ABSTRACT

The age of iconoclasm was not conducive to the documentation of building activity. I The period nevertheless accounts for dramatic and permanent changes in Byzantine religious architecture in both form and scale, and the transformations of the period remain to be fully explicated. The lack of secure criteria for dating the surviving buildings has long plagued Byzantine scholarship. An earlier generation of scholars familiar with the architectural programme of Basil I, recounted in the vita Basilii, had viewed his reign as a formative period and consequently dated a variety of 'transitional' churches in Constantinople to the ninth century.2 None ofthe buildings mentioned in the vita survives, however; nor do any other of the great monuments of ninth-century Constantinople.3 The palaces of Theophilos have similarly vanished without a trace, and only paltry foundations remain for the well-documented monasteries on the Princes' Islands.4