JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 141.211.4.224 on Thu, 18 Jun 2015 11:49:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AN ANCIENT ORIENTAL SOURCE OF CHRISTIAN SACRED ARCHITECTURE1 IWe are accustomed to divide early Christian churches which do not belong to the centralized type into two categories: one of these comprises the churches of basilican character, longitudinal buildings terminating in an apse at the end of their axis and divided into an uneven number of naves by parallel rows of columns. This form of building, we are all agreed, originated on the shores of the Mediterranean from the transformation of Hellenistic and Roman prototypes. The other form of Christian church, which is essentially Oriental, consists of a transverse nave and, attached to it to the east, three apses, or rather a central apse flanked by two side chambers, as in the Syrian basilica. This type occurs in Northern Mesopotamia,2 in Kommagene 3 and in the cave churches of Cappadocia,4 whence it seems to have found its way into Moscovite Russia of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries.5 There are two irregular early examples in southern Syria.6 Of the extant Christian buildings of this type none seems to antedate the fifth to sixth centuries, although the plan had its roots in pre-Christian modes of building. The earliest specimen was found in the Hellenistic temple of Artemis Nanaia in Dura,7 which, apart from the question of vaulting, differs from its Christian successors only by allowing the two side chambers to communicate with the sanctuary, but not with the nave. As in Roman times the said plan became popular in Arabia Petraea,s it may be regarded as Syrian, 1 This article is meant to be no more than a survey of the history of one particular type of architecture. Other types, whatever their importance may have been, are mentioned only if adducing them contributes toward the clarification of my main theme. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Prof. Valentin MUller, without whose profound knowledge of early Oriental architecture the part dealing with the early specimens of the type could not have been written. Prof. MUller, in an article of which I was allowed to read the first draft, will explain the fundamental types of early Oriental architecture and their mutual relationship.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. IS difficult to find two elements in the Western tradition further apart in function and implication than the Christian idea of heaven and the Roman amphitheater---one a place of spiritual perfection, the other of mass passion and cruelty. It is also difficult to find two that are closer to each other in form. All that distinguishes the interior of amphitheaters--the vastness of their plan, their circularity, their regular layout, the horizontal rows of seats so superimposed as to suggest a hierarchy of rank--recurs in the image that Christianity formed of the habitations of the Blessed. When the circularity of the heavens is fully realized, as it is in Botticini's picture of Paradise (Fig. I), the result is the likeness of an amphitheater, even though its inhabitants sit on thin strips of clouds rather than on marble seats.It was inevitable that a resemblance as close as this should have been observed during the Renaissance and that attempts should have been made to draw its components into a near identity. But how was it to be done? Was one to represent the upper world in the image of its architectural simile? If so, one had to overlook the fact that the theater was a heavy material structure, whereas the heavens were transparent and ethereal. Or was one to start from existing theatrical buildings, investing their auditoria with celestial implications? One had then to be prepared to think of the human spectators in them, with all their frailties, as if they were angels incarnate. Unless the path was prepared by corresponding doctrines about the nature of theatrical audiences, this solution was not feasible. It is not astonishing then that the person who seems to have been the first during the Renaissance to use the theater as an image of heaven should have done so without suggesting either of the two proposed forms of identity. His theater was a symbolic tool, a means of cognition, and as such without living spectators, while it also made no claim of complete identity with the celestial world.Its inventor, the writer Giulio Camillo, needs to be introduced to modern readers, for the prestige which made him one of the best known figures of his day has not lasted into recent times.' Contemporaries praised him as "more divine than human,"' and they were convinced that "his mind had risen to such height as cannot be attained by man's unaided strength." They wondered, how "one author could ever have the fertility of mind required for the work,"' he had set out to do. While such praise cannot satisfy critical demands, it is true that he was a scholar of universal scope, who...
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Folger Shakespeare Library and George Washington University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Shakespeare Quarterly.[DDEN away in one of Robert Fludd's works, among Rosicrucian symbols and samples of precocious scientific thought, is that rarest of all birds, a visual representation of a theatre of the Elizabethan type.' Learned Shakespearians seem to have passed it by; and no wonder, for the engraving occurs in one of Fludd's rarest books, the De Naturali, Supernaturali, Praeternaturali, et Contranaturali Microcosmi Historia published in Oppenheim in i6i9; and the chapter in which it appears is, of all things, that on mnemotechnics, or in Fludd's language: "De Animae Memorativae Scientia, qui Vulgo Ars Memoriae Vocatur". Obviously, before we enter into a discussion of the print, we shall have to understand how a theatre, any theatre, came to find its place in an exposition of the mnemonic art.Fludd himself seems to provide the clue in an autobiographical note, in which he relates how the new interest came to him, while residing in Nimes in Southern France, under the impact, as one is bound to assume, of the great Roman theatre there; and how, having learned to take delight in "the sweetness of that art" he retired to Avignon to explore it, and finally imparted his knowledge to a group of Provenqal noblemen and to the Duc de Guise.But in thus tracing the origin of his interest Fludd is more than a little disingenuous, for he forgets that the project of using a theatre as a mnemotechnic tool must have come to him from a book then a few decades old and already a classic in the field, namely Giulio Camillo's Idea del Teatro of i550.2 It was from there that he derived the idea of identifying the levels in the Divine plan with the superimposed rows of seats in the ancient theatre and of thus giving to all concepts their place within an architectural scheme. Camillo had also been the first to think of mnemotechnics not merely as a means for retaining the contents of a particular lecture or speech, and of thus training oneself for delivery without the benefit of notes, but rather as a device for impressing upon the mind the universal order of things. He had upheld the older doctrines only in so far as he believed, as all orators had done since Cicero's and Quintilian's time, that the best way of summoning up ideas was to formulate them in terms of images fitted to facilitate recall, then to place these mentally upon various architectural parts, and to take them down, when the corresponding passages in the speech had been reached.
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