Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [5]
General chronology
The language of architectural history includes words that designate different styles of architecture, and they are associated with different places and times. It has been convenient to divide up the history of human culture into broad periods. It is possible to quarrel with the appropriateness of these divisions, but they are now well established in our language, and they are necessary for finding one’s bearings. We start with the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, which were admired for their literature, philosophy, and grandiose ruins. These civilizations were called ‘classic’, as a term of approbation. They were seen as the basis of authority and accomplishment in artistic matters, and so the products of those societies were in a general way called ‘classical’. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a date of 1607 for an early use of the word in this way (referring to texts, rather than architecture). The other important classical age was the contemporary one, beginning at the Renaissance, the rebirth of classical learning that was also known as ‘the revival of letters’. This gives us four periods in the history of the world, two enlightened ages and two dark ages. There was the primordial world to which ancient Egypt belonged, then the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome. Then, between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance there was a middle age with nothing particular to recommend it: the medieval period. And then came the Renaissance, the modern age, reason, and progress. While this is an over-simplification, it is a useful one for understanding why different types of architecture have their different reputations. The architecture of the classical age was admired and imitated. The architecture of the medieval period was taken less seriously. This has all changed since the terms were coined. We now know a good deal more about the Middle Ages, and would not want to write off the architecture so readily. Nevertheless the periodization remains in place. We still talk about the ‘Middle Ages’, even when we don’t mean to suggest that they deserve to be neglected, and have forgotten what they were supposed to be in between.
If we look more widely then this division of time becomes problematic, because the cultural changes that they signify were not in fact changes in the history of the world, just changes in Western European culture as we have chosen to constitute it. Not only were Asia and the Americas going through completely independent developments, even Eastern Europe developed quite differently. Ancient Greece is certainly included in the Western tradition, because of the influence it had on the Roman ways of thinking about fine buildings. Properly it makes no sense to speak of ‘medieval Greece’, because despite the fact that the Byzantine Empire produced memorable and sophisticated buildings, there was no Renaissance. In a way the whole of Byzantine culture was a succession of renaissances, and the Greek emperors’ sense of who they were was built on their links back to the ancient world. In 1453, just at the point when we might want to say that the Greek ‘middle ages’ came to an end, the capital Constantinople was overrun and the cultural change relocated the city, now called Istanbul, in a different tradition, where it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This caused the flight of Greek scholars to the west, and was one of the causes of the upsurge of knowledge of ancient texts that was so important in bringing about the Renaissance.