_The Iconostasis._--For a description of the screen in front of the bema, with its columns, beam, panels, and doors plated with silver, we refer to the Silentiary. A screen of this kind, from the sacred paintings with which it is adorned, is now called the iconostasis, but by the Byzantine writers it is usually named _herkos_, _druphrakta_, _kinklidai_, or _kankelloi_. Such screens were generally of bronze or marble. The Church of S. John the Evangelist, built by Galla Placidia at Ravenna, had a screen of silver. At the Church of the Apostles at Constantinople, built by Constantine, the iconostasis was gilded bronze. The screen of S. Peter’s in Rome was formed by the twelve beautiful antique columns which figure in Raphael’s tapestry, standing in two rows.[123] Eusebius connects twelve columns which stood about the tomb in the Sepulchre church with the number of the apostles, and it is possible, as De Fleury suggests, that in the six pairs of pillars forming the iconostasis at S. Sophia a reference may be seen to the dismissal of the apostles two by two. From the narrowness of the bema it seems certain that the coupling of the pillars was transversely to the screen as shown on our plan, Fig. 5. Thus they easily supported the passage way, where stood a great gemmed cross and a row of branched silver candelabra. This was the “narrow way for the lamp-lighter above the silver columns” described by the Silentiary. The decoration of the silver plating of the breastwork and the beam by figures of apostles, prophets, and angels, and with circles bearing crosses and monograms, may have been formed in _repoussé_, like a beautiful gilt panel with a figure of the Virgin and Greek inscription now at Kensington Museum, which formed a part of the decoration of the screen at Torcello, but we think it more probable that it was damascened with gold like the silver work in Basil’s chapel. The iconostasis probably reached up to the base of the porphyry strip which forms the border of the marble plating of the bema; if so it was about twenty feet high; it had three doors--“The Holy Doors”--that in the centre being the largest. The “gold and silver columns in the middle of the temple” seen by Benjamin of Tudela, 1173, must refer to the iconostasis.