Byzantine Court (entrance from North Transept).
The regular architectural sequence on the other side of the Nave finds its termination in the Roman Court, and we now resume the order of history with the “Byzantine” Court. Art, as we have already indicated, declined during the Roman Empire; but the general adoption of Christianity gave the blow that finally overthrew it; for the introduction of this faith was, unfortunately, accompanied with bitter and violent enmity against all Pagan forms of beauty. An edict of Theodosius, in the early part of the 5th century, ordered that pagan art should be utterly annihilated, and the primitive Christians demolished with frantic zeal the temples, bronzes, paintings, and statues that adorned the Romish capital.
To complete the work of destruction, it is related that Gregory (A.D. 590), one of the celebrated “Fathers” of the Roman Church, gave orders that every vestige of Pagan Rome should be consigned to the Tiber; and thus was ancient Art smitten and overthrown, and the attempt made to efface its very foot-prints from the earth; so that, indeed, men had now to proceed as best they might, by painful and laborious efforts, towards the formation of a new and essentially Christian style of architecture, which, however feeble and badly imitated from ancient models at its commencement, was finally productive of the most original and beautiful results.
Constantine the Great, in the early part of the 4th century, embraced Christianity. The new religion required structures capable of holding large assemblages of people at certain periods; and notwithstanding the magnificence of some of the Roman structures, none could be found appropriate to the required use, save the Basilicas, or Halls of Justice, at Rome. The form of these structures was oblong, and the interior consisted of a central avenue and two side aisles, divided from the centre by a double row of columns, the central avenue terminating in a semicircular recess with the roof rounded off. It will be at once apparent that such buildings were admirably adapted to the purposes and observances of the new religion; and, accordingly, in A.D. 323, when Constantine removed the seat of empire from the West to the East, from Rome to Byzantium (Constantinople), the Roman Basilica probably served as a model for the Christian churches which he rapidly raised in his new city.
But on this point we have little authentic information; time, the convulsions of nature, and the destructive hand of man, have long since lost to us the original churches built on Constantine’s settlement at Byzantium, and the oldest monument with which we are acquainted, that of Santa Sophia, built in the early part of the 6th century by Justinian, bears no relation in its plan to the long basilica of the Western Empire.
Greek Cross.
Latin Cross.