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They built no long arcades with piers or columns for supports, like those of the Romans, and that simply because such structures would have been contrary to the general principles of their architecture. They made no use, as we have already explained, of those isolated supports whose employment resulted in the hypostyle halls of Egypt and Persia, in the naves of Greek temples and Latin basilicas.
How is it that you have forgotten that lesson?" The minister, I fear, would have to answer that our ancestors were barbarous enough, not only to destroy the Roman cities, and temples, and basilicas, and statues, but the Roman baths likewise; and then retired, each man to his own freehold in the country, to live a life not much more cleanly or more graceful than that of the swine which were his favourite food.
A similar solemnity is performed by proxy at the Lateran, the Liberian, and the Pauline Basilicas. In all these great churches, as in St. Peter's, the jambs and Lintel of the Holy Door are of Porta Santa marble.
He was a layman, although a canon of one of the great Roman basilicas, and as we have already seen, was a candidate for a red hat. With his brilliant parts, great capacity, urbanity, and zeal, it is not surprising to learn that he was declared to be a Jesuit, a generic term not only in his own days, but down to our own, for all who have laboured diligently to restore the old religion.
Fra Angelico seems to have been brought to Rome by Pope Eugenius, but it was under Nicholas, in two or three years of gentle labor, that the work was done. It is, however, impossible to enumerate all the undertakings of Pope Nicholas. He did something to reestablish or decorate almost all the great basilicas.
"Perhaps ten, perhaps twenty!" gasped Agias. "A very pretty number! Some little credit to throttle them," was his answer; and Demetrius plunged on. The night was cloudy, there was no moonlight. The cold, chill wind swept down the Tiber valley, and howled mournfully among the tall, silent basilicas and temples of the Forum.
The glass mosaic-work to be found on the walls of Early Christian churches, both basilican and Byzantine, but less frequently Romanesque, is most interesting and beautiful: "it was," says the high authority already quoted, "employed only to represent and reproduce the forms of existing objects, such as figures, architectural forms and conventional foliage, which were generally relieved with some slight indication of shading upon a gold ground the whole being bedded in the cement covering the walls and vaults of the basilicas and churches."
The larger temples of ancient Rome were certainly similar piles, upheld by the same precious columns, with walls covered with the same polychromatic marbles and vaulted ceilings having the same gilded panels. And his feeling was destined to become yet more acute after his visits to the other basilicas, which could but reveal the truth to him.
The foundations show that there were two basilicas side by side, with a narthex common to both and a passage between them up to the transept. To the south the narthex terminated in an apse nearly 20 ft. across, and there was a hall, probably open to the sky, between the narthex and the baptistery, with others to the north and south of it.
The early Church not only offered widows the moral help of its sacraments and consolations, it also granted a special dignity with certain privileges to those who made a vow to refrain from sex-intercourse. They had in the basilicas, even as the consecrated virgins, a place of honour, divided from that of the other matrons by a balustrade. They wore a special dress.
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