Cathedral diagram Details, Meaning Cathedral diagram Article and Explanation Guide

Cathedral diagram Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

This article discusses cathedral diagrams:

The diagram below represents the floor plan of the Abbey of St.-Denis, showing the parts of a Gothic church. (The black dots are the columns supporting the roof.)

For comparison, the plan of Tewkesbury Abbey has the corresponding parts highlighted in the same colors. (Note: These plans are not drawn to the same scale; they are drawn to be about the same length in the diagram.)

Table of contents

1 West end
2 Nave
3 Transept
4 Liturgical east end
5 Subsidiary buildings

West end

The main doors were at the west end, and there were often towers on that end flanking an opening, sometimes a triple opening, into the nave, often below a stained glass "rose window." The narthex formed a kind of lobby or interior porch on some plans, though not on these two groundplans.

Nave

's choir and nave looking west from the High Altar, through the rood screen]] The nave (from the Latin for "ship," illustration, right) was the long central section directly inside the main (west) doors, where the public would attend services. The nave is ordinarily flanked by aisles. If the aisles are comparable in height and width, the plan may be desribed as having three naves. More usually the aisles are lower, and a clerestory above their roofs lets light into the nave. Recesses in the walling of the aisles might provide spaces for shallow side chapels though not in these groundplans. There was usually a rood screen ("rood" meaning "cross") dividing the nave from the choir (earlier, "quire") which might be almost as long as the nave. There monks would attend their own services ("offices"). Against the screen, on its west side toward the nave where the public could see it, was usually an altar.

Transept

In these two cruciform (cross-shaped) buildings, the arms of the cross (together, the "transept") which formed an aisle across the building are quite pronounced; however, the transept arms might be so short as not to stick out past the sides of the building (as at Notre-Dame de Paris), or there might be two of them (as at Canterbury Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral). The transept itself might have an aisle (St-Denis) diagram) or two aisles, or it might have none (Tewkesbury Abbey diagram).

Some Gothic churches, such as Bourges, had no transepts at all and thus were not cruciform. At the ends of the transept were doors, too, and outside them were porches that were used for various rituals.

Liturgical east end

The end with the altar in it was normally at the east (left in the diagrams), for symbolic religious reasons, though frequently the building could not be disposed in such a way as to make that orientation very precise. Beyond the crossing where the transept intersected the nave was the choir

The next section to the east after the choir was the presbytery (meaning "priestly"), where the priests who were assisting at Mass would sit; that section was not usually separate and might be only a couple of fancy chairs at the side.

The heart of the building was the sanctuary where the "high altar" was. There would be altars in many of the chapels, but this was the one where Mass would be said for the public. This area was also where criminals seeking the right of sanctuary were safe from the law. Very often the sanctuary was raised a few steps above the floor level of the nave.

The semi-circular end of the church around the high altar, which corresponds to the apse in Romanesque and Roman architecture, was often expanded into a passage called an ambulatory (from the Latin to walk), with radiating chapels disposed around the outer wall of the ambulatory. Thus users could make a complete circuit within the building, using the north and south aisles of the nave and the ambulatory, without trespassing upon the sanctuary. In the bays around the ambulatory, between the supporting columns, were shrines and chapels. At the far east end, on the axis formed by nave and sanctuary, a larger chapel was often dedicated to the patron saint of the church, or to Mary, the mother of Jesus, this in medieval English usage a Lady Chapel.

"Chantries" were shrines or chapels where someone had paid an "endowment" to have the monks say (or "chant") prayers on a fixed schedule for someone who had died.

The apse did not last long as an architectural fashion; in Europe it was replaced by the rounded "chevet," and in England by squared-off east ends, and as the cathedrals were rebuilt or repaired, their apses were remodeled into the newer shapes.

Subsidiary buildings

Outside the cathedral would be the "chapter house" where the monks or priests whose church it was would hold their meetings about church business; chapter houses were often round and were always connected to the church building. There was also usually a "cloister," a rectangular colonnade around a grass lawn, where the monks could walk, and their work or study cubicles often opened onto it.

The cathedral often stood in its own precinct, called in England the close.