transenna

From Italian transenna.

transenna (plural transennas or transenne)

1. (architecture) A screen.
   • 1881, George Gilbert Scott, An Essay on the History of English Church Architecture:

     By this reversed direction of the high altars in the two churches each altar was, through the transenna, in view of the other.

   • 1982, Meredith P. Lillich, Studies in Cistercian art and architecture, page 134:

     Very pertinent relationships between these grisailles of the vegetal type and Islamic transennas have been established by Eva Frodl-Kraft, between that of Obazine with palmettes enchâssées, and a transenna from the Umayyad castle of Qasr-el Heir al Gharbi (about 727-750), today reconstructed at the National Museum in Damascus, and with a plaque, probably of Syrian origin, reused over a tomb in San Marco in Venice.

   • 2015, Margaret Visse, The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church:

     The transenne have simple geometrical designs—a common one consists of arching shapes suggestive of waves of water—and wherever these stone screens survive they give dim rippling or starlike lighting effects to church interiors.

• IPA^(key): /tranˈsen.na/, (traditional) /tranˈsɛn.na/^[1]
• Rhymes: -enna, (traditional) -ɛnna
• Hyphenation: tran‧sén‧na, (traditional) tran‧sèn‧na

Borrowed from Latin.

transenna f (plural transenne)

1. barrier, barricade (for crowd control)
2. (architecture) screen

• transennare

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

transenna

1. inflection of transennare:
   1. third-person singular present indicative
   2. second-person singular imperative

• trassenna, trāsenna

Possibly borrowed from Etruscan.^[1]

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [trãːˈsɛn.na]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [tranˈsɛn.na]

trānsenna f (genitive trānsennae); first declension

1. a trap or snare made of netting
2. (in dubious sense, perhaps) a net used as a container, or netting or lattice used as a screen
   • 55 BCE, Cicero, De oratore 1.162:

     illam cōpiam ōrnāmentōrum suōrum, quam cōnstructam ūnō in locō quasi per trānsennam praetereuntēs strictim aspeximus

     • Translation by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham

       that abundance of his treasures, of which, piled together in one place, we in passing have caught just a glimpse, as through a lattice

First-declension noun.

• “transenna” on page 2162 of the Oxford Latin Dictionary (2nd ed., 2012)

• “transenna”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “transenna”, in Gaffiot, Félix (1934), Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.