with whom chance or policy had brought them in contact, and whose tastes and practices they successively imitated in their architecture; but even when these variations were capable of bestowing beauty, there was no longer taste or talent to appropriately apply them. Notwithstanding this debasement, the fate of architecture in Greece was less unfortunate than that which was experienced in the Roman Empire; and whilst, under the dominion of the Goths and Lombards, its principles and almost its practice were rapidly extinguished in the latter, its professors continued to maintain an acknowledged superiority at Constantinople. As the nations of the West began to emerge from barbarism, it was to the Greeks they again turned for instruction in those arts of civilization, of which they were still the depositaries. The Tuscans, the Genoese, and Venetians, in their commercial intercourse with Constantinople and its dependencies, had carried a fondness for their architecture, faded as it was, to the banks of the Arno and the shores of the Adriatic; and when taste began to revive in Italy, after the conquest of the Lombards, the architects of Byzantium were employed in the erection of those sacred edifices which still adorn the cities of Pisa, Venice, and Ancona.* * Such are the cathedral of Torcello, an isle in the Venetian lagunes, built in the ninth century by Orso, son to the When the Turks in the fifteenth century became possessed of the empire, their presence was productive of no perceptible alteration in the practice of the art amongst the Greeks. It had, in fact, already received any tinge of orientalism of which it was susceptible, and its professors had long since ceased to understand or admire the monuments bequeathed them by their fathers. They looked upon them as applicable to no human purposes, and referring them to ages of the remotest antiquity, regarded their erection as the work of sorcerers and genii. Mahomet II. a prince of talent and genius, as well as valour and ambition, could readily appreciate the value of his conquest on gaining possession of his new capital. Whilst its wealth and decorations were given up to the plunder of his soldiers, he appropriated to himself the walls of its palaces and public edifices. St. Sophia was preserved uninjured and entire; and being consecrated by the conqueror to the Prophet, it served as the model for every subDoge Pietro Orseolo; (Agincourt, v. i. Arch. Decad. p. 42;) the church of St. Cyriac, at Ancona, constructed at the close of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh century; the church of St. Mark, at Venice, which was completed about the year 1071; and the cathedral and baptistery of Pisa, the former the work of the celebrated Buschetto, a native of Dulichium, finished in the first year of the twelfth century. sequent mosque erected throughout the empire, which were modified, of course, in their dimensions, according to the means of the several founders. Even the churches of the Greeks are merely humble imitations of this faulty but sumptuous original, to which a barrenness of invention, as well as a feeling of religious veneration, has served to confine them. Nor is their skill in domestic architecture more varied or refined.+ Externally mean and • Eton, c, vi. p. 209. + In the mode of constructing their buildings both civil and sacred, the process of the modern Greeks is remarkably primitive and simple. M. le Roy, says Guys, (vol. ii. lett. xxxv. p. 2.) " pendant le séjour qu'il a fait à Constantinople en 1753, ayant été conduit à la mosquée que faisoit bâtir Sultan Mahmoud, ne put s'empêcher d'admirer le procédé simple et facile avec lequel l'architecte Grec, chargé de la construction de cet édifice, élevoit la grande voûte, qui le couvroit entièrement. Une perche, placée au centre de l'échafaudage qui remplissoit l'intérieur de la mosquée, se mouvant circulairement en tout sens, décrivoit successivement tous les différents cercles de la voûte, et designoit la place de chaque brique qui entroit dans sa construction. Lorsque par ce procédé la perche, en s'élevant peu-à-peu, étoit parvenue à la ligne perpendiculaire, on fermoit la voûte avec une pierre qui en faisoit la clef." Mr. Eton (ch, vi. p. 229.) gives a similar statement from his own observation. "In some parts of Asia, I have seen cupolas, of a considerable size, built without any kind of timber support. They fix firmly in the middle a post about the height of the perpendicular wall, more or less, as the unimposing, their houses present within either a profusion of barbarous ornament, or a display of naked poverty, evincing, whatever be the wealth of the owner, the universal corruption of the art, and the vitiated taste of the artist.* In their internal arrangements they still preserve the Gyneconitis, or apartments of the women, separate from the Andronitis, or those of the males; and even in the dwellings of the poor the distinction is accurately observed. cupola is to be a larger or smaller portion of a sphere; to the top of this is fastened a strong pole, so as to move in all directions, and the end of it describes the outer part of the cupola; lower down is fixed to the post another pole, which reaches to the top of the inner part of the perpendicular wall, and describes the inside of the cupola, giving the difference of thickness of the masonry at top and bottom, and every intermediate part, with the greatest possible exactness. As they build their cupolas with bricks, and instead of lime use gypsum, finishing one layer all round before they begin another, only scaffolding for the workmen is required to close the cupola at top." To this I may add the following still more striking anecdote from the Histoire de L'Archipel, 18mo. Paris, 1698. "La Sculpture et l'Architecture sont encore des Arts perdus pour les Grecs; ils n'en ont pas même les premiers principes; j'en ai vû qui bâtissoient d'abord toute leur maison, et qui perçoient ensuite les fenêtres dans les endroits ou ils vouloient se donner du jour." L. iv. p. 380. *Guy's, v. 1. p. 495. let. 31. The reader will remember this distinction so often marked by Homer: The Turks are easily induced to abandon the profession of architecture to their rayahs; and all the modern buildings of Constantinople and the other cities are the works of Greeks, assisted occasionally by their Armenian fellowsubjects.* 2. Sculpture in Greece at the period of the Roman conquest, had already begun to exhibit symptoms of decline. During the commotions which under the successors of Alexander the Great had rent and impoverished Athens, her artists, abandoning their homes, had fled for protection to the cities of the Ptolemies and Seleucidæ, in Egypt and Asia. Here, and more especially at Seleucia, far removed from the constant contemplation of perfect models, and retaining merely their memory and taste, the imagination and genius of the Greeks were beginning gradually to decay, when the forma “ Αλλ' ὅτε δὴ Πριάμοιο δόμον περικαλλέ ̓ ἵκανε, Iliad, vi. 1. 242. See Mac Farlane's Constantinople in 1828, vol. i. p. 5. 141, vol. ii. p. 59. |