Publication details
Domes of Byzantium under a Gallic Sky: Uses and Receptions of Neo-Byzantine Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Requested lectures |
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| Description | Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and other French cities are still today dominated by churches whose architecture recalls a long-vanished empire: Byzantium. Why mobilize such architectural imaginaries for some of the country’s most iconic buildings? Rather than the expected jagged silhouette of Gothic spires crowning the pinnacle of Paris, the hill of Montmartre, one instead encounters a hovering white form dominated by a large dome: the Sacré-Cour. This basilica and several other churches built in France between 1848 and 1900 reference the architecture of an imagined Byzantium. Described as Neo- or Romano-Byzantine, these buildings are not only the result of eclectic architectural experimentation characterizing these decades, but, as this research seminar intends to show, were shaped by the intensifying clash of anticlericals and Catholics. These projects drew on claims of early Christian and “Byzantine” roots, intended to visually convey the idea of the venerability of French Catholicism. |
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