The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (24 page)

And Hadrian did create a grand resting place for his body. His mausoleum, employed as the core of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, begun in 135, three years before his death, remains even more conspicuous and more familiar to the tourist than the Pantheon. Mausoleums were usually round, and this too was a rotunda, a vast stone drum faced with marble and surrounded by statues. On top in the middle was a roof garden in the Babylonian style. He made it rotund to imitate the tomb of his idol Augustus, but far exceeded it in magnificence. This was also a final monument to the departed architecture of mass, for it had no significant interior, only a burial chamber. It would provide the setting for the tragic last act of Puccini’s
Tosca
. And the future of Western public architecture lay in the fertile afterlife of the Pantheon.

C
HRISTIANITY
created its own reasons for transforming architecture. In the Greek and Roman cults, which Christianity would displace, the temple was the dwelling of the god. Athena’s statue was housed in the cella, the inmost chamber of the Parthenon, to which only the priests had access. The public offered devotions on an altar outside, and in games, horse races, or musical contests, climaxing every year in a festive Panathenaean procession. In Christianity the temple became a church, a place of indoor assembly. It took its name from the Greek word for assembly,
ekklesia
(from which derives “ecclesiastical”), which could mean either the building or the community gathered within.

The Christian church followed the tradition of the Jewish synagogue, which also was an assembly hall. “Synagogue,” for the Jews’ ancient gathering place, a place of worship and study, came from the Greek word “to bring together” (
synagein
). But in the long run church architecture would owe less to the synagogue than to Roman public buildings. The Roman basilica, as we have seen, with its large rectangular interior, designed for baths or law courts, was well suited for Christian assembly, prayer, and liturgy. The apse at one end, with its raised platform where the judges sat, was easily adapted for the altar on which all could see the priest perform the Mass. The needs of Christian liturgy were not well served by the classic Greek architecture of post and beam, of masses ornamented to impress the viewer on the outside. Still, some early Christian churches (such as San Paolo in Rome) were of post-and-beam construction with trussed wood roofs. Christian churches needed large
interior
spaces. And they would be served, too, by heaven-shaped ceilings, arches, and domes emphasizing the common upreach of the praying congregants to another world. But vaults and domes did not appear in Western churches before the sixth century.

The dome, which Roman concrete had made possible, gave a new grandeur to the aspiring interior. Still, the diameter of even so grand a dome as
the Pantheon was not ample enough for the thousands of Christian worshipers expected to assemble for pomp and prayer, nor was it suited for the Christian liturgy. There had to be another idea. But the Pantheon had left an indelible mark on architecture. And for eighteen hundred years the Pantheon motif, a high domed rotunda behind a templelike entrance, would reappear across the West, and outlive changing styles—Renaissance, baroque, rococo, modern. A domed rotunda of stone was built by Roman legionnaires in remote Scotland, a Pantheon-like mausoleum for Diocletian arose at Split in Yugoslavia, and the first Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem was said to be on a similar plan. Countless early Christian churches still remind us of the Pantheon. The greatest Renaissance architects modeled their work on this building that they called Santa Maria Rotonda, “Round Saint Mary.” The Pantheon was reincarnated again and again and in delightful variants by Palladio and his disciples and imitators on the English countryside. No architectural design after classic Greece had so widespread, so versatile, and so enduring a power.

In his long reign Emperor Justinian (483–565; reigned 527–565) made the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake, and celebrated the climax of ancient Roman Christianity. He restored the fabric of empire across Africa, Spain, and Italy with his phenomenal generals Belisarius and Narses, and rebuilt the Eastern capital at Constantinople. His lasting monument was the Great Church.

But in the cultural panorama of the West, Justinian, the emperor of grand Christian hopes, has received less than his due. Byzantium survives only in our peripheral vision. Which is unfortunate, because Byzantium’s very location on the eastern edges of the Roman Empire was a Fertile Verge where Roman ways met the novel and exotic. Justinian’s enduring work bridged time and space, this world and the next, the sacred and the secular. His career revealed the social mobility in the Eastern Empire of this period and showed that, with enough luck, the career was open to talents, even onto the imperial throne. Born Petrus Sabbatius to an obscure peasant family in a village in what became Yugoslavia, he was lucky in his uncle, the able and ambitious Justin, who had gone to Constantinople and risen in the army of the emperor. Young Petrus Sabbatius (later known as Justinian) must have been about eight when his uncle sent for him and catapulted him into the high life of the capital. Justin himself had little education, and was said to need a wooden stencil to sign his name. But he provided his nephew with a solid education in Greek and Latin, and had him trained for a military career. When the aging Justin (452–527) became emperor in 518 he made Justinian his chief counselor, then his co-emperor in 527, a few months before his death. And when Justinian became emperor in his own right, he had the grandiose hope to reunify the Empire and give a new unity to Christendom.

Much of what Justinian created came from his orderly, organizing mind and his ambitious, if volatile, imagination. Inspired by the power of ideas, he fancied himself a theologian, but his great talent was as a lawmaker. When he became emperor in 527, the institutions of Roman law were a disordered inheritance. To codify and clarify Roman law and make it teachable he found a talented lawyer, Tribonian (died 545), who shared his passion for legal order and possessed the necessary technical knowledge and experience. Six years’ labor by Tribonian and the sixteen lawyers on his commission produced the most influential secular codification in history. Justinian hoped “with the help of Almighty God … to cut short the prolixity of lawsuits by pruning the multitude of enactments.” Justinian’s
Code
(Codex, 529) provided a definitive selection of imperial enactments, and copies were sent to all the provinces.

In addition, the prodigious
Digest
(533) had the Utopian purpose of permanently reducing the number of legal opinions. The commission had examined two thousand books by reputable lawyers, and reduced them to one twentieth their bulk by selecting only items of enduring value. Their new elementary textbook, the
Institutes
, had the force of law. And the emperor optimistically forbade commentaries. Greek was the language of most citizens of Constantinople, but the commission’s product was in Latin, Justinian’s native language. The
Corpus Juris Civilis
, as the whole codifying work came to be called, had no effective competition in the West for thirteen hundred years, and the Roman Empire survived in Justinian’s Byzantine legal incarnation.

As we shall see, this inheritance might not have become ours had Justinian never married the bewitching demimondaine, Theodora, one of three daughters of a bear keeper in the Hippodrome in Constantinople. The child Theodora began as a stagehand for her elder sister, who, according to Procopius, “was already one of the most popular harlots of the day.… As soon as she was old enough and fully developed, she joined the women on the stage and promptly became a courtesan, of the type our ancestors called ‘the dregs of the army.’ ” Her sexual energy became a byword. “Often she would go to a bring-your-own-food dinner-party with ten young men or more, all at the peak of their physical powers and with fornication as their chief object in life, and would lie with all her fellow-diners in turn the whole night long: when she had reduced them all to a state of exhaustion she would go to their menials, as many as thirty on occasions, and copulate with every one of them; but not even so could she satisfy her lust.” Who would have predicted that she would become an emperor’s faithful wife, a passionate Christian theologian, and the most powerful empress in the history of the Roman Empire?

Suddenly and unaccountably, Theodora abandoned her lascivious ways, settled in a modest house near the palace, and earned her living by spinning
wool. Attracted by Theodora’s beauty, wit, intelligence, and youth, Justinian determined to marry her, and persuaded his uncle, Emperor Justin, to raise Theodora to the rank of patrician. Roman law still forbade any senator to marry an actress, and his straitlaced aunt, Empress Euphemia, would not tolerate a harlot in the palace. But when Euphemia died, Justinian was free to marry Theodora in 525, which he did. He then had her crowned Augusta, which gave her some title to divinity, and for the rest of her life she shared the imperial power.

Since there were no political parties in Constantinople, frustrated political passions were expressed in the sports arena. The Hippodrome of Constantinople—about two thousand by six hundred feet—which became the model of modern circuses, had been completed by Constantine in 330, and was the largest of the ancient world. The Hippodrome took its name from the fact that it was designed for horse racing, but it was also a place for entertaining the populace with the death struggles of men and beasts. When Justinian came to the throne in 527, the passions of the Blues and the Greens in the Hippodrome were running high. Justinian identified with the Blues, who years before had befriended Theodora and her sisters when their bear-keeper father had died. Rival toughs of both parties united against Justinian’s reforms under the name of Nika (Victory). Assembled in the Hippodrome, they demanded that Justinian dismiss his ministers, and Justinian hastily agreed.

The irresolute Justinian prepared to flee. But the iron-willed Theodora persuaded him to stay and turn his general Belisarius on the mob in the Hippodrome. Some thirty thousand were massacred, but not before much of Constantinople was burned to the ground. Justinian and Theodora remained in power, which made possible their monuments for posterity.

Once again catastrophe was a catalyst to creativity. Like the burning of Rome five centuries before, which gave Nero his opportunity, the Nika holocaust of Constantinople in 532 gave Justinian his invitation.

The church that Constantine had built on the foundations of a pagan temple in 325 had been destroyed by fire in 415 and again rebuilt, only to be demolished by the Nika. “So the whole church at the time lay a charred mass of ruins,” Procopius explained. “But the emperor Justinian built not long afterwards a church so finely shaped that if anyone had enquired of the Christians before the burning if it would be their wish that the church should be destroyed and one like this should take its place, showing them some sort of model of the building we now see, it seems to me that they would have prayed that they might see their church destroyed forthwith, in order that the building might be converted into its present form.”

While the emperor gathered artisans from the whole world, God provided architects close at hand: “Anthemius of Tralles, the most learned man
in the skilled craft which is known as the art of building” in all living memory and associated with him Isidorus, a Milesian. Plans were prepared in less than six weeks, and on February 23, 532, only thirty-nine days after the Great Fire, work began on Justinian’s Great Church.

Anthemius (died before 558), from a cultivated family near Izmir in western Asia Minor, was the last of the great architects of the Roman Empire. With a cosmopolitan education in Alexandria, he was a man of many talents. He earned fame in the Middle Ages for his works of mathematics and geometry on the properties of cones and parabolas. He was said to have been the first to show that an ellipse could be drawn by a string looped around two fixed points. Fascinated by the properties of mirrors, he produced a work on this subject still used in the eighteenth century. He also was a practical joker. When he lost a lawsuit in Constantinople to a certain Zeno, he secretly installed a steam-driven device in Zeno’s cellar to make the building shake, and so forced Zeno to abandon his house for fear of an earthquake. When Anthemius was brought before Justinian, the emperor simply said that his own imperial powers could not compete against Zeus’ thunder or Poseidon’s earthquakes.

Master builders, who worked by rule of thumb, were not hard to find in Constantinople. Since Constantine’s time churches there had mostly followed the traditional basilica design, a rectangular hall with a pitched or vaulted roof. Such a roof also covered the round or hexagonal churches over the tombs of martyrs. Master builders were adept at these simple structures. But an architecture interfusing shapes and spaces would demand Anthemius’s sophisticated mathematics of cones and parabolas and ellipses.

It is not easy to define the precise role of Justinian in creating the Great Church. The grand concept was almost certainly his. Architecture, as we have seen, gave the amateur, if he was a sovereign, a unique opportunity to be a creator. And awe of the emperor automatically gave him credit for all the great works of architecture built in his reign. Since it was a king’s duty to accommodate his people by grand public works, monuments of antiquity bear the fame and usually, too, the name, of ruling kings. “To watch over the whole Roman Empire, and so far as was possible, to remake it,” was how Procopius described Justinian’s mission. Perhaps at Justinian’s command, or at least with his encouragement, Procopius wrote
Buildings
, a whole book describing the emperor’s architectural works “so that it may not come to pass in the future that those who see them refuse, by reason of their great number and magnitude, to believe that they are in truth the works of one man.”