§ 107, THE BYZANTIlSrE STYLE. 551
renowned church of St. Sophia at Constantinople, which was erected in lavish Asiatic splendor by the emperor Justinian after a plan by the architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus (a. d, 532-537), and consecrated to the Redeemer,' but was transformed after the Turkisli conquest into a Mohammedan mosque (Aja Sofia). It is two hundred and twentyeight feet broad, and two hundred and fifty-two feet long; the dome, supported by four gigantic columns, rises a hundred and sixty-nine feet high over the altar, is a hundred and eight ieet in diameter, and floats so fieely and airily above the great central space, that, in the language of the Byzantine court biographer Procopius, it seems not to rest on terra firma, but to hang from heaven by golden chains.^ The most costly material was used in the building ; the Phrygian marble with rose-colored and white veins, the dark red marble of the Nile, the green of Laconia, the black and white spotted of the Bosphorus, the gold-colored Libyan. And when the dome reflected the brilliance of the lighted silver chandeliers, and sent it back doubled from above, it might well remind one of the vault of heaven with its manifold starry glories, and account for the proud satisfaction with which Justinian on the day of the consecration, treading in solemn procession the finished building, exclaimed : '■' I have outdone thee, O Solomon ! " ' The chnrch of St. Sophia stood thenceforth the grand model
' The Wisdom, the Logos, of God ; called in Proverbs and the Book of Wisdom aocpia. Hence the name of the church. There is still standing in Constantinople a small church of St. Sophia, which was likewise erected by Justinian.
" In 557, the 32d year of Justinian, the eastern part of the dome fell in, and destroyed the altar, together with the tabernacle and the arabo, but was restored in 561. A similar misfortune befell it by an earthquake in the twelfth century, and again in 1346. The Turks let the grand structure gradually decay, till finally, by command of the Sultan, a. d. 1847-'49, a thorough restoration was undertaken under the direction of an Italian architect, Fossati. This brought to light the magnificence of the Mosaic pictures which Mohammedan picture-hatred and Turkisb barbarism had in part destroyed, in part plastered over. The Sultan now caused them to be covered with plates of glass, cemented with lime ; so tliat they ara secure for a time, till the pile shall come again into the service of Christianity.
^ Nei'i'ifTjfcct ae l,oXop.<Lv. Comp. the descriptions in Evagrius : Hist. EccL 1. iv. cap. 31 ; Procopius: De aedific. i. 1 ; and the poem of Paul Silentiarius : '"E,K(ppacni vaov TTjy ayias 2o(piai (a metrical translation of it in the above cited work of Salzeo berg and Kortura).
558 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590,
of tlie new Greek architecture, not only for the Cln-istian East and the Kiissian churcli, but even for tlie Mohammedans in the huildinii: of their mosques.
In the West the city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast, after Honorins (a. d. 401) tlie seat of the AVestern empire, or of tlie eparchate, and the last refuge of the old Roman magniti eence and ai-t, affords beautiful monuments of the Byzantine style ; especial!}^ in the church of St. Yitale, which was erected by the bishop Maximian in 547.'
In the West the ground plan of the basilica was usually retained, witJi pillars and entablature, until the ninth century, and the dome and vaultings of the Byzantine style were united with it. Out of this union arose what is called the Romanesque or the round-arch style, which prevailed from the tenth to the thirteenth century, and was then, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, followed by the Germanic or pointed-arch style, with its gigantic mastcq^ieces, the Gothic cathedrals. From the fifteenth century eclecticism and confusion prevailed in architecture, till the modern attempts to reproduce the ancient style. The Oriental church, on the contrary, has never gone beyond the Byzantine, its productivity almost entirely ceasing with the age of Justinian. But it is possible that the Grseco Russian church will in the future develop something new.