Reviews

058

The Byzantine Empire was born in 324 A.D. with the founding of Constantinople on the site of an ancient town called Byzantium. Constantine I (306–337 A.D.), the first Christian Roman emperor, sought a site at the southernmost point of the Balkans to become the New Rome. The Byzantines even called themselves “Romaioi” and their territory “Romania.” The adjective “Byzantine” did not come into use until the 16th century, well after the empire had collapsed in the wake of the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman Turks.

The Byzantine Empire, however, was not just a continuation of Rome—it was a new entity, combining western and eastern elements. Unlike the Latin-speaking pagans of ancient Rome, the Byzantines were largely Greek-speaking and thoroughly Christianized. They created a civilization that outlasted the Roman Empire by about 1,000 years.

Byzantine scholar Robert Ousterhout has chosen to examine one aspect of this civilization, architecture, from the point of view of its builders. His main sources are the surviving buildings and contemporaneous written evidence, though the latter proves far less informative than the former. His study deals largely with church architecture during the latter part of the Byzantine period, following the Iconoclast Controversy (843 A.D.), when a new kind of Christian church appeared on the scene: the cross-in-square-church, with a centrally positioned dome. Ousterhout discusses all aspects of this new architecture, including the basic plan, its structural characteristics, and the liturgical consequences entailed by a new disposition of spaces. This cross-in-square design, he argues, became the basic model of all later Byzantine religious architecture; it provided the theme on which thousands of architects and craftsmen performed fantastic variations.

So accomplished had Byzantine architecture become by the 10th and 11th centuries, that Byzantine masons set to work as far afield as Russia, Germany and Spain. Unfortunately, Ousterhout does not discuss, with the exception of Armenia, what these far-flung workers might have brought back in a process of architectural cross-fertilization. We do know that such exchanges took place. For example, the Byzantine cardinal John Bessarion (c. 1399–1472), who was born in the eastern Anatolian city of Trebizond, advised the Greek despot Constantine of Morea to bring in master builders from Italy and to send local Greeks to Italy to study building techniques. It would have been interesting to know what Russian or Spanish influences crept into the Byzantine repertoire.

One often-discussed and yet unsolved problem in Byzantine architecture is whether the Byzantines used architectural drawings, models and plans. After scouring all the relevant sources—written evidence, illuminated manuscripts, architectural representations in paintings, and actual buildings—Ousterhout concludes that the Byzantines did not use architectural drawings, especially during the 059“high” period (c. 843–1453 A.D.) of Byzantine architecture.

Oddly enough, however, Byzantine architects did sometimes work from life-size drawings of architectural elements. In the church of the Holy Cross at Resafa, in Syria, for example, incisions in the floor correspond to the arcades of the nave. Similar curved lines representing the nave were also inscribed on the inner wall of the 11th-century A.D. church of Çanli Kilise in western Cappadocia, in Turkey. On marble facades of the 12th-century Church of the Virgin at Studenica, in Serbia, one can still see life-size drawings of the arches from which the church’s portals may have been modeled.

With extraordinary insight, Ousterhout observes that Byzantine architects generally worked from existing building types, which they then adapted and modified. These transformations occurred for any number of reasons—the creation of innovative designs, natural disasters, new functional considerations such as surges in population—and often resulted in new architectural forms.^a

A large part of Master Builders of Byzantium is devoted to building materials, construction and structural design. Ousterhout elaborates all of this very disparate material extremely clearly. Nonetheless, it is peculiar to include a discussion of architectural elements like columns, windows and roofing systems in the chapter on “Building Materials,” which deals primarily with stone quarrying and the production of bricks and mortar, rather than in the chapter on “Structural Design,” which examines procedures for constructing such things as arches and vaults. For some reason, Ousterhout discusses “Windows” and “Columns” as separate topics but omits doors and piers altogether. The book should also have more sub-divisions; under the section on “Arch and Vault Construction,” for example, there could have been an informative discussion of domes.

Despite these organizational quibbles, Ousterhot’s pages on materials, construction and structural design will be the starting point for any future investigation of Byzantine building methods. Master Builders of Byzantium is a very good book on an extremely important topic.