ARK. - Latin name used as a synonym for sarcophagus (v.) located above ground in ancient Christian cemeteries (v.). It is used, from the end of the 4th century to the 5th, rarely in the Christian inscriptions of Milan, Brescia, Vercelli, Ravenna, Oderzo, Aquileia; very often at Concordia (Portogruaro) and at Salona in Dalmatia; two examples in Pannonia, at Sirmium and at Siscia. Only once in Latium, in a sarcophagus from Velletri, now lost (CIL, X, 6608). It is never found in the inscriptions of the underground cemeteries.
The author of the so-called Palatine Sylloge (cod. Pal. Vat. 591) uses it to indicate the place of the tomb of St. Peter (G.B. De Rossi, Inscript. Christ., II, 1, Rome 1888, p. 54, n. 7).
In non-funerary epigraphs it was read on the ancient altar of the basilica of S. Giovanni evangelista in Ravenna, where the said apostle was called arca Christi (CIL, XI, 277). For the liturgical use of the term see PISSIDE.
Bibliography
Enrico Josi
Later the name of a. was reserved for monumental sarcophagi such as the Scaliger a. of Verona, or for monuments containing the remains of a saint. Quite famous is that of St. Dominic in Bologna, executed by fra' Guglielmo at the end of the 13th century, adorned with episodes from the saint's life and supported by caryatids, completed in the 15th century by Niccolò da Bari, called, because of the fame of this work, Niccolò dell'A.; it served as a model for the other 14th-century one by Giovanni di Balduccio for St. Peter Martyr (Milan, S. Eustorgio), from which derives, with a more complicated scheme and an overabundance of decoration, the other for St. Augustine in S. Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia. Much simpler, on the other hand, is the a., also 14th-century, for St. Cerbonius (Massa Marittima) by Goro di Gregorio, with reliefs framed by an elegant and sober motif. Still dependent on this simple chest type is the beautiful a. of Blessed Marcolino (Forlì, Museo) which Bernardo Rossellino executed in 1458. That of St. Bernardino of Siena (Aquila, S. Bernardino) from the early 16th century, instead, takes the form of a small building which with its architectural regularity and its reliefs encases the wooden chest and the small space in which it is kept. Quite famous, and such as to participate in the architecture of the building beside which they stand, are those called "of the glossators", next to the apse of S. Francesco in Bologna, and those within the lateral arcades of the Malatesta temple in Rimini.
The type of a. with tegurium was taken up with excessive frequency in the emphatic funerary architecture of late Romanticism and Neoclassicism. Among the last examples are the systemist a. in the Vittoriale by the architect Maroni. - See Pl. CXXVIII.
