Features
The domed apse became a standard part of the church plan in the early Christian era.
Smaller subsidiary apses may be found around the choir or at the ends of transepts. These proliferating apses are common in later Byzantine architecture and the Ottoman architecture that developed from it. The term "abse" tends to be reserved for those at the liturgical east end, with these further spaces called "exhedras" or "absidal openings". A tetraconch is a church on a central plan with four abses, one in each direction. An exedra or apse may be reduced in scale to form a niche within the thickness of walling; a niche does not reveal its presence by projecting on the exterior.
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Famous quotes containing the word features:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)