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THE BASILICA AND BASILICAN CHURCHES A great deal of conjecture has been
expended on the question as to the genesis of the Roman basilica. For present
purposes it may be sufficient to observe that the addition of aisles to the nave
was so manifest a convenience that it might not improbably have been thought of,
even had models not been at hand in the civic buildings of the Empire.
The most
suitable example that can be chosen as typical of the Roman basilica of the age
of Constantine is the church of S. Maria Maggiore. And this, not merely because,
in spite of certain modern alterations, it has kept in the main its original
features, but also because it departs, to a lesser extent than any other extant
example, from the classical ideal.
The lateral colonnade is immediately
surmounted by a horizontal entablature, with architrave, frieze, and cornice all
complete. The monolithic columns, with their capitals, are, moreover,
homogenous, and have been cut for their position, instead of being like those of
so many early Christian churches, the more or less incongruous and heterogeneous
spoils of older and non-Christian edifices.
Of this church, in its original
form, no one however decidedly his tastes may incline to some more highly
developed system or style of architecture will call in question the stately and
majestic beauty.
The general effect is that of a vast perspective of lines of
noble columns, carrying the eye forward to the altar, which, with its civory or
canopy, forms so conspicuous an object, standing, framed, as it mere, within the
arch of the terminal apse, which forms its immediate and appropriate background.
S. Maria Maggiore is considerably smaller than were any of the other three chief
basilicas of Rome (St Peter's, St. Paul's, and the Lateran).
Each of these, in
addition to a nave of greater length and breadth, was furnished (as may still be
seen in the restored St Paul's) with a double aisle. This, however, was an
advantage which was not unattended with a serious drawback from a purely
esthetic point of view.
For a great space of blank wall intervening between the
top of the lateral colonnade and the clerestory windows was of necessity
required in order to give support to the penthouse roof of the double aisle. And
it is curious, to say the least, that it should not have occurred to the
builders of those three basilicas to utilize a portion of the space thus
enclosed, and at the same time to lighten the burden of the wall above the
colonnade, by constructing a gallery above the inner aisle.
It is true, of
course, that such a gallery is found in the church of S. Agnese, where the
low-level of the floor relatively to the surface of the ground outside may have
suggested this method of construction; but whereas, in the East, the provision
of a gallery (used as a gynaeceum) was usual from very early times, it never
became otherwise than exceptional in the West.
Taking East and West together, we
find among early and medieval basilican churches examples of all the
combinations that are possible in the arrangement of aisles and galleries. They
are the single aisle without gallery, which is, of course, the commonest type of
all; the double aisle without gallery, as in the three great Roman basilicas;
the single aisle with gallery, as in S. Agnese; the double aisle with single
gallery, as in St. Demetrius at Thessalonica; and finally, as a crowning
example, though of a later period, the double aisle surmounted by a double
gallery, as in the Duomo at Pisa.
These, however, are modifications in the
general design of the building. Others, not less important, though they are less
obviously striking, concern the details of the construction. Of these the first
was the substitution of the arch for the horizontal entablature, and the second
that of the pillar of masonry for the monolithic column.
The former change,
which had already come into operation in the first basilica of St. Paul without
the Walls, was so obviously in the nature of an improvement in point of
stability that it is no matter for surprise that it should have been almost.
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