How Byzantine Was Romano-Byzantine Architecture?

Within the wider panorama of nineteenth-century historicist architecture, the allure of Byzantium inspired a small yet influential corpus of monuments that defy easy categorization. Owing to a limited and fragmentary knowledge of Byzantine architecture, mediated above all through the writings of Albert Lenoir, André Couchaud, and Charles Texier, French architects devel- oped a distinctive Romano-Byzantine idiom in which the boundaries between Byzantine, Neo-Byzantine, and Romanesque were intentionally blurred. Yet when examined closely, the genuinely “Byzantine” component of these projects proves elusive, their relationship to the monuments of the Byzantine Empire tenuous at best. Through an analysis of key case studies, from Léon Vaudoyer’s and Henri Espérandieu’s churches in Marseille to Paul Abadie’s Sacré-Cœur in Paris and Albert Ballu’s projects in North Africa, this article investigates what “Byzantine” meant to nineteenth-century architects and how they reimagined its forms within the cultural and ideological contexts of their time.