LECTERN. - A piece of furniture intended to support a liturgical book for public reading. It first appeared fixed upon ambos and, like the latter, made of stone. Later, construction in wood or metal prevailed, and lecterns were placed at the center of the choir, some upon supports with an almost always triangular base, and others fitted into the body of a pedestal in the form of a cupboard, called, in Florentine terminology, badalone.
The lower part of the pedestal can be opened, for the storage of choral books, and the upper part sometimes has drawers. The lectern proper has one or more inclined surfaces and is often surmounted by a statuette or by another ornamental motif of a symbolic character. Portable lecterns of brass and wood were also used, with surfaces of cloth or leather and with X-shaped supports. Domestic lecterns had even more varied forms and often formed a single body with writing desks or with small bookcases. Characteristic among all is the medieval type, revolving, in the shape of a truncated pyramid, with the volumes open on its various faces and which the reader had the opportunity to consult without moving from his desk.
In the late Gothic period, which saw the art of wood carving applied to the construction of church choirs flourish throughout a great part of Europe, the wooden lecterns of the collegiate church of S. Orso at Aosta (with ogival arches and tracery of French taste) and of the Pinacoteca of Lucca (with very fine floral inlays) appear typical and of singular beauty, for their architectural line and for the charm of their ornamental schemes. To the early fifteenth century belong those with an eagle figure, in bronze or brass, of the National Museum of Messina and of the basilica of St. Mark in Venice (the latter presents an orientalizing base of superimposed discs), but the full and classicist taste of the Renaissance was to manifest itself during the 16th century, causing the lectern too to assume progressively more and more imposing architectural and decorative developments. Still Tuscan in their sobriety are the lectern carved in the church of S. Agostino at Perugia, with a polygonal base of the Corinthian order, and those of the Laurentian Library in Florence, executed by Ciapino and by Battista del Cinque; already adorned with mannerist motifs is the one, otherwise most valuable, in the choir of S. Maria Novella, in Florence, designed by Baccio d'Agnolo; richer and more luxuriant is the other, carved, inlaid and sculpted with caryatids, chimeras, and medallions in relief, in the church of S. Pietro at Perugia, until one arrives at the exuberant monumentality of the lectern in the cathedral of Siena, with heavy festoons, by Bartolomeo Neroni, called il Riccio (1570). Baroque forms, in the following period, impressed upon this piece of furniture a character of sumptuous opulence, accentuating its sculptural motifs, which instead became simplified in the course of the 18th century, as can be seen, for example, in the most noble, and yet simple, architectural lectern of the Madonna della Steccata, at Parma, surmounted by elegant vases and by an eagle with spread wings. The portable lecterns of that period too were clothed, in their undulating and capricious lines, with the worldly graces of the time, without however losing the elegance and agility of their architectural structure. - See pl. LXIX.
