Who hasn’t gone inside some beautiful baroque church and looked up, gazing left or right in the presbytery or towards the end of the nave, above the entrance door? No one can miss the choir gallery where the organ is usually also located.
In some churches, the gallery is very elaborate, as is the unit that contains the organ’s front pipes. In times when it was thought that art should be the language through which we speak to God and through which God speaks to us, it was believed that every detail in a church should be worthy of an admiring gaze.
This reminds me of the choir gallery in Rome’s Church of Santa Maria della Scala; a double gallery in fact, the top one for the orchestra and the bottom one for the singers. To this, we might add the extraordinarily rich and elaborate church of Santa Maria Maddalena, also in Rome.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Cantus to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.