Traces of the Octagonal Crossing of the Cathedral of Pavia

Abstract

The cathedral of Pavia is one of the great unknown in the history of architecture, despite the fact that the main author of his traces was Bramante and this dome is one of the greatest European domes with a diameter of almost 30 m and the height of its impost of 44 m. The floor of the cathedral has a Latin cross with apses in the heads and in the octagonal transept a dome with a lantern rises, with the special feature that there are eight pillars that form this space and on which support the arches that receive the weight of the dome, according to Bramante’s model and represented in the model that is preserved from the 15th century, whose dimensions are 5 m in length and 3 m in height. In this article the study of the octagonal transept, where its majestic dome and the traces of the square, on which all the geometry of the building derives. © 2020, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.