Afterlife of Byzantine Architecture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Abstract

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, there was a sharp discrepancy between the plenitude, diversity and importance of re-imagined and re-used Byzantine architecture and its persistently peripheral status in historiography. This paradox is especially apparent in the context of Byzantine architecture perceived as both a model for, and a precursor of, architectural modernism. A link between Byzantine and modern architecture, based on the ideas of structural rationalism, tectonics, truthfulness and anti-naturalism, as represented in Neo-Byzantine art and architecture and elaborated by various historians - from John Ruskin and Henri Labrouste to Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg - is only part of an unexplored kaleidoscopic picture of Byzantium's place in the Western modernist imagination.