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THE BUILDING TRADITIONS OF BYZANTIUM AND NEIGHBORING LANDS
, Robert G. Ousterhout
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ISBN 978–0–19–027273–9
Publication was made possible with the generous support of the Onassis Foundation USA.
ONASSIS SERIES IN HELLENIC CULTURE
,e Age of Titans: e Rise and Fall of the Great Hellenistic Navies
William M. Murray
Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy
Simon Goldhill
Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature
Henry Maguire
Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy
Edith Hall
Beauty: e Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea
David Konstan
Euripides and the Gods
Mary Lefkowitz
Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual
Claudia Rapp
e Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World
Frank L. Holt
e Serpent Column: A Cultural Biography
Paul Stephenson
Anna Komnene: e Life and Work of a Medieval Historian
Leonora Neville
Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: e Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade
Anthony Kaldellis
Dirty Love: e Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel
Tim Whitmarsh
Eastern Medieval Architecture: e Building Traditions of Byzantium and Neighboring Lands
Robert G. Ousterhout
TABLE OF CONTENTS ,
Maps xi
Author’s Preface xiii
INTRODUCTION xix
Historical Architecture East and West
PART ONE: LATE ANTIQUITY
ird to Seventh Centuries
CHAPTER ONE 3
Rome, the Domus Ecclesiae, and the Church Basilica
CHAPTER TWO 21
A Tale of Two Cities: Constantinople and Jerusalem in the Time of Constantine
Ritual Settings II: Pilgrimage, Relics, and Sacred Space
CHAPTER FIVE 81
Makers, Methods, and Materials
CHAPTER SIX 101
Regional Developments, East and West
CHAPTER SEVEN 137
Secular Architecture: Cities, Houses, and Forti cations
CHAPTER EIGHT 175
Innovative Architecture
CHAPTER NINE 199
e Basilica Transformed: Hagia Sophia in Constantinople
CHAPTER TEN 219
Justinian’s Building Program and Sixth-Century Developments vii
PART TWO: THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD
Seventh to Ninth Centuries
CHAPTER ELEVEN 245 e Transitional Period within Byzantium
CHAPTER TWELVE 267 Transformation at the Edges of Empire
PART THREE: THE MIDDLE BYZANTINE CENTURIES
Ninth to Twelfth Centuries
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 303
New Church Architecture and the Rise of Monasticism
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 333
Secular Architecture and the Fate of the City
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 353 Constantinople as an Architectural Center
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 381
Master Builders and eir Craft
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 405
Development of Regional Styles I: Middle Byzantine Greece and Macedonia
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 431
Development of Regional Styles II: Middle Byzantine Anatolia
CHAPTER NINETEEN 455 Development of Regional Styles III: e Caucasus: Armenia and Georgia
CHAPTER TWENTY 479
Contested Lands: Architecture at the Time of the Crusades
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 507 e Exotic West: Venice, Southern Italy, and Sicily
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 531
Exporting a Culture/Importing a Culture: Bulgaria, Kievan Rus’, and Serbia
PART FOUR: THE LATE BYZANTINE AND POST-BYZANTINE CENTURIES irteenth to Sixteenth Centuries
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 561 e Di cult irteenth Century
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 595
Palaiologan Constantinople and a New Architectural Idiom
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 621
Old and New: Greek Cities and Landscapes
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 649
Regional Diversity: Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 679
Rival Powers: e Ottomans and Russia
EPILOGUE 705
An Enduring Legacy
Glossary 714
Abbreviations 723
For Further Research 725
Bibliography 727
Index 757
TABLE OF CONTENTS ix
MAPS ,
[Map 1] e Roman Empire, ca. 390 (Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. C. Mango, xx 2002, p. 33)
[Map 2] Justinian’s empire in 565 (Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. C. Mango, 2002, p. 52) 103
[Map 3] e Byzantine Empire in 780 (Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. C. Mango, 246 2002, p. 130)
[Map 4] e Byzantine Empire in the mid-eleventh century (Oxford History of Byzantium, 304 ed. C. Mango, 2002, p. 178)
[Map 5] e Byzantine Empire in the twelfth century (Oxford History of Byzantium, 305 ed. C. Mango, 2002, p. 188)
[Map 6] e Byzantine Empire and surrounding territories in the second half of the 596 fourteenth century (Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. C. Mango, 2002, p. 264)
AUTHOR’S PREFACE ,
In many ways, this book began in 1978, with my lecture notes from Slobodan Ćurčić’s course “Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture” at the University of Illinois. It was the rst time he’d taught the course, and I was in my rst year as his rst PhD student. Following the approach of his mentor, Richard Krautheimer, my mentor provided order, structure, and clarity to a eld of study I found fascinating, although I still hadn’t made sense of it. Under Ćurčić’s guidance, I shifted my dissertation topic from my rst interest, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, to the Kariye Camii in Istanbul, in e ect leaping from the fourth to the fourteenth century—that is, almost the entire period covered in this book. For much of my career, I’ve been lling in the millennial gap between the two monuments.
In 1983, shortly after I’d nished my dissertation, I succeeded my mentor at the University of Illinois when he accepted a professorship at Princeton, and for the next decades, I had the privilege and challenge of teaching “Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture” to generations of architecture students. Making the distant past accessible to aspiring practitioners inspired my 1999 book, Master Builders of Byzantium, an attempt to approach Byzantine architecture from the
perspective of its builders, with a focus on the workshops of Constantinople. When the book appeared, many of my colleagues mistook it for a textbook, as some of the reviews suggest. It wasn’t— in fact, a suitable textbook on the subject did not appear during the thirty-six years of my professional career. I’ve continued to use Krautheimer’s Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, with occasional nods to Cyril Mango’s Byzantine Architecture. Both have appeared in print long after their expiration date. More critically, neither author appears to have liked his subject very much, and their prejudices have trickled down into a variety of other scholarly assessments.
In the early 1980s, Ćurčić joined forces with Krautheimer to update Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. is resulted in the fourth revised edition, which appeared in 1986, and Ćurčić, whose interests were clearly chronologically later than Krautheimer’s, was able to defuse some of Krautheimer’s negative opinions. is was, however, still in the pre-computer era, and to facilitate typesetting, the publisher speci ed that any alterations to the text had to conform to the original line length and page length. Accordingly, the two eminent scholars made adjustments in pencil on graph paper, counting the letters as they went. Not
surprisingly, beyond an enhanced and updated bibliography, modi cations were limited.
I mention this to emphasize that the textbooks or handbooks we have been using were written in a di erent era—before computers, before the internet, before Google, before JSTOR, before ARTSTOR, before any number of new research tools were at our disposal. e world has changed, and so has the way we study it. is fact has both invigorated and intimidated me. Ten years ago, I organized a methods course for graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania (where I taught from 2007 to 2017) called “How to Write a Textbook.” We read and critiqued a variety of books; we dissected our favorites; we wrote mock tables of contents and introductions; we even designed book covers. In the end, we came up with all sorts of ways not to write a textbook, but not a good single way to do it.
Ultimately, it took the persuasive powers of Stefan Vranka at OUP, backed by the kind folks at the Onassis Foundation, a book contract, and a few publication subventions, to force my hand. My decision was that if I were to undertake this book project, it had to be engaging, evocative, and well illustrated, with a narrative that showcases both the monuments and the intellectual currents behind them in a positive way. I thus alternate chapters that are thematic with those that are period or region focused. ey are arranged more or less chronologically, but because of the changes in focus, some of the monuments will crop up in several di erent chapters. e twentyseven chapters (plus introduction and epilogue) were written following my lesson plan for a semester’s worth of lectures, but I suspect few will use the book in the same way. It could also be used as a handbook, from which the reader (or the instructor assigning readings) can pick and choose, as the chapters are written to be self-contained narratives. And although I am an information junkie (as Master Builders surely indicates), I’ve tried not to clutter the narrative with too much data. e same goes for the footnotes. My rst readers, Leslie Brubaker and her students, insisted they were necessary, but rather than overburden an already-long text, I’ve limited my references to a mix of useful recent scholarship and old standbys— that is, where to begin to nd more information,
with some suggestions for further reading and research at the end of the volume.
With the multiple languages represented by the monuments, I’ve tried to reconcile the orthography to what is most familiar, often choosing the Latinized names rather than the Greek—thus, Sts. Sergius and Bacchus and not HH. Sergios kai Bakchos; Procopius and not Prokopios. I’ve left Hagia Sophia and Hagia Eirene with their hagias intact, since they are concepts and not people, but in dedications to people I’ve opted for St., with the exception of a few familiar Italian monuments, which are better known as S. (i.e., San, Santa, or Santo). For toponyms, I’ve usually opted for the Anglicized historical name with the current name in parentheses—thus, Constantinople rather than Istanbul of Konstantinoupolis. But it’s hard to balance common usage with consistency, and I apologize for whatever o enses my choices might cause. As I ventured further a eld, I attempted to follow the simpli ed Library of Congress system, often with unfamiliar diacritical marks. I’ve also attempted to codify the architectural drawings in a consistent manner, with meter scales and north arrows.
As the book gradually came together, beginning in 2014, I was aided and abetted by any number of friends, colleagues, assistants, and institutions, as well as readers and suppliers of illustrations and nancial and moral support. Several colleagues graciously agreed to read all or part of the book. Mark Johnson, Vasileios Marinis, Stefan Vranka, and Ann Marie Yasin read the whole thing and o ered a variety of valuable comments. Leslie Brubaker and her seminar at the University of Birmingham read and commented on the rst half of the book, which helped me immensely as I tackled the second half. Megan Boomer, Ivan Drpić, Derek Krueger, Christina Maranci, and Alice Sullivan also read and commented on pertinent sections of the text. Engin Akyürek, Demitris Athanasoulis, Charalambos and Demetra Bakirtzis, Elizabeth Bolman, Suna Çağaptay, James Crow, So a Georgiadou, Sarah Guérin, Anne D. and John Hedeman, Ayşe Henry, Jane Hickman, Michalis Kappas, Armen Kazaryan, David Kim, Young Kim, Dale Kinney, W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Ann Kuttner, Lynne Lancaster, Henry and Eunice Maguire, Stavros Mamaloukos, Mikael
Muehlbauer, Robert Nelson, Rory O’Neill, Jordan Pickett, Scott Redford, Brian Rose, Nancy Ševčenko, Kaja Silverman, Anna Sitz, Deb Stewart, Tasos Tanoulas, Tassos Tantsis, Ann Terry, Tolga Uyar, and Charles K. Williams II o ered advice, bibliography, guidance, and reassurance. Ali Harwood assisted with the illustrations; Kaelin Jewell edited the text and prepared the bibliography and index. Financial support and the excellent libraries of the University of Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania, and Dumbarton Oaks have facilitated my research through several decades. I also gratefully acknowledge the publication subventions provided by the Williams Fund at Penn and the 1984 Foundation of Philadelphia, as well as the support of the Onassis Foundation. I am also indebted to the many institutions and individuals who generously assisted with
illustrations, all of whom are acknowledged in the credits. Of these, let me single out Bettina Smith and her excellent sta at the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks; Michael Waters, Tayfun Öner, Nektarios Zarras, and Elka Bakalova, who went above and beyond the call of duty; and Danica Ćurčić, who made her late father’s photographs and drawings available to me.
Professor Slobodan Ćurčić—who inspired my lifelong “church itch”—sadly passed away shortly before my manuscript was completed, but an attentive reader will nd his presence throughout its pages. I humbly dedicate this book to him— my teacher, mentor, and friend.
RGO, March 2019 Philadelphia
EASTERN MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE
INTRODUCTION
,
HISTORICAL ARCHITECTURE EAST AND WEST
The rich and diverse medieval architectural traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and adjacent regions are the subject of this book. e focus is the Byzantine (or East Roman) Empire (324–1453 ce), with its capital in Constantinople, although the framework expands chronologically to include the foundations of Christian architecture in Late Antiquity and the legacy of Byzantine culture after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Because Late Antiquity has become a burgeoning eld of study in its own right, I have limited my discussions of Western Europe to Italy and have opted to emphasize the later developments. Geographically broad as well, this study includes architectural developments in areas of Italy, the Caucasus, the Near East, the Balkans, and Russia, as well as related developments in early Islamic architecture—that is, areas connected culturally or politically to the Byzantine Empire (see Map 1). e term “the East” is used here to refer inclusively to this large and diverse area. e title of the book, Eastern Medieval Architecture, is intended to re ect its breadth—that is, covering more than just the Byzantine Empire and more than just the Eastern Mediterranean. is book might have been titled Architecture of the Forgotten Middle Ages, for it addresses the lesser known and understudied monuments of the East, which often stand in sharp contrast to their better
Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, view from the west (author)
known contemporaries in Western Europe. Viewed through an Orientalist lens, scholars of the past two centuries saw the East (broadly construed) as exotic, distant, and only vaguely connected to Western civilization. Nevertheless, they often looked to the East as a never-ending generator of architectural ideas, which were called upon at critical moments to invigorate and inspire European masons. eir sweeping generalizations are usually discounted today: the twin-towered façade, the alternating support system, ribbed vaults, pointed arches, and the like seem to have developed independently in both West and East, and one doesn’t need to be modeled on the other. And while there was certainly cultural interchange across the Mediterranean, architecture is most often regionally based, following established workshop practices, and determined by local concerns and devotional habits. But the view of the East as a source of inspiration has encouraged the notion that developments there must necessarily precede those in the West. Still following this outdated view, most textbooks on Western art or architecture are unsure where to place the Byzantine Empire: it appears either as the end of Antiquity or as the beginning of the so-called Dark Ages.1 Later
1 See my comments, R. G. Ousterhout, “An Apologia for Byzantine Architecture,” Gesta 35, no. 1 (1996): 21–33; and those
[Map 1] e Roman Empire, ca. 390 (Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. C. Mango, 2002, p. 33)
Byzantine developments—those coeval with the Romanesque and Gothic—are usually omitted, not tting into a neatly encapsulated, linear view of European cultural history. In fact, most textbooks stop with Hagia Sophia in Constantinople or San Marco in Venice, and the vibrant architectural developments in the Caucasus, the Balkans, and elsewhere are omitted altogether.
Recent scholarship is more willing to see the cultures of the East as parallel and coeval to those of the West. From this perspective, the di erences in architectural traditions stand as the cultural expressions of polities in similar stages of development, with common concerns manifest in di erent ways. at said, it is nevertheless di cult to view Byzantine and other Eastern architectures without preconceptions based on our greater familiarity with Western medieval monuments. Consequently, we expect something like a linear pattern of evolution, new structural achievements, and buildings on the grandest of scales. Byzantine architecture fails to live up to such great expectations and is all too often dismissed as small, stag-
by R. S. Nelson,
“ e Map of Art History,” ArtB 79 (1997): 28–40.
nant, and dull. Rather than developing from tiny Dark Age basilicas into the towering cathedrals of the Gothic era, church architecture in the East seems backward by comparison. e great Hagia Sophia (Fig. 0.1)—taller and broader than any Gothic structure (Fig. 0.2)—appeared already in the sixth century, when very little was happening in Western Europe. Subsequent centuries in the East witnessed a signi cant reduction in architectural scale. Indeed, most of the church buildings in the East tend to be small, centralized, and domed (Fig. 0.3); rather than a move toward monumental forms and uni ed spaces, we nd instead increasing compartmentalization and complexity on a small scale. Because of the dramatic di erence in form and scale, it is easy to forget that the two lines of development—East and West—are contemporary.
Why did medieval architecture in the East follow a di erent trajectory than that of the West? is is a critical question and one this book attempts to answer. Several suggestions have been put forward, such as economic factors (i.e., limited scale represents limited skill) or notions of sacred presence, with the centrally planned memorial
FIGURE 0.1
Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, view from the west (author)
structures (martyria) guiding the developments in the East. e di erences may lie more in worship practices: although corporate worship never disappeared in Byzantium, private devotion grew in popularity, more conveniently housed in smaller buildings. Even the nature of monasticism differed: rather than the grand establishments of Western Europe, with a regularized typology (e.g., a basilica anked by a cloister), a xed rule (e.g., the Order of St. Benedict), and hundreds of monastics in residence, Byzantine monasteries tended to be small, family-sized units, less formally organized, and without an established architectural typology. Moreover, from the twelfth century onward in Western Europe, the cathedral dominates the architectural scene, representing a concept of urbanism all but unknown in the East,
where buildings continued to be the product of individual patronage rather than communal e ort.
Even with our vision narrowed to just monuments within the Byzantine Empire, a full understanding of the architectural history is fraught with challenges: to paraphrase one recent critic, Byzantine architecture is “an elusive concept built upon evidence that would be thrown out in any court of law.”2 e Byzantine Empire lasted for more than a millennium, and if we take into consideration areas under its in uence, such as Russia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, it can be said to have lasted even longer (Fig. 0.4). Its geographic scope is similarly broad, now spanning modern nation-states not always friendly with one another and not always easy for foreign scholars to access. Both the historical languages and those of modern scholarship are rich and varied, and there seem to be more than any single human being could possibly master in a lifetime. e student of Byzantine architecture is challenged to be intrepid as a diplomat, an explorer, an archaeologist, and a linguist, not to mention a scholar with a discerning eye.
e study of historical architecture is full of challenges, not the least of which is learning it from a textbook. Buildings are three-dimensional entities, whereas our systems of representing them are two dimensional, and the reader is called upon to assemble these entities in the mind’s eye, to imagine the experience of the forms and spaces in three dimensions. How big is it? How does the plan relate to the elevation? How is space de ned or modulated? Does the external articulation relate to interior space? inking more experientially, what happens when you pass through a door? How do the qualities of sound and light change? How do construction materials or decorative details a ect our response to the building? ese are all questions that the close analysis of a building might answer but that are harder to understand from a short description and a few select images.
e standard approach to Byzantine architecture—indeed, to most historic architectures— begins with formal analysis, establishing the basic typology and taxonomy of buildings, and
2 S. Melikian, “‘Byzantium Art’: A Fit-All Category Defeated by Its Elusiveness,” International Herald Tribune (24–25 January 2009), 11.
FIGURE 0.2
Beauvais, Cathedral of St. Peter, view from the east (Andrew Tallon, courtesy of the Archmap Project, Columbia University)
FIGURE 0.3
Kitta (Mani), Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, view from the east (author)
resulting in the description of planning schemes, formal solutions, structural features, or decorative details. Although a variety of texts survive, buildings often constitute our primary surviving evidence for reconstructing or re-imagining the culture that produced them.3 We are thus obliged to learn all we can about them, beginning with their physical structure, closely observed—that is, to “read” the fabric of the building with the same insight and nuance that a philologist would apply to the study of a text. If we are to understand what buildings mean and how they communicate, we must begin with their grammar, vocabulary, and syntax.
e approach adopted in this book begins with formal analysis as a rst step toward understanding the cultural context: how does a building re ect the concerns of the society that produced it, symbolically or ideologically? How does it reect the social or economic situation of its day? How was it used on a daily basis? ese questions may move us into the world of the social histo-
3 See comments by C. Mango, Byzantine Architecture (New York, 1974), 7–9.
rian, whose concerns are often at odds with established approaches to Byzantine art or architecture. Traditional art history, for example, relies on stylistic and iconographic analysis of visual images and has only in recent decades become concerned with issues of patronage, context, and social history. Because the vast majority of the surviving architecture is religious, it is often read in religious terms only, as manifestations of the belief system of the period, rather than as windows onto the society that produced it. Historians of material culture, however, tend to shy away from “high” art and architecture that reek of elitism or religiosity. And yet, the churches are hard to ignore, as they stand in sharp contrast to the paltry remains of urban and residential architecture, which were less carefully constructed and often built of ephemeral materials. at is, the religious buildings represent the concerns that were most important to the society that built them. ey have survived for a reason.
Writing an architectural history depends on surviving buildings, and because the majority of them are ecclesiastical structures, medieval architecture, both East and West, is often dismissed as
FIGURE 0.4 Moscow, Cathedral of the Virgin of the Intercession, also known as St. Basil’s, seen from the east (author)
“all about churches.” As I shall argue, a church is never just a church. It may stand as a manifestation of piety and the spiritual aspirations of its age, and we would be remiss not to recognize it as such. But it is also a social construct, an emblem of power, prestige, and identity; it represents the combined e orts of artisans of varying backgrounds and social statuses; it is the product of intention, a social contract orchestrated within a hierarchy of command, technical knowledge, and labor.
At all levels of society, Eastern medieval people looked at, inhabited, and responded to their architectural environment, for buildings were the visual manifestations of human enterprise in the world around them. ey also wrote about buildings in texts ranging from theological exegeses to legal documents to ekphraseis. ese texts often concentrate on the de ning features of a building at the expense of general description, but they can inform us of what was important to the contemporary viewer and provide a personal, emotional response to the experience of architecture. For example, the Historia mystagogica, a theological treatise attributed to the eighth-century patriarch Germanos I of Constantinople, outlines the symbolism of the church and its parts, o ering many overlapping meanings and associations:4
e church is a heaven on earth wherein the heavenly God “dwells and walks.” It typi es the Cruci xion, the Burial and the Resurrection of Christ. It is glori ed above Moses’s tabernacle of testimony. . It was pre gured by the Patriarchs, foretold by the Prophets, founded by the Apostles, and adorned by the Hierarchs. e conch is after the manner of the cave of Bethlehem, where Christ was born, and that of the cave where he was buried. . . . e holy table is the place where Christ was buried, and on which is set forth the true bread from heaven, the mystic and bloodless sacri ce, i.e., Christ. . . . It is also the throne upon which God, who is borne up by cherubin, has rested. At this table, too, he sat down at his last supper in the midst of his apostles and, taking bread and wine, said unto them, “Take, eat and drink of
4 C. Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cli s, 1972), 140–43, 185–86, 239–40, for the texts presented here.
it: this is my body and my blood. It was pre gured by the table of the law, on which was the manna, which cometh down from heaven, i.e., Christ.
e text continues to associate the ciborium (canopy) with the Cruci xion, the presbytery with Christ’s tomb, the bema with a footstool and a throne, the ambo with the stone rolled away at the Resurrection, and so on. While the symbolism might seem inconsistent and might not add up to a coherent whole, the text gives a sense of how architecture could resonate with and reinforce the ceremonies it housed.
A di erent view of architecture is provided by the Inventory of the So-Called Palace of Botaniates, a legal document that records the contents of an estate in Constantinople, given to the Genoese in 1192. Its description of the palace church reads in part,
e holy church is domed with a single apse and four columns—one of Bithynian marble. e frieze and the curve of the apse are revetted with marble, along with the vaults. e L-shaped spaces to the west are incrusted with Nikomedian tiles, along with the cornice. Above there are images in gold and colored mosaic, as with the dome and the four vaults— three with windows. e partition of the sanctuary consists of four posts of green marble with bronze collars, two perforated railings, a marble entablature, and a gilded wooden templon.
As a legal document, the text says nothing of symbolism or sanctity but concentrates on the expensive materials and surface coverings, noting, later in the document, where the terrace is decayed and where window panes are missing. Curiously, it says nothing of the construction or the size of the church, and even some details of its plan remain unclear.
A description in the form of an ekphrasis o ers yet another perspective, one that is experiential and impressionistic, a rhetorical exercise known from classical antiquity.5 More than
5 See, among others, H. Maguire, “Truth and Convention in Byzantine Descriptions of Works of Art,” DOP 28 (1974):
simply a literary description, an ekphrasis was a form of evocative writing, meant to conjure the image of its subject in the mind’s eye of the reader. e ninth-century patriarch Photios’s well-known ekphrasis of the Pharos Church at the Great Palace in Constantinople, for example, o ers a visual experience that is both vertiginous and distracting:
It is as if one has entered heaven itself, with no one barring the way from any side and was illuminated by the beauty in all forms shining all around like so many stars, so is one utterly amazed. enceforth it seems that everything is in ecstatic motion, and the church itself is circling round. For the spectator, through his whirling about in all directions and being constantly astir, which he is forced to experience by the variegated spectacle on all sides, imagines that his personal condition is transferred to the object.
As Photios describes it, movement attributed to architectural features may be a way of suggesting the experience of the visitor, for whom the viewing of the church transforms the building into an intricate and ever-changing pattern of forms. While he says nothing about the plan or scale of the building, and elsewhere his description concentrates on selected details, he provides a sense of a viewer’s response to a work of architecture. We are much better informed about religious architecture, although recent decades have seen increased interest in secular architecture, with archaeological studies bringing a range of forms and new building types into the discussion: urban entities, forti cation systems, fortresses, citadels, towers, palaces, houses, public buildings, public baths, and water supply systems. e state of research varies for these topics, and none of the secular examples is as well preserved as the churches. While archaeology has dramatically
113–49; R. Webb and L. James, “‘To Understand Ultimate ings and Enter Secret Places’: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium,” AH 14 (1991): 1–17; R. Webb, “ e Aesthetics of Sacred Space: Narrative, Metaphor, and Motion in ‘Ekphraseis’ of Church Buildings,” DOP 53 (1999): 59–74; R. G. Ousterhout, Master Builders of Byzantium (Princeton, 1999), 33–38.
expanded our knowledge of aspects of daily life, urbanism, and military technology, there is a concomitant danger of Eastern medieval architecture becoming a subset of archaeology or of social history. To utilize the terminology of the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius ( rst century bce), utilitas (function) becomes our main concern, with rmitas (structure) a distant second and venustas (aesthetics) not at all. As the texts often emphasize, a Byzantine viewer understood a great building as a work of art and responded to it accordingly. us, an emphasis on the aesthetics of architecture, an approach that has fallen out of favor, remains valid to our discussions. At the same time, new areas of investigation have considerably broadened the eld of study, and they allow a discourse on architecture that addresses all levels of society. In short, a more integrated approach is necessary if we are to understand historical architecture in its many contexts. To this end, the book includes chapters with di ering approaches, both those that discuss architectural developments by period or region and thematic essays on topics ranging from urbanism to ceremonies to construction technology.
Finally, an examination of its architecture emphasizes that the Eastern medieval world was neither static nor isolated. It was both uid and dynamic, regularly invigorated by the movement of people and ideas. Areas of cultural interchange are particularly instructive in this respect, as planning types, structural solutions, and architectural details were disseminated across great distances. e architecture of the Crusaders or of Norman Sicily, for example, makes no sense without an understanding of both regional and international architectural traditions. ere is also the element of time to consider. In architectural studies, we tend to focus on the moment of inception, but most buildings have long histories, replete with additions, modi cations, changes in function, or changes in demographics. Buildings are forever in the process of becoming. To isolate them at a single moment in their rich histories limits what we might learn from them. In sum, buildings have lives of their own, and taken together, Eastern medieval architecture has a fascinating story to tell.
PART ONE
Third to Seventh Centuries ,
LATE ANTIQUITY
ROME, THE DOMUS ECCLESIAE , AND THE CHURCH BASILICA
Let us begin with a few words on context and terminology: rst, the period we are considering in the rst several chapters is often called “Late Antique” (roughly the third through seventh centuries), referring to a period of transformation marked by social, political, and religious upheaval across the Mediterranean. e same period is also termed “Early Christian,” referring speci cally to the religious transformations of the Roman Empire, which lie at the heart of our study. e term “Byzantine” has also been used, since at least the seventeenth century, to refer to an empire with its capital in Constantinople (formerly known as Byzantium or Byzantion), thus spanning the epoch 324/330 ce (the refoundation of the city by Constantine) to 1453 ce (its fall to the Ottoman Turks). is period may be divided into early Byzantine (the fourth through seventh centuries), the transitional period (the seventh through ninth centuries), middle Byzantine (the late ninth through twelfth centuries), and late Byzantine (the thirteenth through mid- fteenth centuries). Like the term “Eastern medieval,” none of these terms is very exact, and they depend on which speci c historical events one takes as markers. In a broader perspective, we are tracking cultural change from the classical
fragments from a
world, through the medieval, and into the early modern.
Second, change does not happen overnight. e Roman Empire did not suddenly become extinct with the introduction of Christianity. Rather, Christianity inserted itself into a wellestablished framework, characterized by urbanism, wide-scale trading networks, diverse belief systems, and—for our purposes—a thriving building industry, with large-scale construction and established building types to serve the utilitarian needs and pleasures of a thriving cosmopolitan population. us, how Christianity found its way into the existing Roman social and urban fabric is a fascinating story.
ird, we must consider the nature of religion. Participation in a religion presupposes ritual acts of symbolic signi cance; architecture in the service of religion is similarly symbolically charged. More than simply functional (in the modernist sense), religious buildings stand as public markers in the landscape, signi ers of human activity at all levels. e dramatic changes in Roman belief systems during Late Antiquity nd physical manifestations in the architecture of the period. Designing and planning a setting for worship demanded both theoretical and practical considerations: for the
Rome, Capitoline Museums, marble
colossal statue of Constantine found in the Basilica of Maxentius, early fourth century (author)
