to set a cupola on a square plan. The cupola is for Byzantine building what cross-vaulting is for Gothic. The older Romans had set it on a round wall, as at the Pantheon. Now they wanted to set it on a square base over their churches. At first all Christian churches had been built as long basilicas, even in the East; an example is St. Demetrius at Thessalonica (Saloniki). Then throughout Eastern Europe they began to build churches rather of the type of our baptisteries—round, or square, or eight-sided figures with apses on every side. Constantine's Golden Church at Antioch was the first famous example of this; it was copied in a few cases even in the West.[1] In Thessalonica is also one of the earliest of these round churches, St. George, a huge circle with a dome, like the Pantheon. But a circle is not a convenient plan for a church, so they wanted to put their cupola on a square. At first they simply cut off the corners by bridging across them, and on the eight sides thus made they set their round dome. The triumph of Byzantine engineering, and the greatest event of this development, was the discovery, gradually approached through infinite clumsy makeshifts, of the pendentive.
Then the time had come for the most splendid of all churches. In 532, while Justinian was reigning, for the second time the cathedral church of his city was burned down. The Emperor determined this time to build a church that should be the wonder of the world. Like its predecessors, it was to be dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (ἡ ἁγία σοφία), that is, to the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, the Word, to whom the text is understood to refer: "I, Wisdom, dwell with prudence … the Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way," &c. (Prov. viii. 12–36). No other building has anything like as much importance in the history of architecture as the Hagia Sophia. Other great churches are, each of them, only one out of many of the same kind; this church rose, after humble and tentative efforts, as the one great example, the model on which a whole style was founded. It is not the daughter, it is the mother, of Byzantine architecture. Nothing that went before can be compared to it, and afterwards for
- ↑ See p. 15, n. 2.
