Order the church as a single path: a colonnaded atrium, a narthex, the long nave drawn toward the altar, and the apse framed by a triumphal arch at the end of the axis.
The dead outside the walls
Bury no one inside the city; keep bodies, urns and sarcophagi outside the walls, even the relics of apostles and martyrs. So the great shrines of the martyrs rise in the cemeteries along the roads, not in the town.
The rule is as old as Rome: the Twelve Tables, as Cicero quotes them, say hominem mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito: do not bury or burn a dead man in the city. The Christian emperors repeated it in 381 for Constantinople, and specifically forbade anyone to think that the resting places of apostles and martyrs gave a right to burial within the walls.
The result shaped the Christian city. The martyrs lay in the cemeteries along the roads outside the gates, and the great pilgrimage churches were built there over their graves (St Peter’s on the Vatican, St Paul’s on the road to Ostia, St Lawrence and St Agnes), with the mausolea of the rich crowding round to lie near the saints. Only from the sixth and seventh centuries did relics, and then burials, move inside the walls, into the churches of the town.
Related rules
Edge the beds before the portico with box, clip box into figures of animals set facing one another, and in the garden beyond cut it into many shapes, even into the letters of the owner’s name.
Lay out a city’s streets so that they do not line up with the directions of the principal winds, which otherwise rush down them cold, violent and unhealthy.
For a hall of assembly use the “D” or tribune plan, a half-circle closed by a straight side: it gives ample room to the audience, a central place to the speaker and scope for display in the architecture.
Make the sweating room of a bath circular, as high to the springing of its dome as it is wide, with an opening at the crown closed by a bronze disc that can be raised and lowered on chains to regulate the heat.
height to springing = width; oculus with a movable bronze shield
Lay the channel of an aqueduct with a steady fall of not less than a quarter of an inch in every hundred feet, cover it with a vault against the sun, and carry it through hills in tunnels and across valleys on arches.
minimum fall ≈ 1 : 4,800 (Morgan’s reading); Nîmes aqueduct: ≈ 12.6 m in ≈ 50 km ≈ 1 : 4,000
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The dead outside the walls”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/burial-outside-walls. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.