Glossary

This glossary gives the technical vocabulary used throughout the site in English, with the Italian form that appears in the primary sources and in most of the specialist literature. Where a term is best understood from a specific work, an example points to the relevant entry. For the dating conventions that govern the reading of medieval Italian documents and inscriptions, see Dating Systems.

Claims are marked according to their evidential status:

• [D] documented — attested in a primary source
• [C] scholarly consensus
• [?] contested or variable — practice differs by period, chancery or scribe
• [T] tradition without documentary support

---

Architecture

Ambulatory (deambulatorio) — The aisle that continues around the apse behind the high altar, permitting circulation and, in pilgrimage churches, access to radiating chapels.

Apse (abside) — The semicircular or polygonal termination of a church, normally at the east end. Smaller subsidiary apses are absidiole.

Baldachin / ciborium (ciborio) — A canopy on columns over an altar or a tomb. In Italian usage ciborio also denotes the vessel for the reserved Host; context decides.

Bifora, trifora, monofora — Windows divided by one, two or no colonnettes respectively. The terminology is standard in Italian scholarship and has no exact single-word English equivalent.

Blind arcading (arcate cieche) — Arches applied to a wall surface without opening through it.

Clerestory (cleristorio) — The upper storey of the nave wall, pierced by windows, rising above the aisle roofs.

Corbel (peduccio, mensola) — A projecting block supporting a vault rib, cornice or arch. A continuous run of small corbels beneath a cornice forms a corbel table.

Cosmatesque (cosmatesco) — Geometric inlay of coloured marble and glass tesserae, characteristic of Rome and Lazio from the twelfth century, named after the Cosmati family of marble workers. [C] The term is a modern coinage and is applied more broadly than the family’s documented output warrants. [?]

Crypt (cripta) — Subterranean or semi-subterranean space beneath the presbytery, normally housing relics.

Lesene and archetti pensili (lesene, archetti pensili) — Flat vertical strips and the small hanging arches that link them, together forming the decorative system usually called Lombard bands. Diagnostic of Romanesque building across northern Italy and beyond.

Matroneum (matroneo) — A gallery above the aisle, opening onto the nave. The traditional identification of this space as reserved for women is a [T] claim; the functional evidence is thin and varies by region.

Narthex (nartece, endonartece) — The vestibule preceding the nave. An open colonnaded forecourt is an atrio.

Pendentive and squinch (pennacchio, tromba) — The two solutions for setting a circular dome over a square bay: a spherical triangle, or a small arch or niche bridging the corner.

Protyrum (protiro) — A projecting porch before a portal, often carried on columns resting on lions (leoni stilofori, “column-bearing lions”). Characteristic of Lombard and Emilian Romanesque.

Rood screen (tramezzo, pontile, iconostasi) — The barrier separating the lay nave from the clergy’s choir. In Italy the tramezzo was widely dismantled in the sixteenth century; its former presence is often recoverable only from wall scars, floor traces and payment records. [D] in individual cases, but reconstruction of its exact form is normally [?].

Splayed portal (portale strombato) — A doorway whose jambs recede in receding orders, typically filled with colonnettes and figural sculpture; the semicircular field above the lintel is the tympanum (lunetta), the moulded arches framing it the archivolts (archivolti).

Tiburio — The external casing, usually octagonal, enclosing a dome or crossing vault. A characteristically Lombard feature with no standard English term.

Transenna and pluteus (pluteo) — Perforated screen panel and solid parapet slab respectively; the surviving carved fragments of early medieval liturgical furnishing are very often of these two types.

Sculpture

Ambo and pulpit (ambone, pergamo, pulpito) — The raised platform for the reading of scripture. Ambone is normally used for the earlier, often paired, fixed structures; pergamo for the freestanding polygonal pulpits of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The freestanding polygonal type reaches its fullest development in the pulpits of Nicola Pisano and Giovanni Pisano, where narrative reliefs, figured supports and stylophore lions form a single architectural-sculptural whole.

Arca — A monumental tomb-chest, especially one raised on columns and containing the relics of a saint. The type is established by the Arca di San Domenico at Bologna, designed in the workshop of Nicola Pisano.

Atlas / telamon (telamone, atlante) — A male figure serving as a support; the female equivalent is a caryatid. A crouching telamon carries one of the columns of the Pistoia pulpit by Giovanni Pisano.

Capital types — Corinthian (acanthus, classical derivation); cubic or cushion (capitello cubico, a cube intersected by a hemisphere, typical of eleventh-century Lombard and Ottonian building); crocket (a crochet, with bud-like volutes, Gothic); historiated (istoriato, carrying narrative figures).

Relief — altorilievo (high relief), bassorilievo (low relief). The extremely shallow pictorial relief later associated with Donatello (stiacciato or schiacciato) belongs to the fifteenth century and should not be applied retrospectively. For relief conceived in painterly terms — composition related to an ideal surface rather than to the depth of the block — see the Orsanmichele tabernacle of Andrea di Cione (Orcagna).

Painting and Panel Construction

Arriccio, intonaco, sinopia, giornata, pontata — The technical sequence of true fresco: the coarse first plaster layer; the fine plaster receiving the paint; the preparatory drawing in red earth on the arriccio; the area of intonaco laid for a single day’s work; the horizontal band corresponding to a level of scaffolding. Counting giornate is one of the few objective means of reconstructing the sequence and division of labour in a fresco cycle. [C]

Bole (bolo armeno) — The red clay ground laid beneath gold leaf for burnishing; its warm tone shows through worn gilding.

Buon fresco and a secco — Pigment bound by carbonation into wet plaster, versus pigment applied with a binder onto dry plaster. Blues (azurite, ultramarine) and greens were commonly a secco and have often been lost, which distorts our perception of original colour balance. [C]

Croce dipinta — The monumental painted cross. Two iconographic types are conventionally distinguished: Christus triumphans, the living Christ with open eyes, dominant to the earlier thirteenth century, and Christus patiens, the dead Christ with closed eyes and curved body, ascendant thereafter. [C] The chronological neatness of this succession is a modern schematisation and admits many exceptions. [?] Component parts: the lateral panels (tabelloni), the terminal at the head (cimasa), the plate beneath the feet (suppedaneo). For the earlier type see Alberto Sozio; for the later, Giunta Pisano and Cimabue.

Gold ground (fondo oro) — Gold leaf laid over the whole background field. Surface decoration is produced by punching (punzonatura) with iron tools; punch-mark inventories are a recognised, if contested, tool of workshop attribution. [?]

Maestà — The Virgin and Child enthroned in majesty amid saints and angels, especially in the monumental panel and fresco tradition of Tuscany. See Duccio di Buoninsegna and Cimabue.

Polyptych, dossal, predella (polittico, dossale, predella) — A multi-panel altarpiece; a horizontal altarpiece behind the altar; the low base register beneath the main panels, usually carrying narrative scenes. The wooden framing structure is the carpenteria, and its dismemberment is the single commonest reason why panels of one complex are now dispersed across several collections. [D] The Strozzi altarpiece of Andrea di Cione (Orcagna) is unusual in suppressing the dividing colonnettes, unifying the compartments into a single field.

Tempera — Pigment bound in egg yolk, the standard medium for Italian panel painting in this period.

Manuscripts and Codicology

Bifolium, quire, recto/verso (bifolio, fascicolo, recto/verso) — A sheet folded once to give two leaves; a gathering of such sheets sewn together (a quaternion is four bifolia, eight leaves); the front and back of a leaf. Foliation cites leaf and side: f. 76v.

Canon tables (tavole dei canoni) — Eusebius’s concordance of the Gospels, set out under arcades in the opening quires of Gospel books. See the Codex Aureus of Echternach.

Cumdach (Irish, “covering, protection”; plural cumdaig; also anglicised cumhdach) - is an Irish book-shrine: a rigid, usually metal-plated box or casing made to enclose a manuscript, normally a gospel book or psalter associated with a saint. It is not a binding in the ordinary sense — it does not adhere to the codex — but a detachable reliquary container into which the book is placed whole. The typical cumdach is a shallow rectangular box of wood (often yew), plated on the front and sometimes the sides with sheets of silver, copper alloy, or gilt bronze, and decorated with filigree, granulation, cast openwork, rock crystal, glass studs, amber, and occasionally enamel. Proportions follow those of the book inside, so they tend to be small and thick. A cross with expanded terminals, dividing the principal face into four fields, is the commonest compositional scheme; the fields are filled with interlace, animal ornament, or, in later examples, figural panels of Crucifixions, ecclesiastics, and saints. Rings or lugs for a strap are frequent, since the object was carried.

Dry-point glosses - are annotations incised into the parchment of a manuscript with a hard-pointed instrument — a stylus, the blunt end of a knife, or a similar tool — without ink. They leave no pigment, only a furrow or a burnished trace in the membrane, and are therefore invisible or nearly invisible under ordinary reading conditions. The scribe presses hard enough to displace the surface of the parchment but not to cut it. The result may be a shallow groove, a slight polishing of the hair or flesh side, or a raised ridge on the verso where the pressure has pushed the material through. Two variants are usually distinguished: true incised glosses, and Griffelglossen proper, where the trace is more of a scratch than a groove. The same tool and technique produced ruling, prickings, and construction lines for decoration, which is why dry-point marks of quite different function coexist on a page.

Incipit, explicit, colophon — The opening words; the closing formula; the scribe’s terminal note, which may record name, place and date. Colophons are the closest thing to direct documentation a manuscript offers — and are also the element most often copied verbatim from an exemplar, so a colophon dates the exemplar unless independently corroborated. [?] For a monogram incipit page carried to monumental scale, see the MARCUS opening of the Codex Aureus of Echternach.

Initials — decorated (ornamental only), inhabited (abitata, containing figures or animals without narrative content), historiated (istoriata, containing an identifiable scene). The distinction is analytically important and is frequently blurred in older catalogues.

Palimpsest (palinsesto) — Parchment scraped and reused; the erased lower text is recoverable by multispectral imaging.

Per cola et commata - is a system of laying out a text so that each line of writing ends at a syntactical and rhetorical break, rather than running to the full width of the writing frame. It is a mise-en-page solution to the problems created by scriptura continua: instead of inserting marks into a continuous stream, the scribe uses the line-end itself as the punctuation. The terms are borrowed from ancient rhetoric and grammar. A comma (Greek kómma, “piece cut off”) is a short phrase, roughly what modern analysis would call a clause fragment; a colon (kôlon, “limb”) is a longer, syntactically complete member of a period. Their use for text layout derives from the practice of preparing rhetorical texts for delivery: Demosthenes and Cicero were copied in this way so the reader could see where to breathe and where to place emphasis. See Codex Usserianus Primus

Pricking and ruling (foratura, rigatura) — The marginal holes and the ruled lines guiding the script. Ruling patterns are a primary criterion for localising and dating undated codices. [C]

Purple parchment and chrysography — Parchment dyed purple and script written in gold or silver, reserved for the most prestigious commissions. The Codex Aureus of Echternach takes its name from the practice.

Scriptio continua - is the practice of writing a text as an unbroken stream of letters, with no spaces between words and generally no punctuation, paragraphing, or lowercase/uppercase distinction. A line reads NEMOENIMESTQUISQUAM rather than nemo enim est quisquam. Archaic Latin inscriptions and early manuscripts did separate words, typically with interpuncts. That habit was abandoned around the first–second century CE under the prestige of Greek scribal practice, and from then until roughly the seventh century Latin books — first rolls, then codices — were normally written continuously, in square capitals, rustic capitals, uncial, or half-uncial. The change of format from volumen to codex did not itself alter the writing: scriptura continua is what fills the pages of the Vergilius Vaticanus, the Vergilius Romanus, and the great biblical uncials.

Scripts — uncial, half-uncial, insular, Merovingian, Beneventan (southern Italy, Montecassino sphere), Caroline minuscule, Gothic textualis, rotunda (the rounded Italian Gothic bookhand). For insular script and ornament see the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Lichfield Gospels.

Iconography

Anastasis — The Byzantine Resurrection image, Christ raising Adam and Eve from Hades; the Western “Harrowing of Hell” is its counterpart.

Deesis — Christ flanked by the Virgin and the Baptist in intercession. The formula appears at the centre of the Strozzi altarpiece by Andrea di Cione (Orcagna).

Maiestas Domini — Christ enthroned in a mandorla, normally with the Tetramorph, the four evangelist symbols (man, lion, ox, eagle). See the Codex Aureus of Echternach.

Mandorla — The almond-shaped glory enclosing a figure in majesty or in transit between earthly and divine spheres.

Nimbus (nimbo) — The halo; the cruciform nimbus (nimbo crucigero), bearing a cross, is reserved to the persons of the Trinity.

Pantocrator, Theotokos, Hodegetria, Eleousa — Byzantine formulations widely diffused in Italy: Christ the all-ruler; the Mother of God; the Virgin indicating the Child with her right hand; the Virgin of tenderness, cheek against the Child’s.

Traditio legis — Christ delivering the Law to Peter in the presence of Paul, a formula of Late Antique and early medieval Roman origin. Its afterlife in the Trecento is visible in the Strozzi altarpiece of Andrea di Cione (Orcagna), where Christ hands the book to Thomas Aquinas and the keys to Peter.