The Church of the Pammacaristos served as the cathedral of the patriarchs of Constantinople for one hundred and thirty-five years after 1456, when deprived of the Church of the Holy Apostles.
These churches put the period of the Palæologi before us in also a pleasing aspect. The mosaics which adorn the narthex and exo-narthex of the Church of S. Saviour-in-the-Chora imply, that love for the beautiful and skill to express it had not fled the city which reared S. Sophia. The proportions of S. Theodosia are exceedingly fine, and the chapel attached to the Pammacaristos is, at least externally, remarkably attractive. Nor had intellectual life and scholarship altogether ceased. The historian Nicephorus Gregoras was a monk in the monastery of S. Saviour-in-the-Chora, and wrote his work in the retirement of his cell. The historians Pachymeres, Cantacuzene, Phrantzes, Ducas, were not the products of an ignorant age. The Greek scholars who took refuge in the West, and contributed to its intellectual revival, represented a society which, with all its faults, had not lost its interest in the literature of ancient Hellas, or in general knowledge. Indeed, in studying the period of the Palæologi, one continually meets a spirit akin to that which produced the Renaissance in Western Europe. And, notwithstanding the vanity of indulging in dreams of what might have been but never has been, the mind obstinately asks, What if that upward movement had not been checked by a great political catastrophe? What if it had been accompanied by moral reform and military prowess?
BUT however interesting the old churches of the city are as historical landmarks, however useful as a clue to guide us through the labyrinth of the life of New Rome, their supreme value after all consists in the fact that they are monuments, one of them the finest monument, of what is styled Byzantine Art--the art which blended artistic elements derived from Greece and Rome with artistic elements borrowed from Nineveh, Persia, Syria, and unfolded a new type of beauty. It was the flower developed by that fusion of Western and Oriental æsthetic ideals and tastes resulting from the long intercourse maintained between Europe and Asia, sometimes at the point of the sword, and sometimes by the peaceful ministries of commerce. Nowhere could that Art find a more congenial atmosphere in which to flourish than in the city which binds the West and the East together. Like all else in the world, Byzantine Art was not a sudden creation, independent of all antecedents, unheralded by previous analogous forms. The dome was reflected in the waters of the Tigris and of the Tiber before it was mirrored in the Bosporus. Columns were bound together by arches instead of by a horizontal entablature, in the Palace of Diocletian at Spalato, before they were so united in the Sacred Palace beside the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Walls glistening with variegated marbles, marble floors glowing with colours that vied with meadows in flower, mosaics radiant with the hues of the rainbow, had adorned homes and made palaces beautiful before the witchery of such coloration cast a spell over the courtiers of Justinian, or suffused the light in S. Sophia. Even the pendentive that fills the triangular space between two contiguous arches at right angles to each other, so characteristic of Byzantine architecture, is claimed to be an earlier device in domical construction. Be it so. In one sense, there is nothing new under the sun. The new grows out of the old, the present is the product of the past. And yet, while a new order of things must spring from an old order, it is not the bare repetition of what has been; while it must employ materials shaped originally for the use of other days, it is not the mechanical combination of those materials. It employs them in another spirit, under the control of ideas different or more mature than have yet been known, as the utterance of feelings acting with peculiar force at particular moments in history, with more skill, on a larger scale, with happier effect, and the result is that something appears with an individual entity perfectly distinguishable from all that ever was before, or that will ever come after. Byzantine Art is its own very self, however many adumbrations prophesied its advent.