Byzantium Rediscovered (review)

Phaidon Press sent the Prairie Schooner a paperback copy of Byzantium Rediscovered for review, suggesting that it could "be used as a catalyst for a local spotlight" because its final focus is on the Nebraska State Capitol, where architect Bertram Goodhue and mosaicist Hildreth Meiere employed the style and materials of the Byzantine revival that had spread throughout Europe in the hundred years preceding. But this local reader and any other seeker after the deep connections between styles and culture not only will see the capitol anew by reading this book but will find new insights into architecture, poetry, forms of representation, and ideology that put the capitol in the context of a major architectural revival.

Author J. B. Bullen, a polymath professor of English at the University of Reading in England, shows readers how architecture interacts with literature and with the wider artistic culture. His admiration for the great Byzantine monuments of antiquity and of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival manifests itself in the profuse and sumptuous illustrations of this book. Sancta Sophia was refurbished in the nineteenth century, and San Marco in Venice as well as the beautiful churches of Ravenna and Palermo that attracted visits of wonder by artists, writers and critics. The buildings constructed in their image make an impressive list: Castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, Sacre Coeur in Paris, Westminster Cathedral in London, the Basilica at Lourdes, the set for Parsifal at Bayreuth, the interior decorations of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the Stadshuset in Stockholm (site of the Nobel Prize presentations and banquets), New York's capitol in Albany, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Each was designed to make a cultural or artistic assertion. Sacre Coeur was constructed to reinspire Parisians and the French with loyalty and pride in their Catholicism after the turmoil of the Commune and the Franco-Prussian wars. The Byzantine features of Westminster Cathedral in London created a deliberate challenge to Westminster Abbey and to Westminster Hall (Parliament) designed by Pugin in the Gothic style he thought of as true to the English spirit style, and thus Protestant in its allusions. Lourdes was the scene of a revelation reasserting the miraculous power of the Virgin; the basilica raised that reassertion to the heavens above the grotto and the healing waters.

Those readers with literary interests will be immediately impressed with Bullen's opening explanation of Yeats's Byzantium poems. Yeats received the 1923 Nobel Prize and thus had the opportunity to be among the first to see Minar Forseth's Golden Hall with its 18 million gold and glass mosaic pieces depicting heroes and scenes from Swedish history and, on the far wall, a figure of the Queen of the Mälaren receiving tribute from the East and the West. Yeats was inspired by this vision to visit Sicily for the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, and the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalù, and then to the churches of Ravenna. Through his friendship with William Morris, he could restudy W. B. Lethaby's 1894 monograph The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople. The result: his two great Byzantium poems. I didn't realize until reading this book that those "sages standing in god's holy fire / As in a gold mosaic on a wall" were actually in Stockholm!

Later Bullen shows how the same recognition of Byzantine illustrative styles is manifest in the work of Gustav Klimt, including his most famous works, such as the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer or The Kiss, paintings striving to achieve the effect of mosaic. In France, Puvis de Chavannes, especially the paintings done for the great Byzantine churches in Marseilles, is nearly pure Byzantine, as is Hippolyte Flandrin, most particularly in his work for Saint-Germain des Prés in Paris. Even more notable is Bullen's account of Ruskin's bringing "the stones of Venice" to England with one of its first effects being the famous Crystal Palace in Brighton. Later, this same book by Lethaby inspired the pre-Raphaelites, Burne-Jones in particular. William Morris's...