§ 1. ORIGINS.
It may be well to say a few words on the growth of the Byzantine architecture, of which Justinian’s church is the perfect flower. This building is often spoken of as if it were at once the first and the maturest essay in this great style, but this we might know would have been impossible, even though the links that led up to it were lost, which is not entirely the case. It is perfectly true, however, as Mr. Morris says, that “the style leaps into sudden completeness in this most lovely building.”
The new wants of the Church soon evolved the complete Christian basilica, which, it has been said must have been in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse as the type of the entire arrangement of the altar, the twenty-four elders, and the great congregation, in his vision of the heavenly worship. In the time of Constantine, and in Rome, alongside of work which was entirely classic, the churches, with fewer ties to the past to limit development along truly rational lines, had developed a manner which was a more direct outcome of the necessities of building with a minimum of merely perfunctory “architectural” forms—those conventions for the thoughtless expenditure of the workers’ labour, which in still worse times make architecture a burden to them instead of a delight.
This transitional style is rightly called early Christian, or Constantinian. In the East, the vital part of the empire at this time, a greater change was taking place that brought back life once again to the arts of decoration; this may be expressed in a formula as the re-orientalization of classic art—the linking of simple massive Roman building to a new decoration, vividly alive and inventive, frank, bright, and full of colour, and yet as rational in its choice and application as the construction. In the modern sense the Romans may be said to have invented building, and the Byzantine-Greeks architecture.
The Roman system of arched building, covered with brick and concrete vaulted shells and domes, had been masked by non-functional pillars, tablements, and pediments in what was thought the true Athenian manner; at the same time many beautiful decorative expedients were also in use, such as the lining of walls with large thin marble slabs, or small pieces of glass of various forms and colours. Mosaic of gold glass seems to have been known before the time of Constantine.[329] Gold tesserae probably originated in an at first almost accidental use of portions of the Roman glass vessels which are decorated by patterns in gold leaf protected by a thin layer of glass over the surface. Parts of such vessels are found used decoratively in the Catacombs.
Byzantine architecture was developed by the use of brick in the frankest and fullest manner, especially in domical vaulting. Wide spans were kept in equipoise by other smaller domes. The more concentrated supports were marble monoliths, and the wall and vault surfaces were covered by incrustations of marble slabs and glass mosaic. Directness, an economy of labour relative to the results obtained, is perhaps the most essential characteristic of the art both in construction and decoration in the great period. This freedom and rationality mark it out from all other styles of building, or rather make it include all other styles, for this reaches the universal. M. Choisy rightly insists on the fact that the Byzantine builders endeavoured to suppress preparatory and auxiliary work, and to execute their vaults and domes without centring. “The greater number of their vaults,” he says “rose in space without any kind of support.... Their method is not a mere variation of that of the West, but it is quite a distinct system, not even derived from a Roman source, but Asiatic. Byzantine art is the Greek spirit working on Asiatic elements.” Here we have an extreme statement in one direction, and the word Roman must be used in a narrow sense; for these Asiatic elements in construction, of which alone M. Choisy seems to be speaking, whatever were their remote origins must have been completely absorbed into the larger Rome of the Empire, and we have no knowledge of any other system of construction in western Asia from the first to the fourth century than “Roman,” unless we subdivide this into Palmyrene, Herodian, or construct an imaginary Persian style out of what went before and came afterwards. Choisy himself shows that a large use of burnt brick was first made by the Romans, and that the system of building vaults in sections known in Assyria and Egypt had been adopted by Roman builders in the East in the time of Constantine. But this was the essential germ of Byzantine construction. It was the falling away of a dead scholasticism that left Roman building in the East free to be shaped into Byzantine architecture. Mr. Bury, who is extreme in the opposite direction, and makes the same claim for the continuity of Roman art as he does for the Empire, suggests that Romaic would be a better term than Byzantine. But whatever name is given to the political system we must remember that the arts are shaped by the people, and that the people were truly Greek who, in the age of Justinian, thought out and left to the modern world the last great gift of Hellenic genius—mediæval Greek architecture.
Fig. 30.—Roman Tomb in Palestine.
While the art of building in the East, particularly in Syria and Asia Minor, and possibly in Egypt, was still distinctly Roman, a ferment and change may be detected which cannot be matched in Rome itself. Both in construction and ornamentation there is much already at Palmyra and Baalbec that belongs to the new, and repudiates the rules of merely official art.
In Rome the dome never appears to have been finally adapted to a composite building by being directly applied to a square plan. The dome on pendentives, so far as we know, was invented and perfected entirely in the East. M. Choisy figures a building from Jerash, which may be of the third or fourth century which he considers the earliest known dome on pendentives. This building, although it is plainly early, has nothing characteristically Roman about it. A building of the same class however, recently discovered by the Palestine Exploration Society at Kusr en Nûeijîs in eastern Palestine,[330] is an ornate example of late Roman work; Ionic pilasters and carved entablature mask the outside, while within we have a perfected dome on pendentives covering a central square area, counterpoised by four barrel vaults. We agree with the Memoir that—“there can be little hesitation in ascribing this building to the second century A.D.” This building, probably a mausoleum, in adjustment of parts, and geometrical development might be a Byzantine church of three hundred years later. It is a little Sancta Sophia, and taken together with the Jerash building it makes a class invaluable as a fixed point to work from.[331] This however like most Syrian buildings is of stone.
A church at Koja Kalessi in Isauria,[332] [Fig. 31], which there is a great reason to suppose of early fifth century work, furnishes an important link. We have here an approximation of the square domed building to the columned basilica which is most interesting. This church is substantially complete with women’s galleries opening to the nave by a second tier of arcades just as at S. Sophia.
Fig. 31.—Plan of a Church in Isauria.
Fig. 32.—Church of the Trinity, Ephesus.
The next building we should place in the sequence is the church of the Trinity at Ephesus of which Hübsch, Wood and Choisy give plans. The former furnishes a restoration, and speaks of it as probably one of the earliest of Christian churches, but there is no reason to suppose it earlier than the beginning of the fifth century. Choisy speaks of it as a curious monument of transition already Byzantine in structure. Before seeing Hübsch’s restoration, we had placed an arcade in the lateral arches, agreeing in every respect with his suggestions; and that this was the original form is strongly confirmed by the next church—as it seems to us—in the development. This is the church of S. Sophia at Salonica, which has long been assigned to Justinian’s reign at a time subsequent to the erection of S. Sophia, but is now thought to belong to the fifth century. M. Petros Papageorgios in the Hestia[333] of Athens for October 3rd and November 14th 1893, gives the mosaic inscription of this church, which he thinks definitely fixes its decoration in the year 495.[334]
Fig. 33.—Church of S. Sophia, Salonica. Scale about forty-five feet to an inch, for three plans.
The churches at Cassaba, Ancyra and Myra in Asia Minor engraved in Texier’s Asie Mineure, and repeated by Salzenberg relate themselves so closely to this chain of development that we believe they will be found to belong rather to the fifth and sixth centuries than to the seventh or eighth as those writers thought. The square type with a central dome persisted independently without coalescing with the basilica. Such was the domed church at Antioch founded by Constantine and completed by Constantius; here the central dome was surrounded by aisles, and formed an octagon. In the churches of St. George at Ezra, and St. Sergius at Bosra we have domes standing over a central octagon contained in an external square. These were built about 515, and they furnished the type that was followed at St. Sergius at Constantinople which was built only a few years before S. Sophia.