Sanctuary and Nave in the Early Byzantine Church

Abstract

In its essential features Early Christian architecture was a reflection of past history rather than contemporary dogma. St John Lateran and St Peter, two of the first, as well as the most important churches to be erected by Constantine in Rome, were planned on the lines of earlier Greco-Roman basilicas. Excavations have now made it reasonably certain that St John Lateran, the first of the two and the cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome, was originally a simple Hellenistic basilica consisting of a nave and four aisles, a single, western apse and clerestory lighting ; and that its transept was a later, probably early tenth-century, addition.¹ The second, St Peter, was, in effect, a double church ; a basilica comprising a nave and four aisles, and an annexed, western transept with a central apse. The former was the church proper, the latter a martyrium, the purpose of which was to house the relics of St Peter. The fourth-century site of the altar, in consequence, could not have been in front of the apse in the transept, for not only would this have been in an annexe of the church, but the position was already occupied by the ciborium and crypt containing the sacred relics.