History · Article
Byzantine Revival Architecture
From Westminster Cathedral to the Sacré-Cœur and the synagogues of central Europe, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries built in a Byzantine manner. What they borrowed and why.
Between roughly 1840 and 1940, architects across Europe, Russia, the Americas and the Middle East built churches, synagogues, cathedrals, banks and railway stations in a style they called Byzantine or Neo-Byzantine. Some of these buildings are very good. Almost none of them look much like an actual Byzantine church.
The revival is interesting precisely because of that gap. What nineteenth-century architects took from Byzantium tells us what they thought it was, and what they wanted it for.
What They Borrowed
The Neo-Byzantine repertory is consistent and fairly narrow:
- Domes on pendentives over a broad, unified interior, in deliberate contrast to the Gothic nave
- Round arches rather than pointed
- Striped or banded masonry, brick and stone in alternating courses
- Gold mosaic on the vaults, where the budget allowed
- A Greek-cross or centralised plan, or a longitudinal plan disguised by a sequence of domes
- Capitals and ornament copied from Hagia Sophia, San Vitale and St Mark’s
What they generally did not borrow was the scale. Real middle Byzantine churches are small, as Byzantine church architecture explains; the revival built enormous ones, on the model of Hagia Sophia, which was itself exceptional.
Why Byzantium
Several motives converged in the mid-nineteenth century.
Escape from the Gothic. The Gothic Revival dominated church architecture in Britain, France and Germany by the 1840s, and was strongly associated with medieval Catholicism. Architects and patrons looking for an alternative Christian idiom found one in the east.
Antiquity and authority. Byzantine architecture could be presented as older than Gothic and closer to the early church — a powerful argument for Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox alike, each for different reasons.
Nationalism. In Russia, Greece and Serbia the Byzantine manner was a national style, asserting continuity with a medieval Orthodox past.
Availability. Publications made it possible. Salzenberg’s survey of Hagia Sophia in 1854, the Fossati brothers’ restoration drawings, Texier and Pullan’s Byzantine Architecture of 1864, and the photographs that followed gave architects the material to work from for the first time.
The Major Buildings
Westminster Cathedral, London (John Francis Bentley, 1895–1903). The outstanding Neo-Byzantine building in Britain and arguably anywhere. Bentley studied in Italy, deliberately avoided Gothic so as not to compete with Westminster Abbey across the road, and produced a striped brick and Portland stone basilica with four domes over a wide nave and a campanile. The mosaic decoration was left unfinished and is still being added over a century later, which gives the vast dark brick interior an austerity Bentley did not intend and that many visitors prefer.
Sacré-Cœur, Paris (Paul Abadie, begun 1875). Romano-Byzantine rather than strictly Byzantine, with a cluster of ovoid domes in white travertine. Built as a national act of penance after the defeat of 1870 and the Commune, and politically contentious from the start.
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia (Alexander Pomerantsev, 1882–1912). A Russian architect’s Neo-Byzantine cathedral in Bulgaria, commemorating the Russian soldiers of the liberation war of 1877–78.
The Church of St Sava, Belgrade (designed 1926–32, completed in stages into the 2000s). Explicitly modelled on Hagia Sophia and among the largest Orthodox churches in the world.
Saint Louis Cathedral Basilica, Missouri (1907–1914), whose mosaic programme — over 80,000 square feet, installed between 1912 and 1988 — is one of the largest anywhere.
Russian imperial building. The Russo-Byzantine style promoted under Nicholas I by Konstantin Thon, and the later Neo-Byzantine of the Naval Cathedral at Kronstadt, served an explicit state ideology of Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality, connected to the ideas discussed in the Third Rome.
The Synagogues
One of the most striking applications was Jewish. From the 1850s a large number of European synagogues were built in Byzantine, Moorish or hybrid oriental styles — the Dohány Street synagogue in Budapest, the Great Synagogue of Florence, the Rumbach Street synagogue, many in Germany and central Europe.
The reasoning was that classical and Gothic were Christian idioms, and that an eastern Mediterranean style better expressed a community with eastern origins while remaining monumental and dignified in a European city. The results are frequently magnificent, and a high proportion of them were destroyed between 1938 and 1945.
Mosaic
The revival drove a revival in mosaic. Venetian workshops — Salviati above all, and later the Venice and Murano Company — supplied glass tesserae and mosaicists across Europe and America, working in the Byzantine technique described in Byzantine mosaics.
The style of the figures is usually a compromise: Byzantine gold grounds and formal poses combined with nineteenth-century anatomy and sentiment. Purists disliked it at the time and dislike it now. The technical accomplishment is not in question.
The Secular Cases
The manner spread beyond churches. Byzantine-influenced banks, libraries, exhibition halls, swimming baths and railway stations were built across Europe and America, generally taking the domes, the round arches and the polychrome masonry and discarding everything else.
The most peculiar offshoot is the “Byzantine” strand in late nineteenth-century decoration and Symbolist painting — Gustav Klimt’s gold-ground portraits derive directly from a visit to Ravenna in 1903, and the Symbolist taste for Byzantium as an image of hieratic, decadent splendour is discussed in Byzantium in the modern imagination.
The Verdict
Neo-Byzantine architecture has a mixed critical standing. It has been criticised as a stylistic mongrel, as a nationalist prop, and as a misunderstanding — the revivalists built imperial cathedrals on the model of an exceptional sixth-century building, and largely ignored the small, subtle, wonderfully proportioned churches that constitute the actual Byzantine tradition.
The best of it deserves better. Westminster Cathedral is a genuinely original building that solves the problem it was set — a very large, cheap, fast-built Catholic cathedral that does not imitate a Gothic abbey — with a coherence the Gothic Revival rarely managed. And the revival had one unambiguous benefit: it obliged architects to study Byzantine buildings seriously, which contributed to the scholarly rehabilitation described in Byzantine studies.
Westminster Cathedral in Detail
The best Neo-Byzantine building in the English-speaking world repays a closer look, because it shows what the style could do when the constraints were real.
The brief. Cardinal Vaughan needed a cathedral for English Catholicism, on a cramped site a few hundred metres from Westminster Abbey, built fast, cheaply, and capable of being used before it was finished.
The decision. Gothic was rejected deliberately. Competing with the Abbey in its own idiom would invite an unflattering comparison, and a Gothic cathedral takes a century. John Francis Bentley, appointed in 1894, travelled to Italy — though not, in the end, to Constantinople, because of a cholera outbreak — and settled on an early Christian and Byzantine manner.
The structure. Four domes over a nave 18 metres wide — wider than any English medieval nave — carried on concrete-cored piers, with the brick vaults built without centring by workmen using the traditional technique. The campanile rises 87 metres.
The materials. Over twelve million bricks, banded with Portland stone, laid in a strong horizontal striping. The lower interior is faced with marble from more than twenty countries, much of it acquired opportunistically over decades.
The unfinished ceiling. The upper interior was left as bare brick, blackened by a century of candle smoke, pending mosaic decoration that has been added piecemeal since and is still incomplete.
That last point produces the building’s actual character. Bentley intended glittering mosaic throughout; what exists is a vast, dark, sooty brick cavern above a band of coloured marble, and a large number of visitors find it more powerful than the intended scheme would have been. It is the closest thing in Britain to the effect of a Byzantine interior — light and colour below, darkness above — arrived at by accident.
Klimt and Ravenna
The most valuable thing the Byzantine revival produced was not a building, and the transmission is well documented.
Gustav Klimt visited Ravenna in 1903 and saw the sixth-century mosaics of San Vitale and Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. He wrote to a correspondent about the mosaics’ “unprecedented splendour.”
What followed was his “golden phase”: Judith (1901, before the trip, but pointing that way), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), The Kiss (1907–08), and the Stoclet Frieze.
The borrowings are specific. Flat gold ground with no spatial recession. Figures whose bodies dissolve into ornamented surface while faces and hands remain naturalistic — exactly the convention of Byzantine icon painting, where flesh is modelled and everything else is pattern. Frontality. The use of gold as a field rather than a background, standing for something other than space.
The Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait in particular reproduces the compositional logic of an apse mosaic: a frontal figure floating in a gold field, surrounded by symbolic ornament, with only the face and hands rendered as flesh.
That a Viennese Secession painter produced the most famous images of early twentieth-century European art by transcribing sixth-century Byzantine technique is worth stating plainly, and it is generally left out of accounts of both.
A Checklist of Buildings
For a reader who wants to find examples, a geographical sample.
| Building | Place | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Westminster Cathedral | London | 1895–1903 |
| Sacré-Cœur | Paris | 1875–1914 |
| Alexander Nevsky Cathedral | Sofia | 1882–1912 |
| Church of St Sava | Belgrade | begun 1935 |
| Naval Cathedral | Kronstadt, Russia | 1903–1913 |
| Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis | Missouri | 1907–1914 |
| Dohány Street Synagogue | Budapest | 1854–1859 |
| Great Synagogue | Florence | 1874–1882 |
| St Sophia Cathedral | Harbin, China | 1907, rebuilt 1932 |
| Basilica of the National Shrine | Washington, DC | 1920–1961 |
The geographical spread is the point: the style travelled wherever a nineteenth- or twentieth-century institution wanted a monumental building that was neither classical nor Gothic — Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, and in a few cases civic.
- Byzantine Church Architecture — what the originals were actually like
- Hagia Sophia — the model everyone copied
- Byzantine Mosaics — the technique the revival brought back
- Byzantine Legacy in Russia — the Russo-Byzantine style
- Byzantium in the Modern Imagination — the taste behind the buildings
- Byzantine Studies — the scholarship that made it possible
- St Mark’s Basilica, Venice — the western model closest to hand