Shaping Sacred Space in the Sixteenth Century: Design Criteria for the Collegio Borromeo's Chapel

2004 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Design Criteria ◽  
Spatial Complexity ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Initial Design ◽  
Ecclesiastical Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic Churches ◽  
The Church

In this article, I present a newly discovered, late-sixteenth-century design drawing for the chapel of the Collegio Borromeo, in Pavia, Italy, and investigate it in the context of contemporary Catholic ecclesiastical architecture. Historiographically, the period is dominated by the church of the Gesù, in Rome, interpreted as a typological paradigm characterized by austere architecture and restrained decoration. This view is called into question by the Collegio's chapel. The initial design (represented by the drawing) drew from ancient sources in order to achieve spatial complexity. The realized chapel is spatially simpler, but ornately ornamented and decorated. The chapel differs from what is considered the norm, but is the chapel an anomaly, or are traditional understandings of the Gesù invalid? On investigation, it becomes evident that patrons may have established a number of criteria for their churches, but architects had a degree of freedom in designing them. In few if any contemporary cases, however, was architectural severity a goal for Catholic churches. With the example of the Collegio's chapel, these findings take on greater significance: the patron, Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584), was one of the most important in the history of ecclesiastical architecture. The chapel's architect, Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-1596), restored, renovated, and built numerous sacred spaces for Borromeo. What they achieved demonstrates that Catholic reformers of the latter half of the sixteenth century sought architectural magnificence for buildings dedicated to the worship of God.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools—from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. This book presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. The book explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

The Book of Common Prayer: A Guide

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Hefling
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Corporate Worship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

scholarly journals «ГОСПОДСТВЕННАЯ ВЛАСТЬ» VS ДУШЕПОПЕЧЕНИЕ: ПРАКТИКА ИСПОВЕДИ В РУССКОЙ ДУХОВНОЙ ТРАДИЦИИ СИНОДАЛЬНОГО ПЕРИОДА

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Алексей Черный
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Mutual Trust ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Russian Orthodox Church ◽  
Pastoral Identity ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

The article attempts to reconstruct various pastoral models that appeared in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church over several centuries. The author identifies several "images" of confession, which are very different, among them: the realization of "despotical" power in a "confessional" family of the sixteenth century, the fulfillment of conscription, deeply personal interaction based on mutual trust and the value of a hierarchical aspect, counseling under the guidance of a "parish elder". The state, depending on the circumstances, either embeds the pastor in itself as a necessary part of its own mechanism, or considers the priesthood as a foreign element, or completely distances itself from religious affairs. The author suggests that the “types” of confession presented in the article can be compared with the forms of pastoral self-consciousness to be found in the modern life of the church. This in turn suggests that in the Russian Church today is characterized by the search for pastoral identity, in which the priesthood plays a key role.

Sacred and profane: Pastoral care in the parish church

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Varnam
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Wall Paintings ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
Church Art ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This chapter argues that the profane challenge posed by lay misbehaviour and sacrilege in the church paradoxically strengthens sacred space. Sermon exempla from the literature of pastoral care (e.g. Mirk’s Festial, Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne) show how devils and demons assist in the cleansing of the church from profane contamination and the chapter argues for the integral relationship between violence and the sacred, focusing on the punishment of sinners and on the sacrificial blood of Christ, depicted in lyrics and wall paintings. The chapter reassesses the relationship between church art and sermon exempla and argues for a symbiotic relationship that presents the material church and its devotional objects as living, breathing actors in the drama of salvation. The performance of narrative exempla animates the visual depictions of angels, devils, and saints in the church who come to life to protect and fight for their sacred spaces.

scholarly journals Kerk, volk en owerheid in die 1858-grondwet van die Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek

1995 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
South African ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The South ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The South ◽  
The Church

Church, people and government in the  1858 constitution of the South African Republic During the years 1855 to 1858 the South African Republic in the Transvaal created a new constitution. In this constitution a unique relation-ship between church, people and government was visible. This relationship was influenced by the Calvinist confessions of the sixteenth century, the theology of W ά Brakel and orthodox Calvinism, the federal concepts of the Old Testament and republican ideas of the Netherlands and Cape Patriots. It becomes clear that the history of the church in the Transvaal was directly influenced by the general history of the South African Republic.

The Orchard of Syon: An Introduction

Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sister Mary Denise
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.

Modernity and Compromise: The Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Warsaw and its Designer Władysław Pieńkowski

Ikonotheka ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 169-197
Author(s):  
Wojciech M. Głowacki
Keyword(s):  
Architectural Design ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Ecclesiastical Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Religious Nature ◽  
The Church

Despite the considerable influence he exerted on post-war church architecture in Poland, the designer Władysław Pieńkowski (1907–1991) is today an altogether forgotten figure. The current paper outlines his biography and his early oeuvre; this is because his experience in designing office blocks and industrial plants gained while working under the supervision of the most outstanding Polish architects of the mid-20th century, was to be of key importance to his later, independent designs for ecclesiastical buildings. The paper focuses on a particularly important work, one which in many ways constitutes a breakthrough in the architect’s career, namely the church of St. Michael the Archangel in the Mokotów district of Warsaw. This was the first entirely new church to be erected in the capital of Poland after the year 1945. Its construction depended on the dynamic changes in the balance of political forces. The church could be built owing to the support of the PAX Association circle, including the direct involvement of Bolesław Piasecki. In spite of their patronage, however, construction works were repeatedly halted and extended over several years, and the architectural design had to be reworked. The paper contains an analysis of three fundamental designs for the church, now held in the St. Michael the Archangel parish archive and in the architect’s records preserved by his heirs. The first design dates from the period of 1948/9–1951, the subsequent one from the year 1954, and the final one from 1956–1961. The evolution of the design moved from the initial continuation of forms typical of the pre-war Modernised Revivalism, through a peculiar reference to Socialist Realism, to rigorous Modernism. The church of St. Michael the Archangel became Pieńkowski’s testing ground; there, he tried out several solutions which he would consistently utilise in the subsequent years of his career, e.g. the large-scale application of prefabricated elements in both the construction and the decoration of the edifice. The construction of this church was concurrent with important events of a political (the Thaw) and religious nature (the Second Vatican Council). Tracing the history of the design for the Warsaw church and clarifying its connections with contemporaneous church architecture in Poland and in Western Europe made it possible to present the key problems faced by the Polish designers of ecclesiastical architecture in the first decades of the People’s Republic of Poland.

Governmental Support to the Theatre in Great Britain

1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-115
Author(s):  
Ronald E. Sherriffs
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
General Acceptance ◽  
Governmental Support ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

General acceptance of the concept of theatre as an institution possessing positive values worthy of public support is a comparatively recent development in the history of the British theatre. The traditional public attitudes which were unfavorable to theatre (focal point of disorder, disease, moral corruption, and sinful activity) were created during the sixteenth-century power struggle between the Crown, London authorities, and the Church. The formulation of public attitudes favorable to theatre (aesthetic, social, moral, and intellectual stimuli) began when theatre became an agent of social change in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals The History of the Creation and Semantics of the Sacred Space of Ust-Medveditskiy Convent Caves in Volgograd Region

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-65
Author(s):  
Vitaliy Stepkin
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
Architectural Elements ◽  
Volgograd Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
Microclimatic Conditions ◽  
The 19Th Century

Introduction. The article presents the caves of Ust-Medveditsky St. Saviour convent in Volgograd region. The relevance of the research issue is in improving the recreational potential of the subject under study. The novelty of the work is in explaining the meaning of cave complex elements and the iconic stone with the image of knee and palm prints. The aim of the work is to study the history of creating the sacred space in the caves of Ust-Medveditsky convent. Herewith the work covers the following issues: 1) considering the history of creating caves by hegumeness Arseniya (Sebryakova); 2) clarification of the semantic meaning of some architectural elements in the cave complex in the context of creating the sacred space in the New Jerusalem of the Don region; 3) recommendations for developing the esthetical component of the caves, which increases the recreational potential for using the caves. Methods. In order to achieve the goals the author uses the structuralsemantic method, which allows to reveal the meaning of separate architectural elements in the caves in the structure of the cave complex. The system-based culturological method and the historical archaeological approach are used to understand the uniqueness of the object against the historical background of the dominating culture. The sources used to fulfill the objective include material ones such as architectural elements of the caves, written ones such as piligrimages, travellers’ notes about visits to the Holy Land, the biography of hegumeness Arseniya (Sebryakova). Analysis and Results. The caves under consideration were created in the second half of the 19th century by hegumeness Arseniya (Sebryakova). There was a sacred space of the Holy Land reconstructed: “Stations of the Cross” and “Sorrowful Way of the Holy Mother”. The stone with the image of knee and palm prints symbolizes the place where the Christ fell down after being arrested. Premise no. 8 with a step can symbolize the Holy Sepulcher with the tomb of Jesus. To improve the recreational potential of Ust- Medveditsky convent it is necessary to control microclimatic conditions, support the cave surface natural stone relief and colour, decorate the key sacred spaces with thematic icons.

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