The Medieval World
Two major architectural developments were initiated by historic religious events. The first occurred in 312, when the Roman emperor Constantine the Great conferred recognition on Christianity, which led to the development of Christian architecture. The second, the promulgation of Islam in about 610 by the Prophet Muhammad, spawned Islamic architecture.
The Architecture of Christianity
Early Christian Architecture
The term Early Christian is given to the basilican architecture of the church prior to the reintroduction of vaulting about the year 1000. The surviving churches in Rome that most clearly evoke the Early Christian character are San Clemente (with its 4th-century choir furnishings), Sant’ Agnese Fuori le Mura (rebuilt 630 and later), and Santa Sabina (422-432). While Byzantine architecture developed on the concept called the central church, assembled around a central dome like the Pantheon, the Western or Roman church—more concerned with congregational participation in the Mass—preferred the Roman basilica. Early models resembled large barns, with stone walls and timber roofs. The central part (nave) of this rectangular structure was supported on columns opening toward single or double flanking aisles of lower height. The difference in roof height permitted high windows, called clerestory windows, in the nave walls; at the end of the nave, opposite the entrance, was placed the altar, backed by a large apse (also borrowed from Rome), in which the officiating clergy were seated.
The Eastern emperor Justinian I was in control of Ravenna during his reign (527-565). Some of the constructions there can be considered Byzantine, as they featured mosaic mural compositions in Byzantine style. Two of Ravenna’s great churches, however—Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo (520?) and Sant’ Apollinare in Classe (530?-549)—are basilican in plan.
Old Saint Peter's in Rome
One of the earliest examples of Christian architecture and an excellent example of the basilica form, the church known as Old Saint Peter’s, in Rome, Italy, was begun in ad 333 and demolished in the 16th century by order of Pope Julius II to make way for the new Saint Peter’s. Based on the shape of a Latin cross, Old Saint Peter’s had a long nave (central aisle) with a transept (projecting wings) crossing the nave near the front of the church. Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (306-337) commissioned the construction of Old Saint Peter’s as a church and public hall after legalizing the Christian religion.Galla Placidia
The 5th-century Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy, is an Early Christian mausoleum built in the form of a Greek, or equal-armed cross. This type of centralized plan, borrowed from classical architecture, usually features a round or polygonal building topped with a dome. The structures were used for Early Christian mausoleums, baptisteries, and martyr shrines.Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
Byzantine Architecture
Byzantine architecture has its early prototypes in San Vitale (526-547) in Ravenna and in Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus (527) in Constantinople, both domed churches on an octagonal plan with surrounding aisles. But it was Justinian’s great church at Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, or the Church of the Holy Wisdom (532-537), that demonstrated how to place a vast dome over a square plan. The solution was to place the dome on pendentives, or spherical triangles, that make a circle out of the square by rounding its corners.
The pendentive can be understood by visualizing its geometry. A square drawn on the ground has two circles, one circumscribed around it, the other inscribed within it. A hemisphere set on the larger circle is intersected by vertical planes rising from the sides of the square, forming four arches. A horizontal plane is then passed through the hemisphere at the tops of these arches, providing a ring on which is built the dome, which has a diameter equal to the circle inscribed within the square. The pendentives are spherical triangles, the remaining portions of the first, or outer, hemisphere.
At Hagia Sophia, two opposing arches on the central square open into semidomes, each pierced by three smaller radial semidomes, forming an oblong volume 31 m (100 ft) wide by 80 m (260 ft) long. The central dome rises out of this series of smaller spherical surfaces. An abundance of small windows, including a circle of them at the rim of the dome, provides a diffused light.
Byzantine figurative art developed a characteristic style; its architectural application took the form of mosaics, great mural compositions executed in tiny pieces (tesserae) of colored marble and gilded glass, a technique presumed to have been borrowed from Persia.
Byzantine churches, each with a central dome opening into surrounding semidomes and other vault forms, and accompanied by the characteristic iconography, proliferated throughout the Byzantine Empire—Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and parts of North Africa and Italy—and also influenced the design of churches in Western Christendom. Later churches are often miniaturizations of the original grandiose concept; their proportions emphasize vertical space, and the domes themselves become smaller. When Moscow became Christian, Europe was already into the Renaissance, but Moscow’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral (1555-1560) shows how Byzantine domes finally became onion-shaped tops of towers, no longer relevant to interior space making. See Byzantine Art and Architecture.
Church of San Vitale, Italy
Built between ad 526 and 547, the church of San Vitale stands as one of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture. Emperor Justinian I, ruler of the Byzantine Empire from 527 to 565, built San Vitale in his Italian stronghold at Ravenna when he extended Byzantine rule through western Europe. The church’s design, especially its domed, centralized, octagonal core, drew heavily from earlier Byzantine architecture in Constantinople, the capital of the empire. Beautiful mosaics within the church commemorate various spiritual and secular subjects, including Justinian and the rest of the Byzantine court.Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Hagia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom) was built in Constantinople (now Istanbul) between 532 and 537 under the auspices of Emperor Justinian I. Innovative Byzantine technology allowed architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to design a basilica with an immense dome over an open, square space, pictured. The original dome fell after an earthquake and was replaced in 563. The church became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453, and is now a museum.Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
Romanesque Architecture
A plan drawn on parchment of a now-vanished monastery in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, shows that by the time of Charlemagne (742-814) the Benedictine monastic order had become a big departmentalized institution, but not until almost 1000 did church building come to life throughout the West. At first, the architects were all monks, for the monasteries supplied not only the material wealth but also the aggregated learning that made the new initiative possible.
The basilican plan used in earlier times needed elaboration to accommodate a new liturgy. The essential symbol of the cross was incorporated in the form of transepts, a cross axis (perhaps borrowed from Byzantium) that served to identify the choir (for the monks), as distinct from the nave (for the public). Beyond the choir, in a semicircular apse girded by the ambulatory (a semicircular extension of the aisles), stood the main altar, the focal point of the building. Subaltars, needed for the daily Mass required of many monks, were placed in the transepts and in the ambulatory. At the nave entrance were placed narthexes, vestibules and reception areas for pilgrims. Although many French churches—Saint Savin sur Gartempe (nave 1095-1115), Saint Sernin in Toulouse (1080?-1120), and Sainte Foy in Conques (begun 1050)—had barrel-vaulted naves, Saint Philibert in Tournus (950-1120) used transverse arches to support a series of barrel vaults, with windows high in the vertical plane at the ends of the vaults. Ultimately, the groin vault became the preferred solution, because it offered high windows together with a continuous longitudinal crown, as in Sainte Madeleine in Vézelay (1104) and Worms Cathedral (11th century) in Germany. The semicircular arches of the groin vault form a square in plan; thus, the nave consisted of a long series of square bays or segments. The smaller and lower vaults of the aisles were often doubled up, two to each nave bay, to conform to this configuration.
The greatest monastic Romanesque church, Cluny III (1088-1121), did not survive the French Revolution but has been reconstructed in drawings; it was an immense double-aisled church almost 137 m (almost 450 ft) long, with 15 small chapels in transepts and ambulatory. Its design influenced Romanesque and Gothic churches in Burgundy and beyond. Another important stimulus to French Romanesque was the pilgrimage cult; a convergence of routes led over the western Pyrenees into Spain and thus to Santiago de Compostela, where the pilgrim could venerate the presumed relics of St. James. Along the routes to Spain, certain points were sanctified as pilgrimage stops, which led to the erection of splendid Romanesque churches at Autun (1120-1132), Paray-le-Monial (1100?), Périgueux (1120), Conques (1050), Moissac (1120?), Clermont-Ferrand (1262), Saint Guilhem le Désert (1076), and others.
Cathedral Group at Pisa This group of buildings, built from 1053 to 1272 at Pisa, in Italy, includes a campanile (bell tower), better known as the Leaning Tower, rear right; a cathedral, center; and a baptistery, left. The tiers of open colonnades (series of columns) throughout the group are characteristic of the Romanesque style of architecture, which preceded the Gothic style in western Europe. The campanile began leaning during construction due to the settling of the foundation.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
Notre-Dame-la-Grande, FranceWith its stone construction, vaulting, and decorative ornamental facade, the church known as Notre-Dame-la Grande (begun in the 12th century), in Poitiers, France, stands as an important example of French Romanesque architecture. The facade of the church displays an elaborate stone-carved relief highlighting numerous figures sitting and standing within bordered arcades. Portions of the exterior recall techniques used during the Roman Empire, especially the pointed scales lining the conical turrets, designed to look like Roman tile.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
Gothic Architecture
At the beginning of the 12th century, Romanesque was transformed into Gothic. Although the change was a response to a growing rationalism in Christian theology, it was also the result of technical developments in vaulting. To build a vault requires first a temporary carpentry structure, called centering, which supports the masonry until the shell has been completed and the mortar has set. Centering for the ordinary groin vault must be for an entire structural unit, or bay, with a resultant heavy structure resting on the floor. About 1100, the builders of Durham Cathedral in England invented a new method. They built two intersecting diagonal arches across the bay, on lighter centering perhaps supported high on the nave walls, and then found ways to fill out the shell resting on secondary centering. This gave a new geometric articulation—the ribbed vault. Ribs did not modify the structural characteristics of the groin vault, but they offered constructional advantage and emphatically changed the vault’s appearance.
Another development was the pointed arch and vault. The main advantage was geometrical. Vaults of various proportions could cover a rectangular or even a trapezoidal bay, so that nave bays could correspond with the narrower aisle bays, and vaulting could proceed around the curved apse without interruption. Also, the nave walls containing clerestory windows could be pushed just as high as the crown of the vault. Soon this clerestory became all window, filled with tracery and stained glass that conferred a new luminosity on the interior.
With these advances, the master builders were encouraged to construct more elegant, higher, and apparently lighter structures. But the vaults had to be kept from spreading outward by restraint imposed near the base of the vaults, now high above the aisle roofs. The solution was another innovation, the flying buttress, a half arch leaning against the vault from the outside, with its base firmly set in a massive pier of its own.
This new style received its most intensive development in the Île-de-France. The abbey church of Saint Denis (1140-1144), the royal mausoleum near Paris, became the first grandiose model. Bishops in prosperous northern cities were then drawn into competition for designers and artisans to outdo other cathedrals. The beginning dates of the major French examples are Laon, 1160; Paris, 1163; Chartres, 1194; Bourges, 1195; Reims, 1210; Amiens, 1220; and Beauvais, 1225. The beginning dates of English Gothic cathedrals are Canterbury, 1174; Lincoln, 1192; York Minster, 1261; and Exeter, 1280. The collapse of the Beauvais choir in 1284, however, indicated that structural limits had been reached. The transverse span of the nave vaults of these cathedrals was in the range of 9 to 15 m (30 to 50 ft), but the rebuilt Beauvais choir attained a height of 47 m (154 ft).
Although the finest medieval architecture was ecclesiastical, secular builders also constructed great buildings in the years 1000 to 1400. The medieval castle is a romantic symbol of feudalism; one of the most impressive and best-preserved examples is the Krak des Chevaliers (1131) in Syria, built by the Knights Hospitalers at the time of the Crusades.
Military architecture was a defensive response to advances in the technology of warfare; the ability to withstand siege remained important. Fortifications sometimes embraced whole towns; important examples include Ávila in Spain, Aigues-Mortes and Carcassonne in France, Chester in England, and Visby in Sweden.
Urbanization increased on a large scale, brought about by the needs and desires of many groups, including the church and its monasteries, the nobles and kings, the craft guilds, and the merchants and bankers. The planning patterns that developed are quite different from the arbitrary geometry of Roman cities or of Renaissance theorists. Throughout northern Europe, where hardwood remained available until the Industrial Revolution, timber frame construction flourished. In half-timber construction, a quickly erected wood frame was infilled with wattle and daub (twigs and plaster) or brickwork. Monastic barns and municipal covered markets necessitated large braced wooden frames. The descendants of Vikings built the curiously beautiful stave churches in Norwegian valleys. In the Alps whole towns were built of horizontally interlocked wood timbers of square cross section. Brick architecture also flourished in many regions, notably Lombardy (Lombardia), northern Germany, Holland, and Denmark.
Salisbury Cathedral Salisbury Cathedral in Salisbury, England, is an example of English Gothic architecture. It was built between 1220 and 1260, but the crossing tower, flying buttresses, and spire were added in the 14th century. The two sets of transepts on the north and east sides are unusual for Gothic buildings, as is the pastoral setting.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
Royal Abbey at St. Denis The royal abbey church at St. Denis near Paris is known as the cradle of Gothic art. It is an excellent example of early Gothic architecture. The building was the work of Suger, the abbot of St. Denis, who completely remodeled a very old church. The church was designed to permit the entry of light, which was considered necessary to create an atmosphere conducive to prayer. Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
Islam forbade the representation of persons and animals; yet craftsmen created highly ornamented buildings. The motifs are geometrical designs, floral arabesques, and Arabic calligraphy. The materials are glazed tile, wood joinery and marquetry, marble, mosaic, sandstone, stucco carving, and white marble inlaid with dark marbles and gemstones. See Islamic Art and Architecture. The Islamic concept of a mosque as a place for ablutions and prayer differs from the idea of a Christian church, and the desert climates in which Islam first became established required protection from sun, wind, and sand. The initial prototype was a simple walled-in rectangle containing a fountain and surrounded with porticoes. A qibla, or wall toward Mecca, had in its center an apse, or mihrab, with a nearby pulpit, or minbar; the shelter at this end consisted of multiple arcades of transverse and lateral rows of columns. Structural elements were the arch and the dome; roofs were flat unless forced upward by vaults, and there were no high windows. The mosque had at least one tower, or minaret, from which the call to prayer was issued five times daily. The same basic plan is followed to this day.
The Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul was built in 1550. The architect, Sinan, based his design on Byzantine churches, in particular the Hagia Sophia. The large central dome above a square opens to smaller spaces vaulted by buttressing half-domes. The four tapering minarets with balconies are characteristic of the architectural style of later Islamic mosques. Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002.
posted by Ronald @ 2:32 AM
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