Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/468

452 452 BYZANTINE AECHITECTUEE. Pabt U. CHAPTER IV. NEO-BYZANTINE STYLE. CONTENTS. Sta. Irene, Constantinople — Churches at Ancyra, Trabala, and Constantinople — Churches at Salonica and in Greece — Domestic Architecture. SANTA SOPHIA at Constantinople was not only the grandest and most jierfect creation of the old school of Byzantine art, but it was also the last. It seems as if the creative power of the empire had ex- hausted itself in that great effort, and for long after it the history is a blank. We always knew that the two centuries which elapsed between the ages of Constantino and Justinian were ages of great architectural activity. We knew that liundreds, it may be thousands, of churches were erected during that period. It might have been that they had all perished, and that thus the thread of the narrative was lost. Fortunately, we have discovered that this is not the case, and we can now trace almost all the steps by which the semi-classical Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem was converted into the perfect Byzantine church at Constantinople. With the two subsequent centuries, how- ever, the case seems widely different. Shortly after Justinian's death, the troubles of the empire, the Persian wars of Heraclius, and, more than either, the rise of the Mahomedan power in the East, and of the Roman pontificate under Gregory the Great in the West — all tended so to disturb and depress the Byzantine kingdon as to leave little leisure and less means for the exercise of architectural mag- nificence. It is therefore hardly ])robable that we shall ever be in a position to illustrate the 7th and 8th centuries as we now know we can the 5th and 6th. Still, building must have gone on, because when we again meet the style it is changed. One of the very earliest churches of the new school is that of Sta. Irene at Constantinople, rebuilt as we 895. Half Section, half Elevation, of Dome of Sta. Irene at Constantinople.