334 The Evolution of Architecture. 



story of its origin in the festal wooden arch, a painted com- 

 pliment, or wreathed with flowers and green. We have had 

 a very recent object lesson in this kind of evolution. I 

 refer, of course, to the centennial arch of 1889 set up in 

 Washington Square, New York. The people liked it and 

 said : " Come, let us put it into stone." The arch of Constan- 

 tino is very beautiful to look upon, if one is not a purist in 

 his architectural ideas. Nevertheless, as one passes under it 

 he passes out of Roman architecture into a period of archi- 

 tectural darkness centuries long. The arch of the first 

 Christian Emperor, it is built out of the stolen substance 

 and decorated with the stolen ornaments of the arch of 

 Hadrian. What better symbol could we have of that " unex- 

 ampled poverty of artistic invention " which marked the de- 

 velopment of Christian Rome for an ill thousand years ? 



And still the line of evolution did not break. But the 

 Roman building to which it attached itself was neither aque- 

 duct, nor amphitheatre, nor bath, nor arch-triumphal. It 

 was the basilica, the name of which passed over with the 

 thing, and it is of the Basilica of St. Peter's that we hear in 

 our time. But the evolution followed the line of Christian 

 worship, which, beginning in the private dining-room, passed 

 into the private basilica, or ceremonial hall. This and not 

 the public forensic basilica fixed the type of the early Chris- 

 tian churches of the West. We have still remaining splen- 

 did examples of those churches in San Pietro in Vincolo, in 

 Santa Maria Maggiore, and in St. Paul's outside the walls. 

 The last, although well-nigh destroyed by fire in 1823, has 

 been restored in perfect sympathy with the original design. 

 In the other two, when you go to see Michel Angelo's 

 " Moses " or the mosaics of Cimabue, you have on either 

 hand majestic columns that have served their present use 

 some fifteen hundred years, and before that they had some 

 centuries of history as the bath or temple columns of the 

 pagan city. 



The sixth century was one of the great building centuries 

 of architectural history ; hardly less so than the century of 

 Pericles in Greece and Hadrian in Rome, and the thirteenth 

 century, which saw Amiens and Salisbury and Burgos rising 

 simultaneously into the wondering and astonished air. It 

 was the century of Justinian, the Eastern Empire's most 

 imperial man, during whose reign and by whose inspiration 

 twenty-five churches of magnificent size and splendid deco- 

 ration were built in Constantinople, all in the Byzantine 



