双语+MP3|美国学生艺术史68 早期基督教建筑

 
当你下次画画或装裱时，你可以试着用其中一款经典花样来镶边。这非常有趣。我知道有些男孩在写信的时候会在信纸上镶边，在他们的圣诞贺卡上镶边，甚至在他们的算术本上镶边，而有些女孩喜欢使用绣有这些花样的手帕和毛巾。但这些活儿做起来必须小心翼翼才好——因为每一部分看起来必须和另一部分一模一样，即便是其中的空隙和线条也必须一模一样。 
68 EARLY CHRISTIAN早期基督教建筑
 
IF YOU get up in the morning at sunrise you might call yourself an early Christian. But early Christian in architecture does not mean early in the day; it means early in the history of Christians. Some of our finest buildings to-day are Christian churches, but once upon a time the only Christian churches were holes in the ground. 
These holes were called catacombs. They were tunnels that were dug underground in Rome because the Christians were persecuted. That means they were punished just for being Christians and so they had to live in hiding. They hid in the dark secret passages of the catacombs. In the catacombs were rooms where Christians could “go to church.” There were rooms there, too, where dead Christians were buried safely. 
It was like living in a coal mine, only worse, because when a Christian was caught by the Roman soldiers, he was generally given to the lions or burned alive or chopped to pieces. Suppose you had to live down underground and never could come up without danger of getting caught and killed. It might be exciting and fun at first, but when you found some of your friends or perhaps even your brother or your aunt or your father had been carried off and put to death, it would not be fun at all. 
So you can imagine how glad the Christians who lived in the catacombs must have been when the Roman emperor himself became a Christian. 
This first Christian emperor was named Constantine. When Constantine became a Christian, naturally the Christians could come up out of the catacombs and worship God above ground. The Christians found the best kind of buildings above ground for their church services were the basilicas. You remember basilicas were the buildings built by the Romans for court-houses. In the court-houses the judge sat in the middle at one end, with his back toward the end wall. In front of the judge was a long aisle with columns on each side and this aisle led to the front door. On each side of the main aisle was another aisle. Here is a plan or kind of map of a basilica. Make believe you are looking straight down from an airplane at the basilica and that the basilica has its roof taken off. The lines are the walls and the dots are the columns. The place where the judge sat is the half circle at the top of the plan. 
 
No.68-1 PLAN OF A BASILICA 
（长方形教堂平面） 
Courtesy of The University Prints 
You can have some fun with paper and pencil, making a plan of your own house. If you imagine everything above the first story taken off the house, you could make a plan of the first floor. If your house has three floors, you might make a plan for each of the three. When I was a boy I used to like to draw plans of make-believe houses and I generally had a swimming pool and a gymnasium and a soda water fountain in my make-believe plans. 
But let’s get back to the basilica. The Christians used the judge’s half circle in their basilica church for an altar and for the minister or priest to preach from. This part of the building had lattice-work railings in front of it called cancelli by the Romans. That’s why some churches still call the minister’s end of the church the chancel. The people who came to worship in the basilica sat on benches facing the chancel—just as they do in some churches to-day. The main central part of a church is called a nave. The chancel and the aisles on the side are not part of the nave. 
The windows in a basilica were way up near the roof. The center part, or nave, was higher than the side aisles and so the center part’s roof was higher than the side aisle roofs. The nave was really two stories high and the side aisles only one story high. The windows were in the second story of the nave. This part with the windows was called the clerestory which means clear story. I think you can guess why it is called that. 
From the outside, these basilicas weren’t much to look at. A good many of them looked more like big barns than anything else. But inside they were magnificently decorated. The columns were beautiful marble ones taken from old heathen buildings. The walls had mosaic pictures on them made of little pieces of stone or of colored glass which shone like jewels. The floors and lower walls were covered with fine slabs of marble. After the catacombs they must have seemed all the more magnificent to the early Christians. 
The largest of these early Christian basilicas is the church of St. Paul-without-the-Wall. You might think from its name that it didn’t have any walls, What its name really means is that the church of St. Paul is outside the wall of Rome. It has a main part, or nave, and two aisles on each side instead of one on each side. Here is a picture of the inside looking along the nave toward the chancel. 
You can see the clerestory windows very plainly. St. Paul-without-the-Wall was built, way back in 380 A.D. and people worshiped there for more than 1400 years. Then in 1823 it caught fire and burned down. But it was built again just the way it was before the fire and so you can still visit it when you go to Rome. 
 
No.68-2 INTERIOR OF ST. PAUL（圣保罗大教堂室内） 
Courtesy of The University Prints 
This chapter has four new hard words. See what score you can make without looking back in the book. Each word you can give the right meaning for—out loud—counts 25. Can you score 100? 
plan (in architecture) □
nave □
chancel □
clerestory □
  Score:______