TheMotherChurch 25
screen door, made that sacrifice present each day in the church’s primary
act of worship.^67 Sant’Eustorgio’s choir contained twenty-eight stalls, four-
teen on each side facing the center, for the clergy’s chanting of the Office.
During renovations in 1246 , the prior, Peter of Verona, raised the high altar
at the east end of the choir on several steps and embellished it with a fine
altarpiece showing Saint George. He also repaved the choir and nave. After
Peter’s murder, the laity of the church commissioned a new altarpiece to
show the martyr saint and decorated the walls of the nave with a fresco cycle
showing his life. Even in a conventual church, the nave remained the special
preserve of the laity.
Another common arrangement, again especially in larger churches and
cathedrals, placed a raised choir over the crypt in the east end. This was an
ancient and much copied model, originating with Pope Gregory the Great’s
renovations of old Saint Peter’s in Rome. Entrance to the crypt was by a
half-flight of stairs downward; people could ascend to the choir by half-flights
in the aisles. Visitors can see such an arrangement today at the cathedral of
Fiesole (fig. 8 ). Older monastic churches, such as that of San Miniato in
Florence, preserve a similar arrangement. Even smaller churches, like the
Chiesa del Crocifisso in the Santo Stefano complex at Bologna, might have
this arrangement. The most striking example extant today is in the cathedral
of Modena, where thirteenth-century choir furnishings remain intact (fig.
9 ).^68 There a knee-high wall topped with graceful paired columns and an
architrave encloses the raised choir. Bishop Sicardo of Cremona, twelfth-
century commentator on the liturgy, especially liked the idea of a divider of
twinned columns, like that at Modena. To him these columns recalled the
pairs in which the apostles set out to preach, just as the separation of clergy
and laity recalled the many mansions in God the Father’s house.^69 The Mo-
dena colonnade, which also extends across the front parapet of the choir,
serves less to hide the choir than to delimit its space. Within the choir, on
each side facing inward, are the choir stalls of the canons. The canons of
higher dignity found their places on the north side, the direction toward
which the deacon chanted the Gospel at Mass. Those with greater seniority
found their assigned seats closer to the nave. The bishop, when he presided,
however, had his throne in the center of the apse to the east.
At Modena, after ascending to the choir by the flanking stairs, the visitor
enters an upper extension of the aisles, with access outward into private
chapels and a view inward toward the high altar within the choir. Modena’s
- See Marcia Hall, ‘‘TheTramezzoin Santa Croce, Florence, Reconstructed,’’Art Bulletin 56 ( 1974 ):
pl. 17. - On this structure, see Arturo Carlo Quintavalle,Wiligelmo e Matilda: L’officina romanica(Milan:
Electa, 1991 ), 125 – 78. - Sicardo,Mitrale, 1. 4 , col. 21. On the symbolism of church buildings in Sicardo, see Joseph Sauer,
Symbolik des Kirchengeba ̈udes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters(Mu ̈nster: Mehren u. Hobbe-
ling, 1964 ).