File:A history of architecture in Italy from the time of Constantine to the dawn of the renaissance (1901) (14761038096).jpg

Identifier: historyofarchit01cumm (find matches)
Title: A history of architecture in Italy from the time of Constantine to the dawn of the renaissance
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Cummings, Charles Amos, 1833-1905
Subjects: Architecture
Publisher: Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin and company
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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erred to its original and final resting place. In the years which followed the recognition of Christianity by Con^stantine many small churches and chapels were built over or nearthe entrances to the various catacombs, in honor of the martyrs thereburied, as well as to mark and dignify the new entrances. Of theseby far the greater number have long since disappeared, but many 8 AiiClllTECTURE IN ITALY remains of such buildings have been brought to light during the moreor less systematic explorations of the past half century. The mostimportant of these are two chapels over the cemetery of Calixtus, alittle to the west of the Via Appia, discovered by Marchi about 1845,and of which the plans are given in Fig. 8. The plan of the twobuildings, which are about two hundred and forty feet apart, isessentially the same, a square of about sixteen feet in the one andtwenty-one feet in the other, with semicircular apses opening fromthree of its sides, and from the fourth a short nave. The apses are
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Fv^. 7. IntHpior of the Apostolic Crypt. covered by homis))heric vaults of brickwork. The naves had i)rob-ably wooden roofs. In one chapel, the strong buttresses at the junc-tion of the a))ses and a portion of a similar buttress at the junctionof one apse with the nave wall suggest that the central square wasalso vaulted. From the nave of each chapel a stair descends to thecatacomb beneath, and this is sufficient, in the estimation of Marchi,to establish the Christian origin of the buildings, and, taken in con-nection with certain inscriptions which he found there, to warrantthe belief that one was the mausoleum of St. Damasus and the otherof St. Mark and St. Marcellianus. Tiie apses are i)resumed to havecontained each a sarcophagus, which was also, according to the custom EAKLY ClIinsriA^i AIM III IKCriKK 9 S BastllH of the time, an altar. The ehapels thus served the triph; purpose ofehurch, niausoleuiu, and vestibule to the eeinetery hen(;ath. Perhaps tlio most fully develojxd of ti

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