 Today, we're going late Roman and early Christian architecture. This is Constantine up here. But before we talk about that, I just want to go back a little bit to Vitruvius, whom we were discussing earlier in this class. Vitruvius, as we mentioned before, was a Roman architect and architectural writer who came up with his 10 books on architecture, which provided architects with a theoretical basis on how to design, how to make choices, talking about things like the three qualities that all architecture should have, firmness, commodity, and delight, or structural integrity, functionality, and beauty. And we talked a little bit about some of the attributes that constitute beauty, things like proportion, or symmetry, rhythm, and decorum. What does decorum mean? Tom, what's decorum? Appropriateness, exactly. So it was very important that if you were designing something, you responded with the correct type, or the correct materials, or the correct use of the orders. The practice of architecture in those days was quite different than it is now, where there's a lot more license to experiment with form and material and so forth. We looked at a number of things that Vitruvius recommended that the architect should consider, things like the making of machinery, the making of technological devices like the water screw for drilling a well, or things like the clock, or things like the city plan. And I mentioned that all of these tended to have more or less the same diagram, which was radial, a circle with radiating lines. It gives you a town. It also gives you a clock. It also gives you a water screw. And that's amazing how convenient. You don't really have to do much doodling. A circle with radiating lines gives you everything. But probably one reason why Vitruvius favored this diagram is that it was cosmologically significant. The idea of the circle has this pedigree in classical thought. Going back to Plato, going back to Pythagoras actually, before Plato, connecting it to the cosmos. The circle is a diagram that connects it to the cosmos. And Plato, in his book The Timaeus, talks about the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and the cosmos. And he attaches a geometrical shape to each of those things. So the one thing that Vitruvius describes that relates to these geometrical figures, the circle, and also the square, he talks about very, very specifically in his treatise. And I'd like to go over a bit, because I think it's a really interesting question. And there are some interesting solutions that came up. And that is the idea that the human figure somehow corresponds to geometry. That's fairly amazing. Because classical thought tells you that there is a kind of dissonance between things in this world, things trapped in time and material that corrupt and rot and pure ideas. But there is also this idea of microcosm, that here on earth there are little images of the world that we can understand, a little cosmos, microcosm, that reflect the order of the divine. And so it's of interest to try to see and understand and even make models of the microcosm as often as possible. So when Vitruvius gives his description, and Vitruvius doesn't have any illustrations in his text, the test from antiquity is completely literary. But he describes the correspondence of the human figure to these two ideal shapes, the circle and the square. On the screen we have Leonardo da Vinci's drawing from around 1500. But before we talk about this one, I want to show you some other attempts. Because it's one thing to say circle and square, guy in the middle. It's quite a different thing to try to solve that problem. So you have a number of these perfectly smart, perfectly talented Renaissance guys who are really interested in recovering the thought of classical antiquity. And they're happy to have Vitruvius because this is a window, a specific address about how the ancients thought. And Francesco Giorgi draws this guy, which I think it's not the best attempt when you say this kind of floppy man standing in the circle. And the square is really not addressed at all. The square just happens to be there as something that the circle sits in, but the human figure is not really generative of the square. And it's barely generative or generated by the circle. So you get another guy, Fra Giocondo. And he's really trying hard to figure out what does Vitruvius mean? How do the circle and the square correspond? What is the logic between them? How is the human figure somehow implicated? And he says, well, okay, this guy can kind of give me the circle. And this guy, and look how hard he's trying. Look at that sad expression on his face. He's giving you the square, but he's about to explode in the task of giving you the square. But in the project of Fra Giocondo, the circle and the square don't come together. This apparently easy thing that Vitruvius describes is a hard thing to accomplish. One of my favorite responses to this problem is Cesareano. And Cesareano is really a friend of Leonardo da Vinci. He's a guy up in Milan, smart guy. And he's pulling out all the stops. Notice how people like Fra Giocondo or Francesco Giorgi are just using the big geometrical figure, the circle and the square to try to solve the problem. And Cesareano's a smart guy. He's saying, what about the grid? What about the idea that within the square there are modules and subdivisions that can begin to help me organize this thing? So he's got the big gridded kind of graph paper thing. He's got the circle, he's got the square. There's this kind of figure ground lock between the circle and the square. And this guy with size 16 feet and lobster claw hands is stretching out and he's kind of doing it. I mean, he's a monster. There's no confusion about that. People don't exactly look like that. But Cesareano still has another conundrum here. And that is the center. What's the center of the circle and what's the center of the square? And how does the human figure relate to that? So classical thought will tell you that the navel, the omfalos, is the place where the soul resides. And so if there is something spiritual about man, then the navel would be the center of that. The navel would be the center of the circle, this cosmological diagram. The square, according to classical thought, according to Plato, is the figure that corresponds to the earth, to the mundane, to things that are trapped in time and material and heavy and ponderous and animalistic. And so what is the center of the square? And Cesareano thinks, hmm, maybe the reproductive organs. So if I gave you a less pixelated image of this, you would be blushing and you would be shocked because Cesareano's little guy is desperately trying to have both circles aligned and his little man is extremely excited. This is one of my favorite Vitruvian men. This is by Francesco di Giorgio. And this guy is just chilling. Like, I'm never gonna get there. I'm just gonna relax and just kind of hang out there. And it really takes somebody of the caliber of Leonardo da Vinci to figure out a good way to solve the problem of Vitruvian man. And one thing that Leonardo does that the others didn't think to do is simply not make the circle and the square concentric. Over here we have Cesareano doing what seems obvious. If you read the literary description of the Vitruvian man, the circle and the square are concentric. They have basically the same kind of ideality and the diagram that Cesareano comes up with is pretty easy and pretty straightforward. But Leonardo slips them so that they rest on the same ground plane, but the centers slip with respect to one another so that there is the orthogonally disposed figure of the person that is descriptive of the square and described by the square and there's the radially disposed person who's descriptive of the circle and described by the circle. And the way Leonardo draws this guy is not simply a description of human anatomy, but rather, if you look closely, you'll see that he's really parceling out the figure into these interrelated pieces. There's this kind of geometrical diagram showing you corresponding measures. And there's also this idea of the slipping of the two centers. So for Leonardo, the center of the circle is the navel, the spiritual center of man, and the center of the square are the reproductive organs and that works out incredibly perfectly because the figure seems like a person and not like a monster or a lobster man and the two meanings are called out. Leonardo is mathematicizing the human figure and at the very bottom of his drawing, there is this linear clarification of what the measurements are and what Leonardo was showing you is that he's sort of unfolding a golden rectangle spiral and there's something about the human figure and these ideal geometries that correspond. And just as an aside note, Leonardo's writing looks crazy and you might think that this image is reversed, but Leonardo was always afraid that people were going to steal his ideas so he simply wrote backwards. He wrote everything in mirror handwriting. So if you could read Renaissance Italian and you had a mirror, you'd be in luck here. And sometimes Leonardo had so many ideas, he would simply take a pen in each hand and fill up two notebooks with two different sets of ideas at the same time. Another little bit of backtracking, not necessarily backtracking, but clarification I want to go through is this whole idea of the Roman Basilica and we talked about the Roman Basilica when we were just discussing the fora and it's something I just want you to understand as a very important type as we go forward in architectural history. We saw it over here, this is the Roman Forum and we see Basilicas lining either side of it and the purpose of the Basilica is meeting all. The purpose of the Basilica is not a religious building at all. The religious buildings were temples like little temples over here and the way in which the temple operated did not involve a congregation. You didn't have a group of people assemble inside a temple. Rather, the priests would perform the rituals there and the observers of the rituals would be outside. But here in the case of the Roman Basilica, this is a public meeting hall and its purpose is for the assemblage of large crowds. So this is essentially the type of the Basilica and notice that it has aisles along the side and the large space in the middle is called the nave. Perhaps you know the word navy, is this a familiar word to you? Naval battle, all that has to do with ships. Nave is the Italian word for ship and people who built the wooden trusses for churches in the early days were often the same people who built the wooden structure of ships. You just turn them upside down. That was certainly the case in Venice where the carpenters at the arsenal would build both ships and truss work for churches. This large space in the middle is the nave. The space on either side is called the aisle and light comes in from above through clear story windows. So that's basically the type. This is the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine. Very late, 308, 313 BC. This is a heavy masonry building. These are arches. These are large vaults over here. Typically it's a columnar structure. This is simply a transformation of the type very slightly and this is where it's located. The Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine right here at the edge of the Roman Forum. It's probably surprising that there would be a Basilica for both Maxentius and Constantine at a moment Constantine and Maxentius were joint emperors and then they each appointed a kind of helper buddy, a Caesar to help administer the empire. So you had four people ruling in tandem. So the empire begins to splinter in administrative sense as well as in a political and militaristic sense. By the time we get to 300 AD, the stability of the empire is falling and it's being threatened by a number of things. One thing that it's being threatened by is the incursion of barbarians coming in from the north and attacking people. Another thing that it's being threatened by probably is one of the glories of Rome, the plumbing system that brought them fresh water, that brought them toilets and plumbing. Also used a lot of lead and the lead poisoned people and began to kind of diminish their capacities. But also from the glory days of the founding of the empire with Augustus back in 27 BCE, there become increasing schisms and the empire begins to fragment. First into co-emperors who, here's just a diagram showing you some of the fragmenting of the Roman empire. So we have 27 BCE where Caesar Augustus consolidates Rome and declares himself to be the emperor. 250 years later, Diocletian divides the Roman empire and you have an Eastern empire and a Western empire. And Diocletian is probably the toughest on Christians. He is very interested in suppressing this new sect. In 330, Constantine transfers the capital from Rome to Constantinople. Rome remains the capital of the Western empire. Constantinople, present day Istanbul, becomes the capital of the Eastern empire. And the Eastern empire grows while the Western empire shrinks. And the reason the Western empire shrinks is that the barbarian invasions are coming down through Italy and Constantinople is more or less protected from that. And this diagram just shows you some of the incursions of barbarians that had to be dealt with and that began to really attack Rome in a big way. While Constantinople over here, headquarters of the Eastern empire remains relatively at peace. Hence explaining the difference in prosperity. And Rome's a good target because Rome is rich, right? And if you can get all the treasure of Rome, you might think you would get the kind of lifestyle that the Romans had. Of course, it didn't quite happen because when you destroy Rome, you destroy the infrastructure and you destroy the planning that makes possible the production of food and the delivery of water and so forth. And pretty much by 410, the empire in Rome collapses and ceases to be a viable state. So the empire begins to splinter in administrative sense as well as in a political and militaristic sense. Different emperors, different co-emperors are mounting their own armies, levying their own taxes and the whole value of the Roman coinage begins to diminish and this makes it harder to enlist a good army to fight. Another factor, and this is at the same period that Augustus becomes emperor and declares eternal and inevitable right of Rome to rule forever, you have the rise of Christianity. If you look at the dates of Caesar Augustus, it's right at the time of Christ. And so you have religious splintering going on in ancient Rome also. And Christianity was certainly not the only new religion that flourished. There were a lot of variations of religions that in order to keep the power of the state intact, it was convenient to persecute all of them. These are just some images of the suppression of Christians during the time of the early decades of the new millennium or the 18th. This is St. Peter, one of the apostles, and he was crucified in Rome and they crucified him upside down. So not only did they use this tool, this symbol of the state of Rome to crucify him, but they did it upside down to underscore the subversiveness of his teachings. And so because of that, the early Christian church became a covert institution. It became a kind of secret hidden institution. These are some catacombs over here. And people would hide. There would be no desire in the earliest years of the Christian church to make visible the presence of the church. Rather, you would go into the catacombs and secret meetings, or you would simply meet in people's houses. So the idea that the church would become a type, the Christian church would become a type, didn't establish itself until quite late. This fragmentation of the Roman Empire into first two and then four goes by various names. When it is the ruler of four, it's called the tetrarchy. And that was established by Diocletian in 293. And this was done really as a way of spreading out control so that the barbarians and the collapse of the economy and various other problems would be dealt with. Constantine is the one who essentially divides the empire between the East and West. Constantine goes to the East, Licenius goes to the West. And the other two are gone. Constantine founds a new city when he goes off to the Eastern Empire. And he wants to call this new city, Rome, which is a catchy name. But people so honor Constantine that they call it Constantinople. This is just Diocletian's palace. We looked at that before to give you a sense of what the architecture was looking like at that late moment. But the architecture was also looking increasingly complex. And already when we looked at the Villa of Hadrian in Tivoli, we saw the simple types of temple or solos becoming intricate, becoming implicated by inner penetrations of other volumes and other objects. And that certainly becomes the case as we move forward in the Roman Empire. This is the church of Minerva Medica from 330 AD. So the empire is already dividing by this point. And it's a nice elaboration on the kind of pantheonic type. It's an elaboration insofar as the perimeter of the building begins to express the interior. So you get this kind of wonderful, crenellated surface. It's a centralized plan, but it's a centralized plan that begins to become capable of spawning secondary, centric organizations. So this plan down here shows you how there would have been a little antechamber or narfex that you move through. And there would have been these cells on the side with support buildings, so that it really looks almost like, I don't know, some kind of organism that can keep spawning and creating secondary organizations. Much, much more complex and also much more structurally invented. If you look at some far flung late Roman churches like St. Gherion in Cologne, Germany, it's kind of a transformation of the Minerva Medica type. You've got this wonderful crenellated surface in folded surface that folds up and becomes a dome. And here there's a nice little transformation going on. And that's the idea of center that we see so clearly expressed in Minerva Medica begins to slip in favor of a description of axis. So formally there's a nice manipulation from one program to another. And possibly one reason that these programs are changing already in 380 is that the state religion had shifted, which is San Lorenzo in Milan. Another super hybrid centric plan where we get these kind of concave, convex, infolding shapes like the ones that we saw at Hadrian's Villa but now amplified by the addition of these other kind of weird ancillary centric organizations. And probably one reason that the church plans begin to change, particularly the church plans begin to change in favor of the axis has to do with Constantine. Constantine, as we said, was co-emperor with Maxentius. And there is a battle where Constantine is trying to defend Rome and his armies are moving to the north of Rome and the invaders are coming down toward them. And Constantine, this pagan general, this pagan emperor, sees a cross according to the legend floating in the sky. And he says to his armies, go, follow the cross, take out your swords and follow the cross. So Constantine's army, following this glowing cross in the sky, defeats the army of Maxentius and defeats all the enemies on this bridge called the Milvian Bridge. And at that point, Constantine decides to legalize Christianity. Constantine doesn't actually become a Christian but he legalizes Christianity so that instead of becoming this secret sect meeting in the catacombs or meeting in people's houses, they become a more public institute. In fact, a few years later, the emperor Theodoric would actually persecute people for not being Christians. So there was quite a transformation at that point. And so when we look at things like Saint Geryon, Heilege Geryon, the idea that there's an axis that begins to transform this centric Roman type has a lot to do with the changing idea of liturgy that goes on with Christian churches. That the church is now congregational so you want a large interior space and you want to have a kind of hierarchy between where the congregation are and where the altar is and the priests are. And so the form of the building stretches to accommodate that. Notice that this terminal lobe in the plan becomes larger, becomes a place to put the altar, and also processions are possible. So the dopey center that we have over here, which is actually a beautiful church in Minerva Medica, now becomes something typologically much more capable of accommodating the sorts of services that the new Christian church would have. This is not really what Constantine looks like. He's not a ghost man with a head and an arm, but there are these fragments of statues of Constantine that remain and they are colossal things. This is a reconstruction of the pieces that we have and what they would look like because Constantine was very successful militaristically, not only did he defeat the co-emperors, Maxentius and Licinius, but he also fought against the Franks, the Visigoths, the Samarians and his reign and even was able briefly to expand the Roman Empire which had been contracting like crazy up until that point. So these are the colossal heads of Constantine that we saw reconstructed in that image, colossal hand of Constantine, his magnificent feet, and here's a person to give you a sense of how big these elements really are. They really are these gigantic things. So Constantine was a good Roman in that he built giant statues of himself and built a triumphal arch to celebrate his victories. This is the Arch of Constantine, probably the most spectacular of the remaining triumphal archers in Rome, but he also began to affect policies that changed the attitude of the Roman state, particularly toward the Christians. In 313, he signed the Edict of Milan and the Edict of Milan declared that all religions in the Roman Empire were fine, that there was no dominant religion. All religions would be tolerated. And then a bit later, the Council of Nicaea was established to clarify the teachings of the Christian church. But as you know, the Nicene Creed, it was formalized at the Council of Nicaea back in 325. So the Council of Nicaea also begins to establish what counts as orthodoxy and what counts as heresy. And at this point, there were all kinds of branches of Christianity, many of which were stamped out not sufficiently orthodox. Well, Constantine probably never converted Christianity, or if he did, it was a deathbed conversion. As he was dying, some stories say, he said, yeah, okay, Christianity, why not? But his daughter, Constancia, was a Christian. And when she died, she was buried in this little martyrium. Martyrium is a type, and it is a tomb for a martyr, really. And it's typically a centralized building. And the Santa Costanza establishes the type. And as we move forward, you see variations on the theme of the type. From the exterior, this big round lump of a thing, kind of looks like a mausoleum that you might have in Roman times. But a Roman mausoleum wouldn't really have interior space. You would simply stick your dead emperor in there, and that would be it. But part of the idea of the martyrium is you venerate the martyr. There will be relics of the martyr. Do you know what relics are? Like an ear, or a nose, or a foot, stuff like that. Notice when we look at the plan of Santa Costanza, it's almost a pholos inside out, right? Remember the Greek and Roman type of pholos, where you have the cell on the interior wrapped by the columns. Here we have the solid perimeter with columns on the inside. Or you might say it is like an onion. You're slicing through a series of concentric rings so that it's possible to have an experience of it that involves the exterior, but the real experience would be the interior. And if you look at the section, the section of Santa Costanza is the section of a basilica. But instead of being nave aisle aisle that gets extruded along the line, it is the notion of the ambulatory that's this little circular aisle that gets bent around a center. And it's little, but it's beautiful. And there are all kinds of interesting things going on. If you look at the columns, these are Roman columns. And some of the columns that you find in Santa Costanza and you increasingly find in early Christian and medieval architecture are just spoils. You just take them from a Roman building and you put them on there. And so there might not be the same attention to the integrity of the orders that you would have had in Roman architecture. You just borrow what you can. And there's a kind of double value in this appropriation of spoils from another culture. In one sense, we don't have to carve a new column, but in another sense, you are demonstrating the eclipse of the old order and the ascendance of the new order by reincorporating pagan elements in a Christian church. And after Christianity becomes legalized after the edict of Milan, there becomes a project to build some Christian churches. The Lateran Palace is given over as a new seat for the Christian church. And it gets developed into the first early Christian church, St. John Lateran, which I like to call San Giovanni in Laterano, just because it sounds so great. And this is not what St. John Lateran looks like now, but this is probably what it looked like back in the early Christian days in 313 AD when it was constructed. And it really does more or less deploy the type of Roman basilica. We see two aisles flanking either side, and we see a large nave. We see also something that we hadn't seen in the Roman basilicas, and that is this thing over here, this element that crosses perpendicular to the direction of the main nave, and that's called the transept. And the effect of putting the transept, this perpendicular element across the nave is to change this linear type into a cruciform type. And that's kind of fabulous also, because the very plan of the church becomes a symbol of the church. So if you look at the architecture of these early Christian churches, like the church at St. John Lateran, you see something that looks really quite modest compared to things that we were looking at in the Roman work. For example, think of the Basilica of Maxentius with these enormous vaults, these great, great kind of heroic swoops of space. This is a modestly constructed architecture. This is a kind of bearing wall building with simple columns supporting the nave on the inside. Notice that the windows are not large, but they're just punched windows into the wall. Here's another early Christian church just a few years later than St. John Lateran, old St. Peter's. By the way, I wanna say that St. John Lateran became the Cathedral of Rome. And cathedral is not just a word for big church. Cathedral specifically means the place of the cathedral, and the cathedral means the throne of the bishop. So this is the seat of the bishop of Rome is St. John Lateran. And that's not true of St. Peter's. This is where the vicar of the church, the pope has his seat. So this is St. Peter's Basilica. And if we look at the section, this probably gives us a clearer idea what an early Christian church looks like. There's a real thinness to this compared to the heavy masonry that we saw in Roman architecture. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're no longer using complicated vaulting, but we're using a much simpler technology, which is wooden trusses. You get a flat ceiling because of the wooden trusses. You get a kind of thinness because the wooden trusses aren't all that heavy. And a lot of space for circulation, a lot of space for the pilgrims to assemble and for liturgical processions to take place. In fact, if you look at old St. Peter's, you'll notice that there's a courtyard on the outside and the facade of old St. Peter's doesn't even look like a facade. This thing that meets the street, this looks really like an assemblage of buildings that you might find in any city. It doesn't announce itself in a very declaratory manner that this is a church, this is a place to worship, but rather it's sort of self-effacing. So the impulse to be covert and hidden that had to do with the earliest days of the Christian church continues in the earliest of the Basilicas. Notice in plan, we have a number of martyria over here. So there is a varying of these holy figures near the church of St. Peter's. St. Peter himself is buried at the crossing of the transept and the nave. I think it's also worth saying that not only is the church a cross and this kind of elongated cross plan is called a Latin cross, but the plan of the church is also anthropomorphic. You see this little bulging out over here and that's called an apse. Let me see if I write the word there. Yes, apse. This little bulging out is called an apse. Kind of looks like a head, arms, legs. So the church becomes a body and the church becomes a symbol. But the church also becomes an assembly hall and in its liturgy, the celebration of the rights are processional. So this notion of a longitudinal church is very important so that the various people participating in the celebration of the mass can come through with incense and chanting and all the stuff that you need. There were four major basilicas established in the early Christian days. We talked about St. John Lateran and that one is more or less over here. We talked about St. Peter's and that one is more or less over here. And the two others were St. Mary Majore or Santa Maria Majore, St. Mary Major and St. Paul's outside the walls. This thing in the middle is the coliseum. This layout of the early Christian basilicas, these four earliest churches of Christendom to be pretty fascinating, particularly given the whole notion of Roma quadrata. The idea that the foundation diagram of Rome is this marking of the four square, the marking of the cardo and the deculmanus and the making of a perimeter. Here's the coliseum. If you wanted to find something that really symbolized Rome or really symbolized the persecution of the Christians where Christians were routinely put into difficulties in the coliseum being persecuted and whatnot, the idea that this becomes the center of a new Roma quadrata, a new crossing of axes is pretty interesting. So if you take an axis from St. Mary Majore to St. Paul and an axis from St. Peter's to St. John Lateran, they cross and the place that they cross is the coliseum. So just as taking the Latin cross and making the cross a symbol of Christianity, so too is the entire city of Rome reclaimed for Christianity by taking the cross and no longer using it to organize the cardo and the deculmanus, but to reorganize Rome as a new Roma quadrata of Christian churches. So if you look at the four basilicas, they look nothing like they were supposed to look like back in the old days. We have facades that are for the most part Baroque in the case of St. Peter's and even 18th century in the case of the later churches, St. Maria Majore, for example. And here in St. Paul's outside the walls, there's a 19th century façade that's trying to look like an early Christian. That's probably more accurately what the church would have looked like. It would have been a flat façade, maybe encrusted with ornament and relating to a courtyard, as indicated here. There are a couple of other important early Christian churches not in Rome proper. And one is Church of the Nativity. The Church of the Nativity takes the place that they believe the manger, this little grotto where Christ was born and commemorates the space with the church. So you have the actual historical place of Christ's birth or at least as it was believed, celebrated by this centralized piece that pulls out of a basilica-like element. So already here in the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem, you begin to get a kind of hybrid typology of the martyrium or the centralized building and the longitudinal building. Kind of looks like the apps that we have at the end of the usual early Christian basilicas, but it's an apps that transforms and becomes more pavilionized. We have the courtyard here and all the elements that we need to establish the type. And you begin to get variations on the theme of the Church of the Nativity that happened. We mentioned that there's a split between the Eastern Empire and the Western Empire. And this little map over here begins to show you the extent of those different domains. The blue states are the Western Empire and the red states are the Eastern Empire. The Eastern Empire, as you see, is much, much more strongly consolidated into a governable whole. And the Western Empire is really beginning to fragment into bits of Italy, bits of France, bits of North Africa. And it's quite different than the extent of the Roman Empire during its heyday. And this is more or less the time of Hadrian where all of this, the entire territory, ringing the Mediterranean all the way up to England, all the way up through Germany was all intact and part of the Roman Empire. So this is an image really from the time of Constantine 330 AD on the right. And I'm showing you the Apollo Belvedere Hellenistic thing on the left about 330 BC as a point of comparison. What has happened to the attitude toward the human figure between the heyday of the Romans and the Greeks and the late period? And I think there's a significant difference. If you look at the Apollo Belvedere, there seems to be some idea that the human body, this thing of beauty, exemplifying kind of ideal perfection, exemplifying the divine and its perfect proportion, marvelous contrapasto, activating the space around it and really becoming something that is not simply static and to be viewed from one position, but that becomes a kind of player in the space of the world. The statue of Constantine's sons is a really different kind of thing. If I had to say what it looks the most like of all the statuary we've seen so far, I would probably say Egyptian, which is shocking, right? We're going way back. And the reason I'm saying that is that these don't seem to be figures operating in the space of the world. They seem to be like totems. They represent people in a kind of iconographic sense, but they don't represent people in a physical sense. They're embedded in the block that they're sculpted from rather than liberated as figures in the round. And the faces are impassive. The faces have no portraiture or personal expression, nor are they particularly idealized. So the attitude toward the human body as something that carries meaning for society has shifted. If in classical thought there is some kind of humanistic notion well represented by the Vitruvian man that the body is a microcosmic reflection of divine order and therefore something to be celebrated. Even by the time we get to late Rome to the time of Constantine, the body has become something kind of reviled or maybe not reviled, but at least it no longer carries meaning the way it had before. Meaning becomes more attached to spiritual things. So here is a description of the spread of the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century. And you can see the orangish stuff showing you the spread of Byzantium, but really the strongest centers of the Byzantine Empire still cluster around Constantinople. This is Rome again, of course. This is Rome with its seven hills, with its low ground in the middle that essentially became the Forum. And it's interesting to look at Constantinople, which Constantine deliberately established as a new Rome and tried to name Rome and to see ways in which it reprises some of these similar themes. There are ideas of Thora over here. There are spectacular fortification walls. And so a lot of the symbols of ancient Rome get rebuilt in Constantinople. The architecture shifts under the Eastern Empire from the kind of grand engineering projects we looked at when we looked at the Western Empire, the consolidated Roman Empire, to things that are more modest in scale and things that deal with the materiality of the wall in quite a different way. The thing we're looking at right here is a tiny little mausoleum for Gala Plakidia in the town of Ravenna, which is on the Adriatic coast, about 60 kilometers south of Venice. You look at the plan. How would you guys describe this plan? Anybody have a nice word for this plan? Yes? It's simple. Good. Can anybody be a little bit more specific than simple? Cruciform. Good. Do you want to take a stab at what kind of cross it is? It's not quite a Latin cross. It's not long enough to be a Latin cross. In fact, we would probably call this a Greek cross because it's, and it's not quite a Greek cross, but if you have a centralized plan that's cruciform, that's a Greek cross. And the plan type of Greek cross is something you see a lot in Eastern Empire architecture, which we call Byzantine architecture. So yeah, yeah, this is a little bit extra long, but pretend it's not extra long. It really seems to be centric. It seems to be organized around its center, but it also has this cruciform description. But look at the wall. The wall is really encrusted in mosaics, and mosaics are these tiny little tiles, these pieces of glazed stone. And one effect of the tile is to really deny the plasticity of the wall entirely. The ability of the wall to cast shadows or to be carved or to be manipulated that we were admiring in Roman architecture has been replaced by the wall as a surface to the black elements. And to me, this seems not so different from the image-making that we noticed when we looked at the statue of Constantine's sons, which is to say it's not about plasticity, it's not about volume and space, but simply about a kind of iconography or making of symbols or registering of meaning. Really, the Byzantine age comes into its glory under Justinian, from AD 482 to about 566. Under Justinian, a number of important churches get built, and a lot of them get built in Ravenna on the Adriatic, where we saw the Gala Plakidia monument. In terms of planned typology, a lot of the late Roman stuff that we looked at when we looked at Minerva Medica or St. Garion are going on here, too. That is to say, there's some notion of the centralized plan, but the centralized plan that's become complex and elaborated in intricate ways. So here, when we look at San Vitale in Ravenna, we see, at a big scale, elaboration of this notion of the silicon section within a round form, but also the kind of transformation of that with an extension that recognizes the axial nature of Christian liturgy. Here's a cutaway of the San Vitale church. You see a big dome up here, and it has the same kind of wall treatment that we saw in Gala Plakidia. Mosaics cover all the walls, and the Mosaic program here is showing you the courts of Justinian. The lad is a pancake, strangely proportioned, really kind of more hieratic than human in their description. So, when we come back next time, we'll talk about probably the greatest monument of Byzantine architecture, and that's the church of Ayasotia in Constantinople.