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Plan of Tewkesbury Abbey. The transepts are coloured purple; the crossing is red.Full descriptions of the elements of a Gothic floorplan are found at the entry Cathedral diagram.
In Romanesque and Gothic Christian church architecture, the transept is the area set crossways to the nave in a cruciform ("cross-shaped") building. The transept separates the nave from the sanctuary, whether apse, choir, chevet, presbytery or chancel. The transepts cross the nave at the "crossing" (plan, right), which belongs equally to the main nave axis and to the transept. Upon its four piers , the crossing may support a spire, a central tower (see Gloucester Cathedral) or a crossing dome. Since the altar is at the east end, the transepts are essentially north and south. These are known as the arms of the transept. The north and south end walls often hold decorated windows of stained glassStrictly speaking, stained glass is glass that has been painted with silver stain and then fired. Depending on its thickness, this stains clear glass with a gold/yellow/brown color. This appears most typically in the golden haloes depicted in church windo, such as rose windowA rose window is a circular stained glass window, with mullions and traceries generally radiating from the centre. Its origin is to be found in the Roman oculus. During the Romanesque period, the oculus became a window, and from about the middle of the tws, in stone tracery .
Some basilicaThe Latin word, basilica (derived from Greek basilike sto royal stoa , was originally used to describe a Roman public building (as in Greece, mainly a tribunal), usually located at the centre of a Roman town ( Forum). In Hellenistic cities, public basilics and the church and cathedral planning that descended from them, were built without transepts, but this is rare. Sometimes the transepts are reduced to matched chapelA chapel is a church other than a parish church, often attached to a larger institution such as a college, a hospital, a palace, or a prison. One of the best known is that at King's College, Cambridge, which has a renowned choir. Another famous chapel iss. More often the transepts will extend well beyond the sides of the rest of the building, forming the shape of a cross; this is a "Latin cross" groundplan. A "Greek cross" groundplan, with all four extensions the same length, produces a central-plan structure with consequences for the liturgyFrom the Greek word λειτουργια, which can be transliterated as "leitourgia," meaning "the work of the people," a liturgy comprises a solemn religious ceremony, following a carefully prescribed f.
When churches retain a single transept, at as Pershore AbbeyThe buttresses on the left were added in the early 1900s, to replace the support from the missing portion of the building. Pershore Abbey at Pershore in Worcestershire, was founded in the 7th century, and came under the Benedictine rule in about the 10th, there is generally a historical disaster, fire, war or funding, to explain the anomaly. At BeauvaisBeauvais is a city of northern France, prefecture (capital) of the Oise departement''. Population (1999): city: 57,355 beauvaisiens ; city and suburbs: 59,003; urban area (in French: aire urbaine : 100,733. It lies about 90 kilometers north of Paris. only the chevet and transepts stand; the nave of the cathedral was never completed after a collapse of the daring high vaulting in 1284. At St. Vitus CathedralSaint Vitus Cathedral is a cathedral in Prague, seat of the archbishop. Full name of the cathedral is St. Vitus, St. Wenceslas and St. Adalbert Cathedral''. Located within Prague Castle, and containing the tombs of Czech kings, this cathedral is an excell, Prague, only the choir and part of a southern transept were completed, until a renewed building campaign in the 19th century.
The word "transept" is occasionally extended to mean any subsidiary corridor crossing a larger main corridor, such as the cross-halls or "transepts" of The Crystal Palace of glass and iron that was built for the Great Exhibition of 1851.
