I bought another book on Kindle. I’ve been spending time on Greek and Roman temples. Could do a lot more and probably will, but I think it’s OK for a first pass. So let’s take a look at the emergence of churches in the late Roman empire, the division into East and West, “collapse” of the Western Empire, transition to Byzantine culture and the various flavours of “Orthodox Christianity”.
I’m going to use quotes from the book again, and let the visuals speak for themselves for the most part.
The study of historical architecture is full of challenges, not the least of which is learning it from a textbook. Buildings are three-dimensional entities, whereas our systems of representing them are two dimensional.
Buildings often constitute our primary surviving evidence for reconstructing or re-imagining the culture that produced them.
The aim here is to sketch a broad outline of the history of religious buildings, a “God’s eye view” if you will forgive the…