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Ecclesiastical Lighting
In hindsight, we can recognize what an enlightened
decision that was. No sooner was Constantinople dedicated in A.D.
330, than the process began of filling it with fine churches. By
the mid-5th century A.D., there were at least fourteen of them,
all mixed in with eleven massive palaces of emperors and empresses.
The Byzantine era was a period in which Roman glassworking
reorganized itself in a way that was almost as dramatic as the changes
which occurred in Augustan times. This was to be the age of the
lamp-maker: so much so that fragments of lamps dominate the glassware
recovered by archaeologists from trash-pits in early Byzantine urban
contexts.
Constantine's version of the Church of Holy Wisdom
was destroyed during political riots in A.D. 532. But it was re-built
and re-consecrated just five years later, and its new-found magnificence
prompted the emperor Justinian to declare, "Solomon, I have
surpassed you!" The central lighting fixtures of the Church
may well have held more than a thousand glass lamps, clustered in
a set of concentric supporting frames.
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Church of the Holy
Wisdom, Constantinople
1835 engraving by David Roberts
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