Ambulatory

A cloister, gallery, or alley; a sheltered place, straight or circular, for exercise in walking; the aisle that makes the circuit of the apse of a church

A cloister, gallery, or alley; a sheltered place, straight or circular, for exercise in walking; the aisle that makes the circuit of the apse of a church. The central eastern apse of a church was often encircled by a semicircular aisle, called the ambulatory. Of these ambulatories there are three species:

• the ambulatory with tangential chapels;
• the ambulatory without chapels;
• variants of the above.

By far the most common type is that in which the

chapels

radiate tot he north-east, east, and south-east. An ambulatory without radiating

chapels

is so rare in Romanesque work that supposed examples should be regarded as

doubtful

. Sometimes there is a rectangular ambulatory, as in the Romsey eastern

chapel

. Ambulatories are constructed either on the inside or outside of a building, or in a public thoroughfare wholly or partially under cover, or entirely open to the sky, and are used only to walk in. The term is sometimes applied to a covered way round a building, such as the space between the columns and cella of a peripteral temple, or around an open space as the

cloisters

of a monastic church, as the Campo Santo at

Pisa

, or the atrium of an ancient basilica, e.g. that of St. Ambrose at

Milan

. The term can be used as an equivalent of either

cloister

or atrium.