Thresholds for ‘Byzantinism’ in Architecture Newman University Church, Dublin, and Early English Architectural Histories

Bhalla, Niamh (2025) Thresholds for ‘Byzantinism’ in Architecture Newman University Church, Dublin, and Early English Architectural Histories. Convivium. ISSN 2336-3452 (In Press)

Abstract

John Henry Newman was installed as rector of the first Catholic university in the British Isles in 1854. The university church that he built in Dublin (1855–6) physically embodied the concept behind the unprecedented university – the provision of an learned Catholic alternative to post-Enlightenment secularism and Protestant hegemony – through a style-based analogy to the Early Church. The Early Christian style of the basilica drew upon features of Roman and ‘Byzantine’ design, and it raises interesting questions concerning how we define ‘Byzantinisms’ in architecture, particularly in regions with no sense of historical identification with the Eastern Roman Empire. The church, designed by John Hungerford Pollen, constitutes one of the first iterations of Byzantine revival architecture in the British Isles and it is situated here in the context of early architectural histories in English and Pollen’s writings to demonstrate that a more nuanced engagement with Byzantine architecture, understood as an evolution of Roman architecture, existed which troubles our neatly homogenized histories of Byzantine reception. The church evidences a meaningful use of what were widely understood as the distinguishing features of the Byzantine style in a basilica, understood by its architect as the form that provided continuity between Roman and Byzantine design. I argue here for the importance of features such as the convex leaf-cut capital, the stilted arch, polychrome stone cladding and ‘mosaic’ in our understanding of nineteenth-century Byzantine revival architecture beyond rigid insistence upon a Greek cross plan and dome as the threshold at which we pronounce Byzantinism. The church and the histories it responded to provide interesting insights into a positive intellectual engagement with Byzantine architecture in the nineteenth century that did not endorse an overly spiritualising, Orientalist agenda, but which pertained to the understood Roman origin and Early Christian identity of ‘Byzantium’.

Actions (login required)

Edit Item Edit Item