"Apse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from 4 to 5 feet deep and wide, and still carried fragments of the walls, about 2 feet 4 inches wide, of tufa, sarsen, and Roman brick. 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. The internal width of the building was then ascertained ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... there were seven lamps of fire burning before the 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 likely than that the 'sea of glass like unto crystal' mystically ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... crowd bowed in dead silence of adoration. But there was nothing yet to adore, 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.... ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... penetrated to the lower part of this garden, where ivy and box alone grew luxuriantly; yet the eternal shadow there was very soft and pleasant as it fell from the gigantic brow of the apse—a religious shadow, sepulchral and pure, which had a good odour about it. In the greenish half-light of its calm freshness, the two towers let fall only the sound of their chimes. But the entire house kept the quivering therefrom, sealed as it was ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... white minarets and golden domes, seems a part of Moscow. On Montmartre I know a picturesque and 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 ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... a number of donkey women offer their services, and it will be well to accept them, for the ascent of about one mile, to the village of Capri is very hot and tiring. On the left we pass the Church of St. Costanzo, a very curious building with apse, cupola, stone pulpit, and several ancient marble pillars and other fragments taken ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... and galleries, in which the inferior magistrates were hearing causes, and doing such justice as the complicated technicalities of Roman law chose to mete out. Through a crowd of anxious loungers the youth passed to the apse of the upper end, in which the Prefect's throne stood empty, and then turned into aside chamber, where he found himself alone with the secretary, a portly Chaldee eunuch, with a sleek pale face, small pig's eyes, and an enormous turban. The man of pen and paper ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Tristan and his guards went down from the town to where the faggot burned, near the road upon a rock was a chantry, it stood at a cliff's edge steep and sheer, and it turned to the sea-breeze; in the apse of it were windows glazed. Then Tristan ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... Raphaels would have been possible: it contains that architecture, not in rude forms, but in the most perfect and loveliest types it ever attained—contains those, not in ruins, nor in altered and hardly decipherable fragments, but in churches perfect from porch to apse, with all their carving fresh, their pillars firm, their joints unloosened. Besides these, it includes examples of the great thirteenth and fourteenth-century Gothic of Italy, not merely perfect, but elsewhere ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... skeleton. As for the rest of the building, it may be said that some of the walls alone substantially remain. The choir—the earliest part of the Cathedral—is entirely unroofed, and its south wall has vanished. The apse has been blown clean out. The Early Gothic nave is partly unroofed. The transepts are unroofed, and of the glass of the memorable rose window of the south transept not a trace is left—so far ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... beginning of the fourteenth century is always pure, and often severe; but this chapel is remarkable, even among the severest forms, for the absence of decoration. Its plan, seen in the marginal figure on p. 26, is a pure oblong, with a narrow advanced tribune, terminating in a trilateral apse. Selvatico quotes from the German writer Stieglitz some curious observations on the apparent derivation of its proportions, in common with those of other buildings of the time, from the number of sides of its apse. Without entering ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... 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. A complacent deity, carved out of white stone, and gaudily painted; a yellow robe, like the Lamas', dangled across his shoulders. The air ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... ecclesiolatry, ecclesiasticism, parish, hierarch, hierarchy, hierocracy, hierolatry, hierology, hierarchism, irenics, cure, evangelical, verger, beadle, chancel, clearstory, nave, transept, vestry, presbytery, prebend, prebendary, lectern, apse, irenicon, living, benefice, sinecure, glebe, see, prelacy, convocation, synod, conference, conclave, consistory, crypt, schism, orthodoxy, heterodoxy, unchurch, sacristan, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 time there was only one apse. In the churches in central ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... crossed upon their wands of office, the great dignitaries of the Anti-Pyrotist association, Viscount Olive, M. de La Trumelle, Count Clena, the Duke d'Ampoule, and Prince des Boscenos. Father Agaric was in the apse with the teachers and pupils of St. Mael College. The right-hand transept and aisle were reserved for officers and soldiers in uniform, this side being thought the more honourable, since the Lord leaned his head to the right when he died on the Cross. The ladies of the aristocracy, and among ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... been made. It seems a 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
... of 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
... from the foundation of it, which circle the entire nave, are very curious. Paolina had engaged to copy two or three of the most remarkable of these; but she intended to begin her work by attacking the larger figures in the apse. And the scaffolding had been placed there on ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... each side is a gallery, or 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 of the nave all kinds of verbal business may be transacted by appointment, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... 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 ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... eternity wrapt round it, sometimes with doves beneath its arms and sweet herbage growing forth from its feet; but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the church before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of the apse. And altho in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble—a woman standing with her eyes raised to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... chantry-chapel to the north-east of the choir, and inserted a new clerestory, in the then fashionable style, in place of the original. He also made a considerable alteration in the chancel by substituting a square east-end for the circular apse, part of which was taken down and used as building material for the innovation. But de Walden's work was cut short by his death, when he had scarcely held the See of London for two years, and was buried in his Chapel at St. Bartholomew's, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... 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
... thing for the poor children. We are thinking of a plan of living which will, I hope, be more convenient than this is; but we have not yet decided what to do.' At this minute a carriage and pair of horses became visible through one of the angular windows of the apse, in the act of turning in from the highway towards the park gate. The boy who answered to the name of Joey sprang up from the table with the promptness of a Jack-in-the-box, and ran out at the door. Everybody turned as the carriage passed through the gate, which Joey held open, ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... they sat, telling each other all, on the step of the ruined chancel, among the lights and shadows of the apse. How unlike to stately Louvre's halls of statuary and cabinets of porcelain, or the Arcadian groves of Montpipeau! And yet how little they recked that they were in a beleaguered fortress, in the midst of ruins, wounded sufferers all around, themselves in hourly jeopardy. It was ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have been built in different parts of the building. The most important of these is the great organ in the north apse. It is furnished with four keyboards and 124 stops, with twenty-four combination stops that admit of more than a million combinations of sound. On either side of the choir is another organ, with a fourth of great power in the crypt, a fifth in the tower, and an echo organ built under the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... early time, which comes back to me—of J.R.G. in Notre Dame. We were on our honeymoon journey, and we came across him in Paris. We went together to Notre Dame, and there, as we all lingered at the western end, looking up to the gleaming color of the distant apse, the spirit came upon him. He began to describe what the Church had seen, coming down through the generations, from vision to vision. He spoke in a low voice, but without a pause or break, standing in deep shadow close to the western ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 apsis served ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... wall of the apse behind the chief of the ten altars gazes down the striking image of the Virgin, executed in ancient mosaic, with her hands raised in prayer, whom the people reverently call "The Indestructible Wall." This, with other ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... of their frames by hail and tempest. But the main body of the 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
... 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 and peak over ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... reports of travellers, in which he divided the building into a nave and two aisles, with an ante-chapel in front, and a sacrarium at the further extremity.[627] M. Gerhard also added, beyond the sacrarium, an apse, of which General Di Cesnola found no traces, but which may possibly have disappeared in the course of the sixty years which separated the observations of M. Gerhard's informants from the researches of the later traveller. The arrangement into a nave and two aisles is, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Thomas of Sarzana, and before beginning to beautify Florence at the instance of the Rucellai family, Alberti entered the service of the Malatesta, and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini. He found it a plain Gothic structure with apse and side chapels. Such churches are common enough in Italy, where pointed architecture never developed its true character of complexity and richness, but was doomed to the vast vacuity exemplified in S. Petronio of Bologna. He left it ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering's room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house. At one end of the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... apse exhibits ornamental half columns, divers rosettes, and a number of raised figures, and masonic symbols. In the interior of the church the most notable thing to be seen is the Renaissance altar-piece and a Romanesque arch that gives entrance ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... in the apse of the centre nave are the most remarkable of those that remain at St. Apollinare, though many of the series of medallion portraits of the Bishops of the See from the foundation of it, which circle ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... six Corinthian columns, and the building is surmounted by a high belfry tower. In 1883-84 a thorough investigation of the church took place. The interior was restored in the Italian Renaissance style, the architect employed being T. Harris. An apse was added and other alterations made. The necessary funds were raised by a bazaar held in the Portman Rooms, Baker Street, in which all the features of the old Marylebone Gardens were reproduced. Close beside the church are the Central National Schools of St. ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Milanese territory, and was one which, according to Jerome's contention, could lay claim to considerable antiquity and distinction. He prefers a claim of descent from the house of Castillione, founding the same upon an inscription on the apse of the principal church at Gallarate.[2] He asserts that as far back as 1189 Milo Cardano was Governor of Milan for more than seven years, and according to tradition Franco Cardano, the commander of the forces of Matteo ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... 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, its dimensions were ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard |
