Word Finder - ambones

definition

A raised platform in an early Christian church, as well as in the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic churches.

example

1918, ‘It will get better somehow,’ he thought, and went to the ambo. On going up the steps and turning to the right he saw the priest. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. Louise & Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998, page 438)

definition

A stationary podium used for readings and homilies.

The interior is in the form of a basilica, the double aisles being borne by ancient columns, and contains ambones and a candelabrum of 1311, the former resting on columns supported by lions, and decorated with reliefs and coloured marble mosaic. The castle at the highest point of the town was erected in the 14th century.

The inconvenience of having a single ambo led to the substitution of two separate ambones, between which these various functions were divided, one on the south side of the chancel being for the reading of the gospel, and one on the north for reading the epistle.

Ambones were made of wood or else of costly marbles, and were decorated with mosaics, reliefs, gilding, &c.; sometimes also covered with canopies supported on columns.

Some early ambones are found in Ravenna, and in the south of Italy are many fine examples; the epistle ambo in the cathedral at Ravello (1130), which is perhaps the earliest, shows a Scandinavian influence in the design of its mosaic inlay, an influence which is found in Sicilian work and may be a Norman importation.

The two ambones in the cathedral of Salerno, which are different in design, are magnificent in effect and are enriched with sculpture as well as with mosaic. In the gospel ambo in the cathedral of Ravello (1272), and also in that of the convent of the Trinita della Cava near Salerno, the spiral columns inlaid with mosaic stand on the backs of lions.

In the epistle ambo at Salerno and the gospel ambones at Cava and San Giovanni del Toro in Ravello, the columns support segmental arches carrying the ambones; the epistle ambo at Ravello and all those in Rome are raised on solid marble bases.

Two magnificent marble ambones, the larger dating from 1175, a large 11th-century altar frontal in the south aisle, having scenes from the Bible carved on thirty ivory tablets, with 13th-century mosaics in the apse, given by Giovanni da Procida, the promotor of the Sicilian Vespers, and the tomb of Pope Gregory VII., and that of Queen Margaret of Durazzo, mother of King Ladislaus, erected in 1412, deserve to be mentioned.