the artistic appreciation of a building of any epoch, it is better to study round or radiating buildings in their own home of the Eastern provinces, as we study the basilica-shaped buildings in Western Europe.
Now the peculiarity of the Eastern church-building, that of the central hall, is generally the absence of any very impressive exterior. This was not necessarily the result of the plan adopted. One does not see readily any sufficient cause for the general neglect among Eastern designers of the appearance from outside; unless it be this—that the cities of the Levant were then as they are now made up, so far as the stranger who walks their streets can discern, of blind whitewashed walls upon which open only the doorways of the dwellings, and here and there, in the ground story, a small unarchitectural and carefully grated window. The street effects, common to the cities of the north of Europe, even as early as the eleventh century, and well known to us for their picturesque and varied character, are, in the Levant, simply non-existent, except in those few cities which show strong external marks of commercial intercourse with Europe. The interior is indeed the chief thing in church building, anywhere, but in the Byzantine art it is everything, or so the student thinks. [Plate XXIII] shows the interior of the great church of Santa Sophia, at Constantinople, which seems to many the noblest architectural conception of the Christian world in any of its parts. [Plate XXIV] gives the exterior of the same building: and it will be seen at once how much there needs to be taken from it that its true Byzantine character may be judged. The tall round minarets are modern Turkish additions, put there for the muezzin who calls to prayer, the enormous buttresses, looking like lofty houses without windows, which rise one on either side of the great arch in the flank of the church, are additions resulting partly from the fall of the original cupola in the sixth century and partly from much later reparations; and all the small cupolas near, with the buildings which they cover, are wholly modern,