards him, and he could see nothing. He stepped upon the tiles of the little apse.
The longest ship that crosses the ocean could lie in the nave between the door and the apse, and her masts from deck to truck would scarcely top the canopy of the high altar, which looks so small under the super-possible vastness of the immense dome. We unconsciously measure dwellings made with hands by our bodily stature. But there is a limit to that.
The apse, with its three harmonizing étages corresponding to the chapels, aisles, and nave, and flanked by leaning buttresses ornamented with delicate pinnacles, is Gothic in its details; the ensemble is, nevertheless, Renaissance, thanks to a perfect symmetry painfully pronounced by naked horizontal lines so contradictory to the spirit of true ogival.
Again the vaulting of the apse in São João de Alporão is arranged very much in the way which was almost universal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the chancels and side chapels of many a church, such as Santa Maria do Olival at Thomar, or the Graça at Santarem itself, and the curious boat-like corbels of São João are found more than once, as in the choir of the old church, formerly the cathedral of Silves, far south in the Algarve.
Word Of The Day