Note 20 — THE TRIFORIUM

Rivoira will not allow that the women’s galleries of the Eastern Church, so notable a feature in the churches of Constantinople and Salonica of Justinian, and other great Byzantine church builders, was a pure invention of these architects. But he believes that these galleries, so universal in the planning of Eastern Basilicas, were in the first instance imitated from an older model, viz. from certain of the Pagan civil galleried Basilicas, such as the Basilica Julia in the Roman Forum, which even before its rebuilding by Augustus in A.D. 12 possessed a gallery occupied on the occasion of important trials.

He also dates a very few ancient examples of the existence of such a gallery in churches of the Latin type, notably in the Churches of S. Salvatore (Spoleto), fifth century; S. Lorenzo (Rome), sixth century; SS. Quatuor Coronati (Rome), seventh century; S. Agnese (Rome), seventh century.

Still, granting the strict accuracy of Rivoira’s interesting account of the genesis of the Byzantine introduction of the women’s galleries, the general deductions given above will not be affected.

The adoption of the women’s galleries in Byzantine churches was, without doubt, referable to the Eastern use of the separation of the sexes in divine worship; still, in spite of the existence of certain rare exceptions, it was never really a Latin practice.

The planning of great churches in the West, until the “coming” of the Anglo-Norman school of architects, was emphatically without this gallery. But the Byzantine great women’s galleries were indisputably the origin of the Triforium, which really only reappeared in parts of the West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.