AP® Art History · Unit 3 · Topic 3.1
From Roman Basilica to Christian Church
Early Christians built churches on the plan of the Roman basilica, a long public hall used for law courts, because its open floor could hold a crowd, unlike the small, closed cella of a Roman temple.
A Roman temple was built for a god's statue, not for people. The cella, its inner room, was small and closed, and worship happened outside at an altar. That plan is useless for a religion built around a gathered congregation listening to a service. The Roman basilica, a secular hall used for law courts and civic business, already solved the problem: a long rectangular space, a wide central nave flanked by lower side aisles carried on colonnades, and a raised, rounded apse at one end where a magistrate once sat. Christians kept the plan and put an altar where the magistrate had been. Old Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, begun around 320 CE under Constantine, set the pattern at huge scale.
Inside, the plan does real work moving people. Worshippers enter at one end and the colonnades funnel their eyes and feet straight down the nave toward the apse, which frames the altar and the clergy. The nave rises higher than the side aisles, and that extra height is pierced with clerestory windows, a row of windows sitting above the aisle roofs, which pour light down into the center of the building without anyone needing windows at ground level. Santa Sabina in Rome shows this cleanly in plan and section: a wide nave, columns marching down each side, aisles behind them, and clerestory light flooding the center.
The one weak point was the roof. Early basilicas like Santa Sabina covered the nave with a flat timber roof sitting directly on the walls, cheap and fast to build but a constant fire risk, and timber roofs were replaced again and again. Romanesque builders eventually answered that problem by switching to a stone barrel vault, which does not burn, but a stone vault pushes outward on the walls it rests on, a new structural problem the basilica never had to face.
Key terms
- basilica
- A long rectangular Roman public hall with a nave, side aisles, and an apse, later adapted as a church plan.
- nave
- The tall central aisle of a basilica or church where the congregation stands or sits.
- apse
- A raised, semicircular recess at the end of the nave that holds the altar and frames the clergy.
- clerestory windows
- A row of windows set high in the nave walls, above the aisle roofs, that lights the center of the building.
- cella
- The small enclosed inner chamber of a Roman temple that housed the cult statue of the god.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a basilica plan move a crowd down a nave and deliver them to an apse?
- Worked exampleShow me Santa Sabina in plan and section with its nave, aisles and clerestory windows.
- How it worksWalk me through excavating a catacomb: galleries, loculi cut into the walls, and cubicula off the sides.
- Ties togetherHow does the basilica's plain timber-roofed nave set up the problem the Romanesque barrel vault later solves?
Check yourself
End of topic.