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Byzantium and British Heritage
Byzantium was a very influential part of the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement (1880-1910) in Britain, and although the influence of the Gothic Revival (1830-80) is well known, that of the Byzantine Revival (1840-1910) is not. This volume is about the people and the movements that created the Byzantine Revival and shows how they influenced British heritage from architecture to the decorative arts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The central pillars of the volume are the architects and scholars who created the Byzantine Research Fund (BRF) Archive, a unique collection of architectural drawings and photographs of numerous monuments across the Byzantine world, and the social and professional networks in which they circulated. The BRF members, an eclectic and little-known group, who based themselves at the newly founded British School at Athens, established the research of Byzantium in Britain and Greece. They were trained in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought authenticity in design and decoration in reaction to the styles that had developed through industrialisation. Their work, uniting a distinctively British design tradition with Byzantine arts and crafts, represents a highly significant and under-researched link between Britain and the Hellenic world. This volume is the first contribution to try to fill this knowledge gap.
Byzantium and British Heritage will appeal to all those interested in the relation between Byzantine and British culture and Byzantine art.
Amalia G. Kakissis is Archivist at the British School at Athens.
Acknowledgements
The Byzantium and British Heritage: Byzantine influences on the Arts & Crafts Movement conference and publication has been an incredible opportunity to demonstrate how archive collections, like the Byzantine Research Fund Archive, can still generate so much new discussion and research. I have been privileged to work with this remarkable collection, as the Archivist of the British School at Athens and it has been very rewarding to share its wealth with many others in the last few years.
My sincere thanks to the participants of the conference, especially my co-organizer, Mary Greensted, and, especially, to the contributors of this volume for their exchange of ideas and enduring patience during, at times, a difficult road through to the final manuscript.
I would like to thank: Professor Catherine Morgan, former director of the British School at Athens, for giving me the platform to expand archive engagement with our collections, the encouragement to develop this project and her support throughout it; Professor Roderick Beaton and Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith, former chairs of the School’s Committee for Society, Arts and Letters, for all their support to realise the conference and their advice on the publication; Professor John Bennet for seeing the publication through to completion; Professor Elizabeth James, Annette Carruthers and the late Dr Ian Jenkins and Dr Ruth Macrides for giving generously of their time to work on ideas and give me feedback; Robert K. Pitt for his incredible editorial support as well as Semele Assinder for her essential assistance at the beginning of the editorial process; BSA Librarians, Penny Wilson-Zarganis and Sandra Pepelasis, for their administrative and research support; BSA Administrative Staff, Tania Gerousi, Maria Papaconstantinou, and Vicki Tzavara, for their advice and administrative support; the staff of the Centre of Hellenic Studies and Kings College London for their administrative support for the conference; Elias Eliades for the impeccable photographs he took of the Byzantine Research Fund Archive; and to the anonymous reviewers of the volume for their comments and feedback. I will forever be grateful for all the moral support of my friends, my sister Joanna, and colleagues throughout this project, especially Robert, Penny, and Sandra.
Finally, I am indebted for the generous financial support for both the conference and publication to the sponsors: The J.F. Costopoulos Foundation, The A. G. Leventis Foundation, The Goldsmiths’ Company, Matti and Nicholas Egon, and the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.
Amalia G. Kakissis Archivist British School at Athens.
Preface
This volume derives from a conference of the same title that took place at King’s College London in September 2013, organised by the British School at Athens in conjunction with the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. The purpose of that meeting was to open up a dialogue between specialists working on the Byzantine world and the British Arts and Crafts Movement, respectively. Its aim was to place in context an important, if shortlived, episode in Anglo-Hellenic relations at the turn of the twentieth century: a flowering of interest in Byzantine art and architecture that had an important influence on British design, particularly within the ecclesiastical realm. The chapters that follow discuss the individual characters and the artistic and philosophical movements that launched the Byzantine Revival in an attempt to trace and understand how elements of British heritage, from architecture to the decorative arts, came to be inspired by the Byzantine tradition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Various intellectual circles in Britain from the late 1880s to the mid-1930s, among them the Arts and Crafts architects, classicists, artists, historians, and archaeologists, produced great new developments in the area of Byzantine studies. And, it was the keen interest of the Arts and Crafts scholars to explore Byzantine lands that so greatly enhanced this aspect of Byzantine studies.
Therefore, Byzantium played a prominent role in the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain (1880-1910), but the influence of the Byzantine Revival (1840-1910), the outcome of this artistic and philosophical exchange, does not enjoy the same level of familiarity in scholarship as that of the Gothic Revival (1830-80). The present volume aims to address this neglect and to highlight the importance of Byzantium for the practitioners and practices of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
The central pillars of the volume are a group of architects and scholars whose works created the Byzantine Research Fund (BRF) Archive, a unique collection of architectural drawings and photographs that forms part of the Archive collection of the British School at Athens. Between 1888 and 1948, these individuals meticulously studied monuments in many parts of present-day Greece and the eastern Mediterranean with the BSA as their institutional base. The material they produced remains an invaluable resource for researchers today. No less important than the individuals are the social and professional networks in which they operated, which are also extensively explored in the chapters that follow. The BRF members, an eclectic and little-known group, were brought together almost by chance to establish the study of Byzantine visual and material culture in Britain and Greece. They had been trained in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought authenticity in design and decoration in reaction to the styles that had developed through industrialisation. Their interaction with Greece and its monuments on their travels would prove critical to their thinking and creativity throughout their later careers. Since the volume deals with a very small network of people, biographical information may be traced through various chapters.
These architects developed highly successful practices, undertaking major commissions for buildings, furniture, and fittings across Britain and the British Empire. Their work, uniting a distinctively British design tradition with Byzantine arts and crafts, represents a highly significant and under-researched link between Britain and the Hellenic world. This volume represents a first attempt to fill that gap in our knowledge.
The volume is organised into three themes. The first chapters, under the heading Prelude to the Byzantine Revival, discuss the development of the idea of Byzantium through the literary, artistic, architectural, and social movements of Britain in the nineteenth century. They introduce our British travellers and investigate their perceptions of the Byzantine world that they encountered, and how these in turn transformed popular thinking back home. Focusing on art and architecture, the chapters discuss the important role that these architects played in the rediscovery of Byzantine monuments and the formation of the academic field of Byzantine Studies in the UK. Furthermore, they explore how the exchanges between these individuals and other scholars in Greece and elsewhere in Europe influenced the appreciation of Greece’s Byzantine monuments and the restoration practices of the time.
The second theme, Pioneers and Patronage, highlights the work of key figures in the Arts and Crafts Movement who initiated the Byzantine Revival, such as William Lethaby, Robert Weir Schultz, and Sidney Barnsley, as well as the patrons who supported them, particularly the remarkable figure of John Crichton-Stuart, Third Marquess of Bute. Lethaby’s influential writings on art and architecture encouraged a generation of architects: his book on Hagia Sophia in Constantinople provided much of the inspiration for J.F. Bentley’s design for Westminster Cathedral. Schultz, one of Lethaby’s protégés, was, together with Sidney Barnsley, the first to undertake a systematic recording of the remnants of Byzantium; no researcher before them had made detailed plans and drawings of these monuments. It was Schultz who would later establish the Byzantine Research and Publication Fund that continued this work. Following on from his research in Greece, Schultz was taken under the wing of the Third Marquess of Bute, who already had an interest in medieval Greece and was a significant supporter of the expansion of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of St Andrews. Walter George, whose meticulous drawings for the Byzantine Research Fund Archive provide an outstanding record of Byzantine monuments now lost, was also important to the Revival as the first to document medieval domestic architecture employing this novel approach.
Chapters under the third theme, Byzantium and Modernism: Britain and Beyond, discuss how the philosophies of the Byzantine Revival were put into practice in artistic works by revivalist enthusiasts. One important example is the transformation of mosaic production during the industrialisation of the technique; here, traces of Byzantine processes were retained, as can be seen in the mosaic programme for Westminster Cathedral. Walter George also applied techniques that he had developed while recording Byzantine monuments for the BRF in his work in New Delhi, India, where he helped to carry out the new city’s architectural plan together with the lead architects, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker. Another example is Sidney Barnsley, the first of this eclectic group to build a Byzantine Revival church after his return from Greece, who later translated Byzantine designs into his furniture-making in the Cotswolds. This theme also brings to centre-stage a group of Scottish Philhellenes and leading architects who contributed to the Byzantine Revival with a series of experimental designs in Scotland, while influencing their collaborators in the large architectural firms in England, and especially in London.
The conference brought together many scholars from the fields of architectural history, decorative arts, and Byzantine studies, many now reunited in the present volume. Since the conference took place, the field has been sadly diminished by the loss of two remarkable scholars, whose contributions appear posthumously. Gavin Stamp (1948-2017) was a distinguished architectural historian who championed the rescue of historical buildings through his writing and teaching. His breadth of knowledge of his field, his graciousness in sharing that knowledge, and his enthusiasm were uplifting. He was especially pleased that a small book on Robert Weir Schultz that he was commissioned to write in 1981 had sparked such a wealth of research four decades later.
Ruth Macrides (1949-2019) was a Byzantine historian with a particular interest in reception studies. Her ingenious and witty personality was infectious. Ruth loved teaching and discussing new ideas and was a seasoned storyteller. A Byzantine historian by trade, she first ventured into reception studies on a quest in 1992 to uncover the story of Lord Bute, the man who had started Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of St Andrews, at the time her own institutional home.
Both Gavin and Ruth were extremely enthusiastic about their individual fields of study but also just as keen to learn from others. They contributed enormously to the energetic and stimulating atmosphere of the conference and their contributions to this volume are essential for understanding the people who created the Byzantine Revival movement and their vision.
If the conference participants were the spark, then the fuel was the magnificent archival collection of the Byzantine Research Fund. This collection still has many stories to tell, not just of the monuments and structures that it documents but of the people that it brought together and their resulting cultural exchanges. There remains much to be learned about the influences of Byzantium in Britain, as well as new ground to break on how the Byzantine Revival in Britain contributed to the Arts and Crafts revival in Greece later in the 1920s and 1930s. Given this potential, future plans will include further exhibitions and multidisciplinary conferences based on this rich archival resource in which scholars can share their expertise on this vibrant and visually engaging subject.
Amalia G. Kakissis British School at Athens September 2022
Editor’s Note on Transliteration
The reader will note that transliteration of place names is not consistent throughout the volume, e.g. Hagia Sophia, Agia Sophia, St Sophia. It was decided to keep the variation used within each chapter as particular transliterations are reflective of the time in which they were used and the cultural background of those using them.
1 The Byzantine Revival in Europe
J. B. Bullen
Byzantine art, architecture, religion, and culture were rejected by post-Enlightenment thinkers as ‘a disgrace to the human mind’ (Voltaire) but rediscovered by Romanticism. Yeats’s famous poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1928) was a late expression of that romantic impulse, in which Yeats represents the empire and its culture in aesthetic terms and as a foil to the political upheaval of contemporary Ireland.!
Yeats’s Utopian view of Byzantium had its roots in William Morris’s political idealism and in the concordance between the arts developed by some of his most prominent followers. Delighted by what he saw of the Hagia Sophia, Morris spoke eloquently about Byzantine culture: ‘Nothing more beautiful than its best works has ever been produced by man’, he said in 1889, and the force of his argument inspired a generation of Arts and Crafts architects, including Sidney Barnsley, William Lethaby, and the architect of Westminster Cathedral, John Francis Bentley.’
Morris’s sense of the intimate connection between cultural achievement and architectural form had come essentially from Ruskin, and Ruskin was one of the earliest and most articulate enthusiasts for Byzantium in English. Surprisingly, Morris did not warm to San Marco in Venice, but Ruskin was overwhelmed by its design and its decoration and wrote some of his most highly charged prose about it as the principal representative of Byzantine culture.
But it was in Germany in the 1820s that the first Romantic turn to Byzantium seems to have taken place. In a world dominated by the strict rules of neoclassicism, the unusual forms of the Byzantine style attracted a number of rich and colourful figures in Bavaria and Prussia, characters who found in Byzantium modes of expression for religious, aesthetic, and political ideas that could not be contained within the prevailing orthodoxies.
Goethe and the Boisserée Brothers
With pardonable exaggeration, we might date the revival of widespread European interest in Byzantine culture to the year 1823. On the night of 15 July of that year, the basilican church of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Rome, caught fire and was almost completely destroyed. A church had stood here since the fourth century CE, facing first neglect, then the critical attacks on Byzantine culture from the Enlightenment philosophes. Now it was gone in an instant, and Europe slowly woke to the fact that something had been irretrievably lost. Its rebuilding was instigated by the recently elected Leo XII, and like the culture it represented, it rose like a phoenix from the ashes. There had, however, been signs of curiosity about Byzantine work before this event. In 1814, the interest of the unlikely figure of Goethe had been stimulated by the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée. Born in Cologne in the early 1780s, they were the sons of a wealthy merchant. As young men, they developed a passion for medieval art. Under the tutelage of Friedrich von Schlegel, Melchior began to make an unprecedented collection of early German painting, while at the same time Sulpiz had begun to measure and draw medieval German buildings. The brothers firmly believed that medieval German work had its origins in Byzantium.
In 1810, Sulpiz was introduced to Goethe, who was then arch-dictator of German taste. He was a 60-year-old celebrity and well-known classicist, but the brothers managed to rouse his interest in their picture collection, though they had to wait until 1814 before he actually came and saw the paintings for himself. Even then they had to wait another two years, until 1816, for him to get round to writing a piece about the works in the journal Kunst und Altertum.
The article entitled ‘Heidelberg’ is fascinating for its ambivalence towards Byzantine art. For Goethe, Byzantium is made acceptable or perhaps is tempered by being Greek in its early phases and German in its later ones. ‘The Byzantine school of which we have been able to say very little good’, he wrote, ‘still bore within it, merits of its Greek and Roman forefathers’ .* But one comes away from this essay with the sense that even for this classicist there is a real power, energy, and strange attraction latent within Byzantine art.
The pattern of Byzantine influence that the Boisserée brothers thought they detected in German painting, they transferred to the history of German architecture. Together with Friedrich Schlegel, they developed the idea that early Rhenish churches were characterised by traces of Hellenism that came to them through Byzantium. Sulpiz Boisserée in 1810 identified the Romanesque architecture of the Rhine as ‘neugriechisch’ or ‘néo-Grec’, which became for him synonymous with ‘Byzantine’, and it was from these seeds of curiosity that early Romantic interest in Byzantium began.‘ It was stimulated and consolidated, however, by royal patronage and particularly by the important figure of Ludwig I of Bavaria.
Ludwig I came to the throne in 1825 at the age of 38, and his little neo-Byzantine Allerheiligen-Hofkirche or Court Church of All Saints, which was begun in 1827 and finished in 1837, had an influence on and created an interest among European builders out of all proportion to its size or its place in Ludwig’s ambitious and eclectic architectural programme.
Ludwig’s first encounter with Byzantine architecture took place in Sicily in 1817. On Christmas Eve he attended mass in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. The light of the candles reflecting off the richly encrusted mosaics captivated his imagination, and he told one of his companions, the doctor Emile Ringseis: ‘I will build myself a private chapel like it’.- This was an important moment in Ludwig’s personal development as he began to devise the idea of a collective German consciousness built upon the culture of the arts. This notion was reinforced by his meeting with the young Protestant scholar Christian Bunsen, and although they did not take to each other personally, the publication in 1823 of Bunsen’s innovative study Die Basiliken des christlichen Roms (The Christian Basilicas of Rome) helped to consolidate Ludwig’s positive view of Byzantine architecture. In the same year as the destruction by fire of San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome, Ludwig spent the New Year once again in Palermo, and for a second time was delighted by the Cappella Palatina. Ludwig was now determined upon a Byzantine style for his own court chapel.
His principal architect, the classicist Leo von Klenze, hated the idea but was forced to give in to his master. On the outside, the chapel was German Romanesque; inside, it was pure Byzantine (Figure 1.1). Ludwig wanted mosaics, but the art of manufacturing tesserae had died out, so instead the Nazarene painter, Heinrich Hess, decorated the interior with hieratic murals. The building was an international success. Ann Mary Howitt, a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was an art student in Munich in 1850 and was amazed by the Hofkirche. ‘I had no conception how sublimely beautiful is this chapel’, she wrote soon after her arrival.° It is built, she said, ‘in the Byzantine style . . . all one glow of gold, of rich draperies, of angelic forms and faces, of rainbow-tinted wings, of mystical flowers and symbols’.’
Less gushing, but more influential, was the account of Hess’s work from Hippolyte Fortoul, professor at the University of Toulouse, who was to play a crucial role in naturalising the Byzantine style in France. In his extensive critique of modern German art, De /’art en allemagne (Concerning German Art) (1841), Fortoul saw the archaising elements in Hess’s work as explicitly Byzantine in origin. His decorations, according to Fortoul, are ‘austere’ and ‘naive’, but they are expressive of ‘deep feeling’, ‘conviction’, and ‘masculine energy’.* Fortoul’s enthusiasm for Hess in the Hofkirche, ‘the most precious jewel of Munich’, derived from the importance that Fortoul attached to the importance of Byzantine art in the history of the Western imagination.° ‘Byzantinism’, he claimed, ‘is the dream which rocked European art in its infancy’.'°
The pictures amassed by the house of Wittelsbach had grown too numerous for the Kammergalerie in the Residenz, and Ludwig was determined to give Munich a gallery unequalled in Europe. There were no very early works in this group, so in 1826 he approached the Boisserée brothers for the purchase of their collection. Discussions about this were protracted because Ludwig met opposition from his ministers on financial and pedagogical grounds. In their view, it contained no Italian masters and could, therefore, provide no reliable models for contemporary artists. Peter Cornelius, who was the King’s principal art adviser, took Ludwig’s side, and the two of them ensured that in 1827 the paintings entered the Royal collection. The sale catalogue proudly announced them as Byzantinisch-NiederRheinische Schule vom ende des I3ten bis zum Unfang des 15ten Jahrhunderts (Lower-Rhine Byzantine school of the end of the 13th century until the beginning of the 15th century).
Ludwig’s brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, also had a strong nationalistic interest in Byzantine work. He came to the Prussian throne in 1840, and though he shared a number of Ludwig’s passions, including a love of Italy and distaste for Napoleonic France, in temperament he was very different from his brother-in-law. Where Ludwig was an aesthetic Catholic, Friedrich was a committed Protestant; where Ludwig was something of a libertine, Friedrich was a Puritan; and where Ludwig wished to establish Munich as an eclectic art capital of Europe, Friedrich was committed to establishing a state modelled on the values of primitive Christianity. It was to Friedrich Wilhelm that Bunsen dedicated his book on the basilicas of Rome.
Like the Roman emperor Constantine, who, for Friedrich, was something of a role model, the Prussian monarch was attempting to rebuild an empire ruined by invaders (the French in Friedrich’s case), and like Constantine was trying to build that new monarchical state out of a fervent belief in the political efficacy of Christianity.
Returning from Rome in 1828 via Ravenna and Venice, Friedrich Wilhelm was determined to bring Byzantium to Prussia, but it was not until he came to the throne in 1840 that he was able to put his ambitions fully into operation. Above all, he wanted to revitalise the Protestant Prussian Church and decided that architecture would become a prominent vehicle for his political and social goals. In Friedrich Schinkel, his principal architect, he found a sympathetic interpreter of his ambitions, but Schinkel died only a year after his accession. Ludwig Persius succeeded him in the role of Architect to the King, and it was under his direction that neo-Byzantine work in northern Germany came to its full flowering. In 1841, he began his Heilandskirche at Sacrow, now Potsdam (Figure 1.2). This tall, simple Roman basilica with an externally arcaded apse and a freestanding campanile derived from Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome. This was soon to be followed by the Friedenskirche (1843), modelled on the basilica of San Clemente, also in Rome.
Though Friedrich’s interests tended towards the Romanesque and basilican rather than Byzantine, he made one extremely significant contribution to the Byzantine Revival in Europe. It took the form of the support of a publication illustrating the greatest Byzantine church in the world, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Friedrich Wilhelm commissioned the architect Wilhelm Salzenberg to go to Constantinople to make a visual record of the church, and the result was A/t-Christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom V. bis XII (Ancient Christian Architecture in Constantinople) (1854). This sumptuous collection of detailed drawings of the architecture and mosaics opened people’s eyes to the splendour of Byzantine art in the Eastern Empire, and it remained a standard reference work for the rest of the century.
Salzenberg’s work impresses by its sheer scale. The volume is enormous, the architectural drawings gigantic, and the lithographs pulsate with colour. The smoothing of the mosaic effect, the realistic representation of the hands, and the soft modelling of the skin are all more suggestive of Nazarene painting than Byzantine mosaic, but to Salzenberg’s contemporaries, the engravings must have appeared powerful in their primitive magnificence.
France
The revival of interest in Byzantium was developed in France in three different ways. The first was the exploration of Byzantine sites in Greece, Turkey, and beyond by French archaeologists and historians. The second was the fashion for Byzantine architecture, which sprang out of the belief that there existed a native tradition of Byzantine work in France, and third was an interest in the decoration of churches in a Byzantine style.
Though Byzantine Revival buildings are not widespread in France, two of the most important span the country geographically and the period of the nineteenth century. The first, the cathedral of Sainte-Marie-Majeure (1852-93), is situated in Marseilles and has its stylistic roots in an early nineteenth-century Romantic architectural tradition. The second, Sacré-Coeur, which towers over Paris on the hill of Montmartre, is the product of an attempted Catholic Revival and was not finished until well into the twentieth century. Both of these churches were built in troubled times, both grew out of the passionate religious convictions of their respective patrons, and both record the turbulent relationship between the French Church and State in the nineteenth century.
We have seen how Germany, or rather Bavaria, discovered Byzantium through the particular passions of Ludwig I. We have also seen the way in which Ludwig incorporated the then rather eccentric interests of the Boisserée brothers into the mainstream of modern art by purchasing their collection of medieval German paintings and placing those same paintings in the royal collection in Munich. The Boisserée brothers also provide a link between France and Germany, since Sulpiz Boisserée was a familiar figure in both Munich and Paris. In the mid-1820s, Sulpiz was known in the French capital as a lecturer and writer on art and architecture and was well known, too, for promulgating the idea that medieval Rhenish churches were byzantin-roman. But this fascination for the Byzantine origins of northern European architecture was naturalised in France not by Sulpiz Boisserée, but by Ludovic Vitet. Vitet was famous as a novelist and as the editor of the widely read liberal journal Le Globe.
Under the July monarchy, his passion for ancient architecture led to his appointment as first Inspecteur Général des Monuments Historiques, and his interest in early medieval work stemmed from a trip that he made in 1829 to the Rhine, where he met the Boisserée brothers. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and he effectively brought the ‘new’ German attitudes to the attention of the French. He adopted the Boisserées’ passion and their terminology. Vitet translated their word ‘neugriechisch’ (neo-Greek) into the French ‘néo-Grec’ or ‘Byzantin’ and wrote about it as a style burgeoning with ‘youth and life’. ‘Towards the second century’, he said in a widely read article of 1830, the emergent Byzantine style began to play like a shy child. . .. Then, growing each day, little by little gained its independence: free, bold, original, it stepped out at last under Justinian, when in the designs of Isidoros, Sancta Sophia rose up in Constantinople."
The French passion for Byzantium was translated into modern terms by a group of radical architects. In the late 1820s, Henri Labrouste, Félix Duban, Louis Duc, and Léon Vaudoyer were impressed by the ideas of Claude Henri Saint-Simon, ideas that indirectly opened the way for the rehabilitation of Byzantine art in historical terms. Saint-Simonian theory perceived historical processes in terms of a number of cycles that alternated between ‘organic’ periods and ‘critical’ periods. Organic periods were sustained by religious faith in conjunction with stable social organisations. Critical periods were times of change, disjunction, and instability. Saint-Simon’s great organic periods were those of Greek antiquity extending to the age of Pericles, and the period of Christianity up to the fifteenth century. This meant that the privileged architectural models were the Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral, since they were produced in times of cohesion. Byzantine architecture, though Christian in its associations, was more closely related to a period of transitional instability and close also (so the young architects of the 1820s argued) to modern life and modern culture.
Alexandre Laborde’s influential Les Monumens de la France (Monuments of France) marks most clearly the change that took place in French sensibility about pre-Gothic architecture. The first edition of 1816 had little space for the ‘degenerate architecture’ between late classical and the flowering of Gothic in the twelfth century. The second edition of 1836, however, is quite different, and in this he devoted the whole first section of the book to some 33 French ‘monuments in the Byzantine or Roman style’. It was the ‘discovery’ of St-Front in Périgueux, however, that confirmed the French in their belief about Eastern influence in France (Figure 1.3). St-Front was an abbey church of 1120-50 dedicated to the follower of Saint Peter and first bishop of Périgueux. After many years of archaeological labour on the church, the historian Félix Verneilh published a study, L Architecture byzantine en France (Byzantine Architecture in France), that appeared in 1851. As its title signifies, its assertions were far-reaching. Verneilh claimed that France had a hidden tradition of Byzantine architecture that could be traced from the domed churches of Le Puy, Avignon, Souillac, Solignac, and above all Périgueux, back to Constantinople.
The key building was St-Front, by then in an advanced state of decay, whose magnificent domes had long been hidden under a sloping tiled roof. The similarity in plan between St-Front and San Marco in Venice, and back to Hagia Sophia, was exploited to the full by Verneilh, and a restoration campaign was set in motion. The architect chosen for the task was Paul Abadie, who had already stripped the domed cathedral of St-Pierre at Angouléme of its later additions, and who was the future designer of Sacré-Coeur in Paris. The debate around St-Front centred on whether French architecture drew directly on Byzantium, as Verneilh argued, or whether the early influence came from the Romanesque building of northern Italy.
The greatest authority behind the idea of French Byzantine, however, was Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. In the section ‘L’ Architecture’ in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture francaise (1854-68), having praised Verneilh as ‘one of our most distinguished archaeologists’, he devoted a large section to identifying the sources of Eastern influence in France.'* Using material from Verneilh’s book,he suggested that trade between the Mediterranean and the East, influences from Rhenish building in Germany, and the presence of Venetian colonies in Limoges around 988 or 989 CE all served to introduce Byzantine planning and Byzantine detail into the architecture of the domed churches of Aquitaine and the Midi. Above all, it is St-Front, he said, that is ‘distinguished not only by the way in which it was laid out — which had no analogue in France — but was perhaps the original of all the churches possessing domes on pendentives in Périgord and the Angoumois’.'? But le-Duc continued in unequivocal mood: ‘We believe that the domed churches in the Auvergne and the Lyonnais, like those of the cathedral of Le Puy, for example, were influenced by the East, or, rather, by the Adriatic, in a direct fashion, through Venetian commerce’.'4
Abadie’s restoration of St-Front took place in the wake of this enthusiasm. In modern terms, this was not so much a restoration as rebuilding, and recent historians have bemoaned the loss of evidence for the history of domed churches in France. Coloured decoration was considered but abandoned. In his preliminary report on the building in 1851, Abadie suggested that the first architects had intended decoration. Like San Marco, he said, it should have been covered with paintings, but his idea was never taken up. The work on St-Front and the other buildings in south-western France encouraged a belief in a native Byzantine tradition, which in its turn provided a basis for not only the design of the Cathedral in Marseilles but also the famous shape of Sacré-Coeur in Paris (Figure 1.4).
In the world of nineteenth-century architectural practice, it was Léon Vaudoyer who took most passionately to the idea of Byzantine France. He came under the influence of Saint-Simonian thought in the early 1830s with its belief in social scientific progress, and he established friendships with the editors of the SaintSimonian journal the Encylopédie nouvelle, Pierre Leroux and Léonce Reynard together with Albert Lenoir. He was also close to the historian Edgar Quinet and the journalist and politician Hippolyte Fortoul, both of whom were interested in things German, in reading Herder, and in travelling to the Rhine.
It was at about this time in the early 1830s that the Byzantine style began to be distinguished from Romanesque. Albert Lenoir identified what he saw as two strains of post-antique architecture — ‘style Latin’ and ‘style Byzantin’, as he called them. ‘Style Latin’ was Western in its pedigree and derived directly from the basilicas of antique Rome; ‘style Byzantin’ was the Eastern version, the version with the oriental physiognomy that developed the pendentive and the dome.
We have seen Fortoul’s enthusiasm for Ludwig I’s work at the AllerheiligenHofkirche, and it was his friendship with Vaudoyer that took him to Germany in the first place. Germany was the envy of France, and particularly of the SaintSimonians, who saw in its dominantly Protestant culture the appearance of a progressive state. They felt that its philosophical culture dominated by Fichte and Hegel was second to none. Fortoul’s De /’art en allemagne (1841-2) was the fruit of this trip and did much to establish the central importance of Byzantine architecture in the history of the West. Fortoul’s view of art and architecture was societal and progressive. The artist, he maintained, was part of the continuing process of history, and artistic style was conditioned by evolving political and religious forces. So, in the concluding paragraphs of De /’art en allemagne, Fortoul stressed the vital, revolutionary importance of Byzantine work in the progress of architecture. It was a moment, he wrote, when ‘architecture freed itself from the orders . . . placed the arcade on the column . . . and began upon the road of its uncertain development’.!°
For this group of architects and writers, Byzantine art was energetic, innovative, and fresh. It was also exotic without being remote from the French tradition, and it fitted an interpretation of the relationship between art and society of which they approved. The outcome of their thinking can be seen in Marseilles. The cathedral church of Sainte-Marie-Majeure and the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-de-laGarde dominate the city skyline (Figure 1.5). From the sea, the cathedral appears to be floating on a slim raft, its domes rising one behind the other and billowing like sails in the wind. The Byzantine style of both these buildings was the inspiration of Vaudoyer and his colleagues, but the money to finance them was due to the efforts of a local priest, Eugéne de Mazenod.'® Few buildings in the nineteenth century were more caught up in contemporary politics and the struggles of the Church. Its origins lie in the Romantic mythology of the Mediterranean and the arrival of Christianity in France, its foundations rest on the relationship between the State and the Church, and its superstructure grew out of the aesthetic conceptualism of Vaudoyer. Sainte-Marie-Majeure is a symbol of many things. It represents the material mid-century prosperity of Marseilles; it represents the Catholic Revival under the Third Republic; it is a monument to Mazenod’s temporal and spiritual ambitions; it is the architectural realisation of the Saint-Simonianism of Fortoul and Vaudoyer, and it symbolises the triumph of a pan-European aesthetic over the narrower field of northern European Gothic. It is a proud, striking and unusual building, and one that asserts itself at the heart of the port life of Marseilles.
As early as 1846, Vaudoyer had told Pascal Coste that the first cathedral to be built in France for a hundred years should be in a Byzantine-Romanesque style.'7 When he was commissioned to build the cathedral in Marseilles, Henri Espérandieu, Vaudoyer’s right-hand man, wrote to Charles Blanc, that ‘two things must have immediately occurred to him: the structure of the great thermal halls of the ancients and the decoration of St Mark’s and Santa Sophia’.'* He was also aware of the debate about the presence of Byzantine buildings on French soil. Charles Questel had successfully experimented with a neo-Romanesque building in nearby Nimes, and Vaudoyer wrote to him requesting copies of the drawings of St-Paul-de-Nimes. He entered into a correspondence with local scholars about the relationship between Romanesque and Byzantine styles and he corresponded with A. C. Mallay, author of Essai sur les églises romanes et romano-byzantines du départment du Puy-de-Déme (Essay on the Romanesque and Romano-Byzantine Churches in the Area of Puy-de-D6me) (1838), who sent him a substantial number of measured drawings of the churches from the Puy-de-Déme region. Though Vaudoyer had never been to Greece, André Couchaud’s Choix d’églises bysantines de la Gréce (Selection of Byzantine Greek Churches) of 1842 provided an array of drawings of domed churches designed to be a source book of ‘motifs’, which might be ‘applicable to modern architecture’ (Couchaud 1842, 1). Vaudoyer also sought the assistance of the French ambassador in Istanbul, who agreed to send measured drawings of the Hagia Sophia. Above all, he was convinced by the compelling argument of Félix de Verneilh’s L Architecture byzantine en France.
Britain
In Germany and France, interest in Byzantium centred on Byzantine architecture and emerged out of an earlier interest in Romanesque. The sequence was similar in Britain, but it was a slower process. The reason may have been that Byzantium was more remote for the British than for the rest of Europe. Germany saw connections between the churches of the Rhine and the building of ancient Byzantium, and in the figure of Charlemagne in particular their history was linked to that of the East. The French, too, perceived both direct and indirect links between their own architecture and that of the Byzantine Empire. In the middle of the century, the ancient domed churches of south-west France came into prominence in such a way that Oriental origins of early French architecture became something of an orthodoxy.
This was not the case in Britain. It is true that the terms Norman and Romanesque were used indifferently, and the two were often identified as ‘Byzantine’, but the extremely widespread use of the term ‘Byzantine’ to describe any pre-Gothic building was the result of blurring and confusion, rather than of strong historical connections. Religious issues also played a part. The Gothic Revival in Britain was a doctrinaire affair. Catholics claimed one thing and Anglicans another, but both perceived Gothic as the Christian style par excellence. In terms of this odd way of thinking, Romanesque was seen as ‘foreign’, and Byzantine even more remote. It was Oriental and alien, and its long-standing associations with Christianity were almost totally ignored.
Architectural historians of the Gothic, however, could hardly overlook its precursors, and in the late 1830s, British architectural writers began to take a serious interest in early medieval and basilican styles. Outstanding here was the work of the Master of Trinity College, William Whewell, who in his book Architectural Notes on German Churches (1830), and in advance of continental historians, laid the cornerstone for a historical and systematic discrimination between Byzantine and Romanesque.’ The clarification was, however, a slow process, and towards the end of the 1830s and the beginning of the 1840s, the term Byzantine was persistently applied to the few round-arched buildings that now appear decidedly neo-Romanesque. A writer in the Christian Rembrancer, explaining the use of ‘Byzantine’, suggested that it was generic for ‘pre-Gothic’. ‘Byzantine’, he said,might be its most accurate general name; but as in passing into different countries it became more or less modified, so it has in each received a different denomination: in Italy it is called Lombard, in England, Norman; and to the German churches of the same style, Mr Whewell has affixed the term Romanesque.”
Three buildings in this period stand out. They were all called ‘Byzantine’ but to our eyes are Romanesque: St Mary’s at Wreay, Cumbria by Sarah Losh (Figure 1.6); Christ Church, Streatham by James Wild (1845); and St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton by Sidney Herbert (1845). The first (and perhaps the most remarkable) was ignored; the other two were much publicised, and their use of round-arched forms, large undecorated wall surfaces, and other un-Gothic features set in train a vigorous debate about the place of non-Gothic styles in modern church design.?! In this period, the British High Church was profoundly intolerant about the use of Romanesque or Byzantine styles in modern architecture. Like Byzantine art, it was un-English and un-Christian. This view was bolstered from the continent. From France, the influential critic A. F. Rio denounced Byzantine art as emanating from an ‘abyss of moral and intellectual degradation’.
His views were promulgated in the Catholic community by Nicholas Wiseman, who condemned mosaic as ‘the hard and dark delineations of the Byzantine school’.*? From Germany, the most widely read historical guide took an even stronger line. Franz Kugler’s Handbook of the History of Painting (1837, trans. 1841) spoke of the ‘spectral rigidity’ and ‘dull, servile constraint’ of Byzantine mosaic.™ His British editor, Charles Lock Eastlake, agreed and wondered why Byzantine art had ever been included in the book at all.”
The burgeoning study of the history of architectural style, however, inevitably brought Byzantine work to the attention of British readers. Henry Gally Knight’s The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Italy From the Time of Constantine to the Fifteenth Century (1842) was a magnificent historical panorama of the history of pre- and early medieval architecture with sumptuous drawings of Italian, German, and French buildings by Domenico Quaglio. J. L. Petit’s Remarks on Church Architecture (1841) was a two-volume anthology of drawings by Petit himself from a Continental trip of 1839, accompanied by his commentary, in which he suggested the adoption of a round-arched architecture in Britain. A little later, Edward Freeman published his History of Architecture (1849), in which Byzantium took a prominent place in the historical development of world architecture. In spite of its importance, however, in Freeman’s eyes it is fundamentally the product of alien culture: ‘it is not ancient, modern, or mediaeval .. . it is Oriental .. . alien in language, government, and general feeling’.*®
In all this confusion and condemnation of Byzantine art and architecture in Britain, we usually associate Ruskin with the change of mood, but he was preceded by three lesser-known figures who took up the challenge in favour of Byzantine work. The first was Frances Palgrave, a Jew who converted to Christianity and compiled one of the first guidebooks intended for mass tourism. Ten years before Ruskin, Palgrave as a passionate antiquarian enthused about the Byzantine work in San Marco in his Handbook for Northern Italy (1842). “As soon as you cross the threshold’ of San Marco, he wrote, ‘you feel admitted into the Byzantine empire’.”’ The second was Lord Lindsay, who, in his remarkable Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847), claimed that ‘St Mark’s is the glory of Byzantine architecture’.
The whole building, he continued, is ‘completely incrusted with mosaics; the lower walls are lined with precious marbles; the pavement is of rich opus Graecanicum, undulating and uneven like a settling sea — the whole blending into a rich mysterious gloom’.** Lindsay was a committed orientalist and entirely at home in the art of the East. The third is Benjamin Webb, whose intimidatingly dull title, Sketches of Continental Ecclesiology (1848), disguises a fascinating guide to the most important European religious centres. For him, San Marco is “unique in the world in almost every point of view’, and he claimed he was mesmerised by the ‘porphyry, jasper, serpentine and alabaster, verde, and rose antique’ and hundreds of other marbles that create ‘a truly eastern magnificence’.””
Ruskin had experienced the fascination of Venice and San Marco long before Webb set foot there. His interest began back in 1835 when, as a boy of 16, his parents took him to Italy. His first published views on Byzantine building came in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and by the time that the second volume of The Stones of Venice appeared in 1853, there was as yet no real consensus about the status of Byzantium either historically or aesthetically, nor about its place in the history of art and architecture. Ruskin stepped in with a critical discourse that was effusive, tactile, corporeal, even erotic: ‘Round the walls of the porches’ of San Marco, he writes,
there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, ‘their bluest veins to kiss,’ — the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as the receding tide leaves the waved sand.*°
But Ruskin’s is not uncritical romanticism. His account of Venice and San Marco shifts between meticulous observation, moral rhetoric, and intense personal responsiveness, and it is embedded in a historical structure, of cultural birth, blossom, and decay. The first readers of The Stones of Venice were simultaneously astounded by his language and puzzled by his ideas. Throughout these volumes, Ruskin consciously manipulates his audience; his range of linguistic ‘voices’ is far greater than that of any contemporary writer, and he employs those voices to entice, to fascinate, and to convert his readers.
So far, the British had only read about Byzantium, but in the 1854 Crystal Palace Exhibition in Sydenham, a version of Byzantium came to Britain. Anew Byzantine Court was designed for the exhibition by Digby Wyatt, and the famous architect Owen Jones went on to print three plates to illustrate ‘Byzantine Ornament’ in his hugely innovative book, The Grammar of Ornament (1856) (Figure 1.7).
One of the effects of Ruskin’s panegyric on San Marco was to increase the public interest in Byzantine design and Byzantine mosaic. A few individuals had been intrigued by mosaic and, as we have seen, in the 1830s, Ludwig I had wanted to place mosaic in his Allerheiligen-Hofkirche, but this was technically impossible because the art of making tesserae had died out. This changed in the 1850s through the inspiration of one man, Antonio Salviati. A native Venetian distressed by the condition of the mosaics on San Marco, Salviati abandoned his job as a lawyer and teamed up with glass master Lorenzo Radi to research the process of tesserae manufacture. They succeeded totally, and the firm Salviati’s Venetian EnamelMosaic Works was a rapid success, beginning to supply the coloured glass cubes to potentates throughout Europe. Henry Layard had met Salviati in Venice and facilitated an invitation to decorate the Royal Mausoleum Frogmore (1865) modelled on the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. By 1868, Salviati realised that Britain would be a useful base for his operations. Since Layard had come to believe ‘that mosaic is the only external and internal decoration on a great scale which will suit our climate’, the Englishman invested money, and the Venice and Murano Glass Company opened in London.*!
It is an irony that while the Italian Salviati was working in Britain, Englishman Edward Burne-Jones was asked to design a mosaic for Rome. The church for which it was destined was G. E. Street’s St Paul’s American Church in the via Nazionale. Building began in 1870 and when, some ten years later, an artist for the mosaics had to be found, Street turned to Burne-Jones. Street had met the painter in the 1860s when he and William Morris were undergraduates at Oxford. He also knew that Burne-Jones had had a long-standing interest in this medium — an interest that went back to his introduction to the art of Venice under the auspices of Ruskin in 1862. After seeing San Marco and Torcello, he wrote to Ruskin, saying that his ‘heart was full of mosaics’,*” and this love of mosaic was strengthened by his visit to the ‘heavenly churches’ of Ravenna in 1873.*? Thus in 1881, St Paul’s in Rome offered the long-standing ambition to work in ‘vast spaces’ and to have ‘big things to do’. Burne-Jones saw in mosaic the possibility of creating democratic art on lines suggested by William Morris; he wanted ‘common people to see them and say Oh! — only Oh!’**
Burne-Jones co-opted William Morris to help design the mosaics, and the two of them spent many Sunday mornings at Burne-Jones’s house, The Grange in London, creating a key system by which the colours on the cartoon could be matched to the colours on the tesserae. During this period, Morris was developing a considerable interest in Byzantine art, an interest that was strengthened by his personal involvement in the craftwork associated with mosaic production.
While Burne-Jones was completing the mosaics for Rome, the interest in Byzantium was beginning to inform the burgeoning Arts and Crafts Movement. One of the most prominent Byzantinists of the period was Robert Weir Schultz, who came from Scotland in 1884 to work in Norman Shaw’s London office. In Shaw’s office, five young architects, including Schultz and Sidney Barnsley, and led by William Lethaby, were thinking of forming a guild. Three years later, in 1887, Schulz won a Royal Academy Gold Medal and Travelling Scholarship. He first went to Venice, where he made careful drawings of the interior of San Marco, Murano, and Torcello, then in 1889, and on Lethaby’s advice, he went with Sidney Barnsley to Greece to study the remains of Byzantine architecture.** Their work had to wait until 1901 to be published as The Monastery of St Luke of Stiris in Phocis, but their personal enthusiasm for Byzantine art and architecture was communicated to friends in their circle. But perhaps the single most important figure behind this late nineteenth-century interest in Byzantium was William Morris himself.
Morris’s initial inspiration came from Ruskin who, in The Stones of Venice, attached enormous importance to architectural integrity, honesty, and the autonomy of the craftsman, but Morris intensified the practical and pragmatic aspects of the message and shifted its political implications away from Ruskin’s paternalism and towards egalitarian socialism. And in doing so, he placed Byzantine art and architecture on a footing comparable with that of other major historical styles.
For reasons probably connected with his interest in the ‘Eastern Question’ and the threat of a Russo-Turkish war in the mid-1870s, Morris’s interest was drawn to Hagia Sophia. In 1878, he asked a Greek friend, Aglaia Coronio, to send him photographs of the building, and in the same year, he told his daughter that he had been ‘reading a lot about the Byzantine Empire in Finlay’s book’, finding it ‘interesting though somewhat dreary’.*° Also in that year, he described Hagia Sophia as ‘lovely and stately’*’ and the ‘crown of all the great buildings of the world’.
Morris’s understanding of Byzantine art and culture was, like Ruskin’s, socioaesthetic, and the city of Constantinople, and Hagia Sophia in particular, became central to his thinking about the relationship between art and society. For Morris, Gothic art was the true art of the modern period, and Byzantine art was its earliest manifestation, ‘new born’ out of the decadence of Greece and Rome.* Morris’s first extended account of Byzantium came in his 1882 lecture, “History of Pattern Designing’, in the period when he was helping Burne-Jones design the mosaics for Rome. But it was in 1889 in a paper entitled ‘Gothic Architecture’ that he described Byzantine ‘freedom’ breaking away from the deadly grip of classicism in his most extended account of Byzantine society and art. ‘The first expression of this freedom’, he wrote, ‘is called Byzantine art. The style leaps into completion in this most lovely building’ .*°
For Morris, social unity and equality informed Byzantine culture. ‘Who built Hagia Sophia?’ he asks. The answer is ‘men like you and me, handicraftsmen who left no names behind them’.*' The essential characteristic of Byzantine art, he said in another lecture from 1881, was that it was ‘the work of collective rather than individual genius’, and just as it united architect and craftsman, it drew together East and West in a richly synthesising process.** Byzantium constituted ‘a kind of knot to all the many thrums of the first days of modern Europe’.* It gathered together the arts of India, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, and Egypt, which it ‘mingled’ with the older arts of Greece, and it joined, too, Eastern love of freedom, mystery, and intricate design with Western respect for discipline, structure, and fact. ‘It is the living child and fruitful mother of art, past and future’.*
Morris’s dithyrambic, historically panoramic account of Byzantine architecture, which reaches its peak in ‘Gothic Architecture’, owes much to Ruskin’s ‘Nature of Gothic’. But Ruskin’s version of Byzantium began and ended in Venice; Morris took the hint from later archaeological work and gave Byzantine architecture a global significance. ‘From Italy’, he wrote, ‘or perhaps even from Byzantium itself, it was carried into Germany and pre-Norman England, touching even Ireland and Scandinavia’.*°
It is as though Morris has turned all the old attitudes to Byzantium on their heads. Gone is the talk of oppressive tyrants, inflexible religious hierarchies, and cultural stagnation of the Enlightenment philosophes, and in its place have appeared ideas about political and personal freedom, life, vitality, and autonomy. Morris mythologised Byzantium in positive economic, political, social, and aesthetic terms. By 1884, Morris’s views were sufficiently widely accepted for five architects from Norman Shaw’s office (led by W.R. Lethaby) to found the Art Workers’ Guild under his auspices. In 1888 its public face, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, held its first meeting in the New Gallery, and to celebrate its second show in 1889, Morris delivered his passionate account of Byzantium in ‘Gothic Architecture’. This was just two years after Lethaby urged Schultz to travel to Greece to study Byzantine architecture. Morris considered this lecture sufficiently important to be delivered to another three London groups and to further groups in Liverpool and Glasgow. Finally, he published it in book form in 1893 and sold it at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of that year.
From the Bavaria of Ludwig I to the Irish meditations of W.B. Yeats, the Byzantine Revival in Europe was more a matter of heart than head. In architectural terms, it flickered in and out of the culture, unlike the Gothic Revival, whose monuments maintained a stern and constant presence throughout the nineteenth century. Part of that difference was determined by the exotic nature of Byzantium. Gothic churches and Gothic cathedrals were familiar sites and populated the whole of Western Europe; the Hagia Sophia was extremely distant, difficult to penetrate, and had a complex, mysterious history.
Architects, clerics, royalty, or simply men of great wealth turned to the Byzantine style to satisfy personal agendas that were often unorthodox or unusual. Though in its early days the Gothic stimulated the imagination, it did so by seeming to be an extension of Western culture back into the Dark Ages. Byzantium fed the imagination in another way. It was separate, remote, mysterious, and had only one toe in Western culture in the form of San Marco in Venice. These sentiments lay at the heart of Ruskin’s response to the basilica in The Stones of Venice, awesome and different: ‘there rises a vision out of the earth’, he wrote, ‘and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away’.
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