ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF THE STRUCTURAL BEHAVIOR OF THE ROSE WINDOW OF THE CATHEDRAL OF MODENA (ITALY)

The rose window is a peculiar character of the main facade of Romanesque cathedrals. A beautiful example of rose window can be found in the Cathedral of Modena, Italy. The faced of the Cathedral, built at the end of the XI century, and declared as UNESCO heritage sites in the 1997, was originally built without the great rose window which was added during the XIII cen-tury, together with some lateral doors, to increase the brightness inside the building. It is made of various stones typologies which are arranged in order to suggest the shape of a rose. Due to the quite slender shapes of the stones forming the spokes, the rose could be subjected to high stress and susceptible to instability. In this paper a preliminary assessment of the structural safety of the rose window is carried out. The structural behavior is studied considering both the in-plane and out-of plane actions. The in-plane analyses are developed through limit schematizations. The out-of-plane analyses are carried out through finite element models which are compared with simple hand calculations. The analyses results indicate that the rose window is in a safety state.